Memorial Excursion and Errancy in Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow

Marshall’s novel inscribes memory and cultural identity in poetics of excursion and errancy. The protagonist deviates from the course planned of an American cruise ship and escapes an alienated and monolithic identity when the underlying memory of her African and Caribbean origins emerges on the island of Carriacou to which she is accidentally led. The spatial excursion leads to a memorial excursion as Avey wanders in the depths of the cultural rituals brought through the Middle Passage from Africa. The excursion includes a rhetorical dimension : it takes part in the reconstruction of a lost memory while the numerous digressions and analepses deviate the plot line. I shall base my argument on Glissant’s poetics of errancy1 to show that the memorial process depends on the hazard of encounters and relations. Memorial recovery is connected to the confrontation to the unpredictability of the relations created on excursion.