Paule Marshall`s The Chosen Place, the Timeless People (1969), despite its vivid characterization of major individuals like Merle, Saul, and Harriet, focuses its main attention on a certain Caribbean ``place`` and its ``people.`` Marshall analyses, with great precision, the ways in which the hybrid society of the fictional Caribbean "Bourn Island" and the poor black people of the isolated backward mountain village "Bournhills" suffer from its white-centered racial, cultural, and color hierarchies as well as its age-old colonial and postcolonial economic structures. Despite recent discourses on hybridity highlighting its potentiality as a creative and subversive site, the diverse and conflicting elements of hybrid identity and culture of the Caribbean are portrayed to still be at war with each other. Therefore, how to reconcile these opposing parts, how to make them a whole, is an urgent problem, not only for each individual, but also of the society as a whole. Marshall envisions various ways in which marginalized poor black people construct their own counter-identity against negative ones imposed from the outside. She claims not just the past itself but mythic narratives redeemed and constructed from the past are the very sources for a new identity. This focus on identity construction and negotiation makes the text itself a kind of visionary and mythical narrative. By envisioning a new Caribbean identity which crucially includes the oppressed and undervalued black people`s experiences, Marshall try to show what literary and cultural narratives can do in order to change the world within and beyond the written word. Borrowing Anzaldua`s words, creating a new mythos and narrative has the potential to change "the way we perceive reality, the way we see ourselves, and the ways we behave."