Eruptions/Implosions in Praisesong for the Widow

Bonnie Park

In Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow, Avey Johnson embarks on an exploration of her suppressed and forgotten memories and cultural roots. In order to do so, however, she experiences emotional and physical 'eruptions'-- violent bodily and mental reactions to the turbulent emotional experience of revisiting her past. Essentially, 2/3rds of the novel builds up to this cathartic purging of suppressed and festering emotions and memories within Avey. To advance the metaphor of 'indigestion', Avey's upset stomach does not arise from only her 'over-gorging' of materialism and richness. The unresolved aspects of her life-- namely, her complete detachment and alienation from herself sits in her stomach like milk gone bad. The milk, her past and her identity, festers and rots within her until finally, in Ch. 6 of the third part of the book, Avey, on the schooner on the Carriacou Excursion, explodes the contents of her stomach out through her mouth-- words and ideas she has suppressed all her life, and through her bowels-- all of the undigested ideas of self-identity which she has failed to confront, explode and erupt out simultaneously, "gushing from her with such violence she might have fallen overboard." (205) This purging of her mind and body is significant because it provides a denouement to the conflicts Avey explores throughout this novel. She purges not only her physical being, but her spiritual and emotional being as well, allowing her to proceed refreshed, renewed, and cleansed of all of the self denial and the pain she has withheld inside her body and mind, leaving both open and receptive, like an empty stomach, to the new food she will encounter-- the Carriacou islands and finally, her reencounter with her Afro-Caribbean cultural roots.