ABSTRACT
Paule Marshall was born in 1929 in Brooklyn, where she grew into adolescence during the years of the Great Depression. The dialogue in Marshall's fiction shows that the West Indian manipulation of the language of their imperialist masters signalled their successful preservation of their own cultural identity. Here Zora Neale Hurston was commenting on the fatuous impossibility of categorising the black American simply on the basis of skin colour, not only because the variety of skin tones is infinite, but because such a definition also ignores the complexity of the cultural, tribal and racial elements that constitute the individual. Audre Lorde insists that black men and women should unite against racism and that all women, irrespective of colour, should unite against sexism, in the belief that human progress is possible only if the individual is freed from any societal categorisation which gives hierarchical power to a race, class, gender or one definition of sexuality.
