To Da-Duh, In Memoriam

The core of “To Da-duh, in Memoriam” is the relationship that develops between Da-duh and the narrator, a woman recalling her experiences as a nine-year-old girl. The events described are based on the real-life experiences of the author, Paule Marshall, and her relationship with her grandmother, Da-duh. However, the relationship is also highly figurative. Within the story’s symbolic framework, Da-duh variously represents an African diasporic connection, unyielding traditional values, and rural life in a colony, while the narrator represents novelty, urban life in the metropole, and youthful pride. Through this complex symbolic relationship, Marshall explores colonialism and diaspora, female relationships and cultural transmission, and guilt.

“To Da-duh, in Memoriam” is written in a largely realist narrative mode that avoids romanticizing or idealizing the relationship between the narrator and her grandmother—e.g., by depicting them learning to understand each other and resolving their tension. Instead, the relationship is complex, and its antagonisms manifest obliquely, as in the opening sentences, which sets the tone for the fraught interpersonal dynamics. During her first meeting with her grandmother, the narrator notes that “she [does] not touch [the narrator]” (97). Instead, the grandmother simply stares at the child, assessing her, and the child stares back. This first encounter is far from the warm embrace one might anticipate and suggests not merely an effort to assess one another but also to assert power. In this respect, it is symbolically relevant that the grandmother is “the first to look away” (97), foreshadowing how the child will contribute to her grandmother’s spiritual “breaking.” of the grandmother (97). This tension never wholly disappears. When the narrator says goodbye to her grandmother, never to see her again, Da-duh’s final words to her are “Girl, you’re not to forget now to send me the picture of that building, you hear” (105). It is a message of connection and anticipation of the narrator’s future, wrapped in a sense of competition with the younger generation; she is challenging both the narrator’s personal responsibility and the accuracy of her portrayal of New York. 

Indeed, the dominant element of the relationship between Da-duh and the narrator is competition, which speaks to the centrality of Environment as a Source of Identity. Da-duh seeks to impress upon the young narrator what she sees as the wealth of Barbados. She is eager to show the narrator not only the sugarcanes but also the fruits the island has to offer: breadfruit, papaw, guava, mango, and more. She pointedly repeats to the narrator, “I know you don’t have anything like these in New York” (100), emphasizing the agricultural bounty of the rural environment compared to the urban landscape of New York. 

While this is framed as a competition, it is also emblematic of a consistent theme in Marshall’s work: the role of women as bearers of culture. It is notable within this context that the narrator’s father opts out of visiting the family in Barbados, describing it as “Blowing out good money on foolishness” (99). He does not see this visit and maintaining family bonds as worthwhile. By contrast, for all the tension that exists between them, the narrator shows that she absorbed her grandmother’s lessons about the beauty of the Barbadian environment by “painting seas of sugar-cane” as an adult (106). Her connection to her grandmother’s culture is also illustrated in how the narrator begins to adopt her grandmother’s language, as when she retorts, “How you mean!” (103). This dynamic is in keeping with Marshall’s use of idiomatic language as a bearer of cultural identity in many of her works.   

Despite these moments of connection, the competition between the two characters is the stage for the tone of regret and grief that permeates the work. The narrator feels overwhelming guilt about “winning” the civilizational competition between the two, and that guilt is born of respect for Da-duh that dates to their first meeting. She notes of that meeting, “Da-duh had recognized my small strength—and this was all I ever asked of the adults in my life then” (98). Ironically, it is this shared strength that becomes a source of conflict between the two. When Da-duh first challenges the narrator on everything she lacks in New York City, this provokes a sense of inferiority; she recognizes that “[her] world did seem suddenly lacking” and takes steps to defend it and (100), by extension, herself. However, as the narrator’s boasts about everything New York has to offer put Da-duh on the back foot, her feelings of guilt about breaking the spirit of this proud woman grow. When she reluctantly tells Da-duh that the Empire State Building is taller than the tallest tree on the island, she feels “triumphant yet strangely saddened” (104). As an adult, she describes her efforts to capture in vivid detail the landscape of Barbados as a form of “penance,” implying that she is trying to expiate a wrong she committed through respectful representation of her grandmother’s homeland and its beauty.  

Ultimately, the two characters are separated not only by age and experience but also by their positions within and relationships to colonialism. Da-duh, having grown up in the British colony of Barbados, has internalized elements of white imperial rule. She likes “her grandchildren to be ‘white’” (97), boasts proudly of the plantation commodity of sugar, and is shocked to hear that the narrator fought a white girl who “called [her] a name” (103), presumably a racial slur. By contrast, the narrator has grown up in an urban metropole born of colonialism. Like her grandmother, she boasts about the fruits of colonial modernity, represented in skyscrapers, machines, and the Rag Time songs she gleefully sings. These two colonial structures, though different, are linked; as Da-duh points out, “[T]hese canes here and the sugar you eat [in New York] is one and the same thing” (100). However, the narrator has not internalized the lessons of that colonial power in the same way as her grandmother, as her refusal to apologize for the darkness of her skin or for fighting rude white people demonstrates. This leads to tension between the narrator and her grandmother and develops themes of The Black Diaspora and Colonialization and Conflict and Cultural Connections Between Generations. These tensions are encapsulated in the final scene of the story. The adult narrator painting images of Barbados while “the thunderous tread of the machines downstairs jar[s] the floor beneath [her] easel” is representative of the narrator being at once connected to her rural (106), colonial past while living in the urban, metropolitan present. 

The story’s epigraph foreshadows the complex relationships between life and death, colony and metropole, and older and younger generations. It is a quote from the poem “At My Grandmother’s Grave” by Lebert Bethune, a poet and filmmaker from Kingston, Jamaica, who moved to New York City as a teenager. He was part of the Black Arts Movement, a Black nationalist literary movement in the 1960s. In the poem, the narrator mourns the loss of his grandmother, who, like Da-duh, was a fierce woman with whom he had a tense relationship; when he thinks about her, he “remember[s] a rap on the knuckles / And hoped [she] would die” (Lines 17-18). He quotes her as saying he came from “a generation of vipers” (Line 22), underlining the disdain his grandmother had for him and the modern, metropolitan world he grew up in as compared to her life in the colonial island of Jamaica. The epigraph comes from the final lines of the poem, where the narrator reflects on how the grandmother’s spirit lives on through her offspring, including the narrator himself (Lebert Bethune. “At My Grandmothers Grave (Calvary Cemetry, Kingston).” Poèmes) The poem, like the story it introduces, is ambivalent about this formative, complex relationship between a grandchild and their grandmother, one that anchors the grandchild to the rural colonial world and their ancestors while also being a source of sadness and grief, as it is a relationship bracketed by disappointment, misunderstanding, and death.