1. Alice Walker: The Color Purple, 1982

3. Maria Lauret states that “When Billie Holiday sings ‘I’ve Got a Right to Sing the Blues’ in that slow, cracked way of hers, we hear not only a song of lost love (as the sleeve notes have it), but her own history of abuses of all kinds and indeed that of the history of African-Americans generally”.
The lyrics ‘I’ve got a right to sin”… hark back to slavery times, but the river as trope of escape is now one of release of another kind: that of suicide.
The blues come from Africa and slavery, and not necessarily from the early 1920s.
When teaching The Colour Purple, a set of question are address by white students as follows:

4. A feeling of, at best, exoticism and, at worst, primitivism, weird people doing weird things and talking funny.
Empathy with Celie’s plight and delight in the happy
identifications of a highly traumatics kind, with Celie as a victim of sexual abuse and violence.
Emma Waters-Dawon says that “A persistent characteristic of Alice Walker’s fiction is the use of a Southern Black woman as a protagonist challenging convention”. 255
Also, inherent in her fiction is a black feminist perspective women suffering stressful situations:

5. loveless dull marriages, stifled creativity, jealous and cruel spouses, sexual and racial victimization, capitulation to ignorance and tradition, and a myriad of other problems.
In The Color Purple, Alice Walker recommends self-love as a panacea to combat abuse in any form, whether it be that of gender, race, or class.
In the essay “In Search of our Mothers’ Gardens,” Walker describes three types of black women: the physically and psychologically abused black woman, the black woman torn by contrary instincts, and the new black woman, who recreates herself out of the creative legacy of her maternal ancestors.

6. Kalamu ya Salaam, says:
In the contest of black literature, women and those who are sensitive to women are offering critiques of society that stretch beyond class and race, and this stretching is both healing and necessary […] female authors are making these important creative strides not simply because they are reaction to […] oppression and exploitation in general, and of their own particular oppression and exploitation as women. In other words, they are fulfilling their historic mission.
In probing the mysteries of God and everyday life, Walker utilizes the epistolary form.

7. Celie’s narration of rape, for example, vividly illustrates not only Walker’s depiction of physical and psychological abuse, but also the plight of a young girl torn by contrary instincts:
She revelas to the reader her emotional and psychological distress at sexual relations with the man she assumes to be her father.

8. “He never had a kine word to say to me
“He never had a kine word to say to me. Just say You gonna do what your mammy wouldn’t …. He start to choke me, saying You better shut up and git used to it. But don’t never git used to it”. (3)
The epistolary Walker utilizes allows the reader to be inside Celie’s head as the protagonist records and comments on the events that happened to her.

9. Celie is raped by her mother’s husband, taken out of school because she is pregnant, and deprived even of the two offspring she is forced to bear.
Celie survives the abuses by writing every detail of her life.
The cruelty of the black man to his wife and family is one of the great tragedies.

10. It has mutilated the spirit and the body of the black family and of most black mothers.
The discussion between the two men takes the form of negotiations over livestock, the deal is closed when a cow is included with the woman.
Celie literally has become a commodity, one with a low exchange value.

11. The characters of Pa, Mister, and Old Mister illustrate that they believe in the economic exploitation and social dominance of women even though they are oppressed in the larger Jim Crow Society ( ).
Gloria Snodgrass Malone says that Walker only “uses violence to stress the urgency of the problems she explores and to illustrate the depth of the despair which emanates from the deep-seated, unfulfilled desires of the characters”

12. Walker has dared to explore subjects and discuss issues which are generally unacceptable to many readers, and she seems to have no qualms about exposing any problems which stand in the way of people’s freedom, including especially sexism and racism.
Alice Walker was accused of everything from betraying the Black community to destroying the mind of children to being a feminist tool of white racism.
More specifically, some even denounced her for writing a novel whose central focus is the glorification of Black women and the denigration of Black men.

13. What is especially unsettling to many readers about The Color Purple is that it dares to tell a womanish story, a story that looks at the world from a Black woman’s point of view and reflects Black women’s complexity and intensity.
The novel simply tells a story that needed to be told.
The Color Purple brings to light the historical experience of Black women and how their coming together as women loving themselves and each other serves as a liberating force.

14. Language
The language of the novel, particularly in Celie’s letters to God and to Nettie, is as innovative as the form.
Celie’s rural Black idiom is not the “acceptable” language, the language of the learned, but it is the language which provides the reader with greater insight into her character and a more intimate view of her growth.
Of equal importance, Celie’s letters in her own vernacular are her means of self-expression and in telling her story in her own words, she initiates the process of self-discovery.

15. Incest in the Black family, the brutal oppression of Black women by Black men, rape and other forms of violence, and lesbianism have been the focus of much of the discussion, especially from those critical of Alice Walker.
Arguing that such issues among Black should remain in-house, these self-proclaimed protectors of the race respond as if The Color Purple exposed some hidden racial scandal which would fade away eventually if only it were kept quiet.
Sexuality is presented as self-discovery and empowerment.

16. Shug Avrey loves men, but she loves herself more, and it is this self-love which defends her against becoming the victim of male oppression.
Sofia
Sofia, another one of Walker’s womanish women, might not be the worldly, blues-singing, pleasure-seeking person Shug Avery is, but through her character, Walker’s emphasis on self-love and the struggle to be whole are equally enlightening.

17. Aware that any woman who loves herself protects herself, Sofia fights all those who seek to oppress her in any way.
When her husband, Harpo, tries to “make her mind” as his father had taught him and says to Celie, “I love Harpo… God knows I do. But I’ll kill him dead before I let him beat me” (46)

18. Sofia is as quick to fight racism as is sexism
Sofia is as quick to fight racism as is sexism. When the mayor’s wife asks her if she would like to be her maid, Sofia says “hell no,” challenging whites’ stereotype of the Black woman as servant.
The mayor slaps Sofia for sassing his wife, and Sofia, bent on fighting oppression, knocks the mayor to the ground.

19. She gets a long prison term, beatings, rapes, depravation because she is Black, female and had the audacity to defy the accepted standards of behavior for Black females.
After elven and a half years in prison and six months probation, Sofia is nonetheless determined to challenge whites’ actions about race.

20. She shocks the mayor’s daughter, Eleanor Jane, when she turns the mistress-maid relationship upside down by refusing to play the nurturing mammy whites expect of Black women.
When Eleanor Jane is trying to get Sofia to say she loves her son, Sofia says, “I don’t get about him at all. I don’t love him, I don’t hate him” (233).

21. Eleanor Jane, stunned that Sofia would challenge yet another one of the whites’ sacred myths-the Black woman as loving mother, sees Sofia as an aberration and indicates as much in her comment, “All the color women I know love children. The way you feel is something unnatural” (233).

22. Sofia is one of the women who helps Celie transform herself from a fearful self-hating victim of male domination and oppression to a self-assertive and self-loving woman refusing to be mistreated by any man.
Sofia shows Celie that life for women need not to be characterized by disrespect, abuse, neglect or any other form of persecution.
Before Shug Avery comes into Celie’s life, Celie’s self-definition is based on her history as a victim of male oppression. END

23. Her stepfather, Alfonso, for example, rapes her, gives her children and then turns her over to Albert to raise his ill-bred children.
Albert, whom Celie calls Mister, ruthlessly abuses her and has no problems telling her exactly what he thinks of her. “You black, you pore, you ugly, you a woman… you nothingat all” (187).
Albert’s diatribe captures precisely what Celie thinks of herself.
Shug helps Celie to recognize her value as a human being, a woman of worth.

24. Although she protects Celie from Albert, she also challenges her to stand up for herself and demand respect.
Shug teaches her about sexul love and her body, and explains to her the true meaning of a living and lovinf God.
Through Shug Avery, Celie learns that a man cannot define a woman’s place, the woman must define her own.
It is Celie’s relationship with Shug Avery that frees Celie to develop into an independent and self-sufficient woman (Christian, 194)

25. The physical bonding between Shug Avery and Celie, one of the most talked about situations in the novel, is important to both women.
Their union is not simply the fulfillment of sexual needs, it is also the coming together of two women who share a common history, and a symbol of their freedom from the restrictions society places on women.
Shu’s and Celie’s love is stronger and more enduring than any male-female relationship in the novel, as their love survives Shug’s physical need for Albert, her marriage to Grady and her fling with Germaine.

26. This love among women in The Color Purple projects them from oppression and helps them to grow into more productive people.
Finding beauty in each other, the women often discover something about themselves through their relationships and are liberated from male oppression and from problems they typically have with each other.
Distrust, among women, suspicion, jealousy, and slander are eventually replaced by a physical and spiritual bonding, and these women come to understand that their quality of life is how these relationships symbolize the potential power of women to reconstruct their lives into a positive whole.

27. Actually, this concept of God takes God out of the church and puts it in our hearts, in nature, in everything. Alice Walker’s God is real living and loving God.
I am worry that there is so much fear and prejudice in our world, some see The Color Purple with its focus on Black women and their struggle to claim their own lives, as a threat to moral decency.
And I worry that with all the ignorance in our society, some would dare to dream to snatch the novel from library shelves.
I worry because book banning is as terrible thing.

28. Alison Light states that “Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982), is novel that confronts issues of gender, class and race”.
Walker’s story is narrated by Celie in the first person, a young Black girl, poor, abused and segregated, and that this through letters that she addresses to god and then to her sister.
In fact, the letters are really a means to express herself, to alleviate silence and suffering.

29. The story takes place between the two world wars
The story takes place between the two world wars. She relates in them the process of her eventual triumph over the most brutal forms of exploitation, her gradual recovery of her racial past and, via lesbianism, her claiming of an affirmatory sexuality.
Walker is not primarily concern here with the black struggle against white racism but with experience with in the black community, within families and sexual relationships.

30. This foregrounding of the ‘private sphere’ has made it possible for the question of difference, racial, sexual, social, to be ignored and effaced as a conflictual and political force and to be reformulated in the rhetoric of a liberal humanism as a repository of essential and eternal truths about a universal human condition (NO).
The dark continent, the great unwashed, the second sex, all these others are pushed to the margins of humanity, sometimes, as in th racist theories of thnineteenth century, even denied such humanity.
Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques have argued:

31. Our model of society is that the only things worth getting involved with are our things; others are not capable of creating movements and currents which deserve our support, enthusiasm and intervention. This is a very patronizing view of the world.
Walker herself has noted the operation of such collusive divisions of psychic and social existence in reproducing the inequalities of race:
Black writing has suffered because even black critics have assumed that a book that deals with the relationships between members of a black family –or between a man and a woman- is less important than one that has white people as primary antagonists.

32. The consequence of this is that many of our books by ‘major’ writers (always males) tell us little about the culture, history, or future, imagination, fantasies, and so on, of black people, and a lot about isolated (often improbable) or limited encounters with a non-specific white world.
Perhaps it is not that we need to act as though we believe utopian achievements are possible – that like of Celie we really will get it all;
Rather it seems that we need to believe in such utopias in order to act, in order to survive as human beings, making our own texts and histories in the face of the divisions and conflicts in our psychic/social existences which determine and fragment us.

33. For where would the political struggle against oppression, against misery, be without such human narratives?
The narratives may be inventions, but the suffering people cause one another, and the pleasure they are capable of giving each other, exist and continue to exist.
The woman-centered universe of The Color Purple is often cited as the definitive womanist feature of Alice Walker’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel.
Critics have pointed to the text’s inscription of an unoppressive, nonhierarchical model of power relations, as indicative of the author’s unimpeachable pro-woman stance.

34. “Womanist” behavior, in addition to being woman-identified, is first and formost “audacious,” “willful,” and probing.
In The Color Purple it takes the form of an investigative interest in the exercise of power, not only by men against women but also fundamentally by women against each other.
The novel’s exploration of intra-female oppression based on race and class, like its account of black male misogyny, is part of a womanist strategy to challenge both traditional and nontraditional power structures that block human liberation.

35. Feminist critique of The Color Purple has focused on male hegemonic dominance and has generally ignored oppressive power relations among women.
In the wake of current feminist rethinking of the dynamics of power, an examination of the novel’s offensive against abusive assertions of power by women is likely to yield useful insights into the subversive performance of womanist.
In Search of Our Mother’s Walker launches harsh comments on the colonizing economy of white feminist discourse, particularly the exclusion of black women from critical and theoretical reconfigurations of womanhood.

36. Two types of patriarchal power:
One is black and localized, a power that runs amok until its assault on black women is repelled by the aggressive assertion of female subjecthood.
Another, white, systematic, and implacable, communicates the terrible reality of institutionalized power.
Its capacity to destroy the racial, sexual, and cultural other is infinite.
The viciousness by itself can be destructive, but Walker detects a greater problem in the way it helps to maintain the dominant power structure.

37. To enlist an example, the two rape acts in black women as sexual object, and since the image originates in white patriarchy, Pa’s rape of Celie lends tacit but strong support to the (white) sheriff’s violation of Mary Anges.
Womanist exploration of the dynamics of female self-oppression in The Color Purple extends beyond racial and class boundaries into the less traveled region of black women’s interpersonal relationships where Walker sees a lure of domination that is equally strong.
The idea of black feminist discourse in light of the more urgent need to address the corrosive impact of race and gender oppression on black female identity.

38. Walker has too noted with anguish the self-cancelling modes of relations between black women, ranging from skin color intolerance to an exacting pro-black-male loyalty.
Little has been said about Shug’s near-pathological heterosexist complex and even less about how it crystalizes around the oppression of other women.
She admits, for example, to feeding her sexual appetite for Albert at the emotional expense of two already exploited women – Annie Julia and Celie. ( )
Celie too is enamored of Shug, but she rightly interprets the text of Shug’s self-imagining as male-oriented. (82)

39. Shug is trapped within a tantalizing male sexual economy that thrives on victimization rather than emotional fulfillment.
END