Learning from Others: Reading Relations in Paule Marshall’s “From the Poets in the Kitchen”

Paule Marshall’s essay “From the Poets in the Kitchen” (1983) is exemplary in tracing the progress of the word through the world of a writer sensitive to relations. To such relations all responsible reading commits us as social beings. Marshall’s self-reflexive narrative speaks to readers, especially young adults, to make themselves on terms entirely their own, and feel obligation-free amid discriminatory regimes and culturally biased institutions of learning. This article traces a carefully evolved pattern of reading relations in Marshall’s recall of locations, beginning especially with the kitchen where her mothers gather to tell tales to regale one another. We have much to learn from this discovery of her writing self in the most unexpected places; her chance to feel happy at happenstance; and above all, the creative evolution of one who turns out to be, again, a writer/teacher who learns from and reports on an unexpected classroom imbroglio. Responding quite earnestly to both storytelling and the epistemic bonds it builds for a raconteuse, Marshall’s essay attests to an enabling vision of community that is born of and sustained by communication, a community that realizes itself first of all in a classroom through the emblematic fiction and the figures of life it reads.