Visibility of Older Black Women in Literature: Female Ancestors in Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow

Older Black women and their bodies are subjected to a process of essentializing, ‘othering,’ and/or being rendered invisible as part of the destructive legacies of Eurocentrism and the African-diaspora slave trade. As a result, there are lingering myths of Black women as asexual/neutered mammy figures, hypersexualized jezebels, ‘superfreaks,’ and angry Black women and/or matriarchs. However, the novel Praisesong for the Widow (1983) by Black US and anglophone Caribbean female writer Paule Marshall refutes these stereotypes and resists Western narratives of decline surrounding midlife and older age. It features older Black female characters who engage with the supernatural to thrive in spaces that are often hostile to them, rendering mature Black women’s bodies and life experiences visible. Particularly, by presenting the main character, Avey, as an ancestor ‘in-process,’ Marshall diversifies conceptions of older Black womanhood in literature to include the duplicitous, superhuman trickster figure, fallible ancestors, and ‘ordinary heroines’ who have the agency to develop and shape their own futures as well as those they choose to support.