The Immersion Library

I’m pore, I’m black, I may be ugly and can’t cook, a voice say to everything listening. But I’m here. Amen, say Shug. Amen, amen.

“Sure, I guess I’ll choose Alice Walker. She’s the one who wrote The Color Purple, isn’t she? I’ve heard of that, at least.”

During my second year in college, our Writing Essays professor asked each of us to choose an essayist whose work we would present to the class. I chose Alice Walker. That night, I turned to her section in our textbook, thinking I would read a little bit each day until my time would come to lead discussion in class. That plan utterly failed. I read her every word in that textbook and the next morning began snatching her novels from each English professor’s office. In the following weeks, I somehow navigated campus with my eyes glued inside her novels and In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens. I’m still here, so I can confidently say I avoided stepping in front of moving vehicles or cyclists. At the time, I wouldn’t have known if I did or not.

Later, I met Alice Walker in a book store where she read from a new release and signed books. I brought a stack with me, all of her books. I also had a letter that I had written to her years before; trying to explain her impact on me, on my worldview. When I approached her, I couldn’t speak. Maybe I cried. I definitely cowered. I could only reach out and hand her my letter. She took it from me and I looked up to see her soft eyes, her beautiful, compassionate face, her consoling countenance. When she finished signing each one of my books, I nodded to her and moved from the line. Not a word spoken in one of the most profound moments of my life.

I’ve now read The Color Purple twice. I now try writing my thoughts about it and will most assuredly fail in conveying the brilliance of this woman and her most popular novel.

To begin, the experiences and characterizations of Celie, Nettie, Shug, Sofia, and the others astound me. The epistolary form, in addition to serving Walker’s themes of redefining spirituality, introduces the reader to real people exposed from behind the coneptions of the author. Walker does not need to describe them or tell us their thoughts and feelings. They speak for themselves. And we listen. We pity them, cheer for them, cry with them, rise with their elations and crumble with their setbacks.

Celie’s victimization, a term that barely conveys the immensity of her experience, when paired alongside the experiences of Sofia, Shug and Mr., weaves an interdependence from which they learn from and support each other through their respective journeys of maturation.

When Celie begins her isolation, not her independence, as Mr.’s young wife, she writes letters to God because she has no one else. Though bright, she lacks the education to qualify the moral quality of her experience and therefore eeks through it, simply surviving with the endurance of the innocent. When she meets Sofia and then Shug, two women vastly different from herself or any other women confined to conventional gender roles of the time, her education begins.

Sofia contests expectations on black women with violence. Celie watches, and learns. Sadly, violence and self-assuredness land Sofia in jail, barred from her family in a devestating fate. Even worse, Celie learns that Sofia’s humiliation mirrors her own cowering behavior. She watches a power manifested in physical strength that cannot contest with southern convention, a lone person holding back the ocean, or cursing the storm. In fact, one could say that the magnitude of Sofia’s prowess is perfectly counter-balanced by the magnificence of her fall.

While readers undoubtedly wish that Celie would stand up and emulate Sofia, she cannot. She is not Sofia. She looks at Sofia and surely see how she differs from her. They contrast. Celie does not have the physical brawn of Sofia or the upbringing among tough brothers. To follow Sofia’s example, Celie would have to stop being Celie. She would have to abandon herself and become someone else. And even then, Sofia’s method does not work to achieve the freedom and power othat Celie needs. It only serves to shackle Sofia into Celie’s condition.

Then Celie meets Shug, the loud, sexy blues singer who her husband still loves. Shug contests expectations on black women with rebellion. When the ruling class demands subservience, obedience, and modesty, Shug does the opposite with a beautifully carefree irreverance. She shows Celie how to liberate herself from oppression not by fighting it but by ignoring its rules and consequences.

We love these characters because they progress; they evolve. They are not two-dimensional archetypal characters that Ralph Ellison would criticize, serving simply to illustrate an idea. These are living, breathing people and they change and mature. While Celie and Sofia’s lines begin at opposite extremeties, they proceed in opposing directions with one rising and the other falling. But for Celie and Shug, they ascend together.

Shug introduces Celie to love. Not the same love as Celie shares with Nettie, but a love of choice; to respect, honor, and cherish someone for who they are, not what we want them to be or because they share parents. Shug exemplifies how love, when freed, interlaces all things; the root of sex, joy, laughter, singing, and freedom. The root of happiness.

Mr.’s maturation tests the readers ability to embrace Walker’s views. An embodiment of mysoginistic power, a deplorable monster, a pathetic, nearly unspeakable farce of a husband, at the end, we must decide if we should embrace his maturation as well. Albert models his understanding of masculinity on his father, an unnatural emmulation that confuses him, as it does Harpo. Albert loses his innocence at one point as well. As he tries to impress his father and solidify a respectable identity as a conventional man, he loses Shug and any chance at real happiness. As we see in other novels from Walker, this emasciating curse leads to anger vented through violence and self-destruction. Yet through their shared love of Shug, Albert and Celie forge a genuine bond. How they establish this bond matters little when compared to the fact that they now have one. As Celie matures, so does Albert, finally viewing the world through his own eyes, thinking about the world with his own mind, outside the pressures of conventional masculinity.

I think us here to wonder, myself. To wonder. To ast. And that in wondering about the big things and asting bout the big things, you learn about the little ones, almost by accident. But you never know nothing more about the big things than you start out with. The more I wonder, he say, the more I love.

Walker explores the shackles of gender roles, power structures, and captivity with her characters in America. She grapples with racial sentiments as well, particularly with Sofia and the mayor’s wife. But when Nettie tells her story, which leads her to Africa with missionaries, one might expect her to paint a perfectly exhonerating image of black folks as innocent people blessed to have escaped America and avoid its curse. As in most things, Walker sees beyond this to a more universal truth. Africa is not the primitive nor the Eden stereotype.

No one else in this village wants to hear about slavery, however. They acknowledge no responsibility whatsoever. This is one thing about them that I definitely do not like.

I think Africans are very much like white people back home..in that they think they are the center of the universe and that everything that is done is done for them.

Walker does not idolize Africans over white Americans, nor women over men. She explores the captivating effects of perverted power. As her characters will learn, the key to happiness and freedom for the oppressed and oppressor is not having power over others, but embracing power over one’s self.

Most importantly, however, in The Color Purple, spirituality, not feminism or racism, is the dominant theme. Walker makes this abundantly clear as Celie addresses her letters to God. Spirituality is a process of love, including for oneself. It is not God, a separate personified entity, who will grant us power, liberate us, or give us joy. It is our discovery of God in all things, of which we are a part, learning its nature, and connecting to it, that will achieve these things for us.

Up until Celie learns of Nettie’s fate, Celie only shows her vulnerablity to “God” in writing letters. As part of her growth, not her destination, Celie begins redefining her concept of God through her experience and conversations with Shug. After all, Shug is the only one who responds to Celie’s vulnerability with tenderness and love. At the time, this is more than God, the old man in the sky, had given her. Shug acts as Celie’s Virgil as she ascends from the depths of Hell and Purgatory. During that journey, she has to challenge her concept of God.

I believe God is everything, say Shug. Everything that is or ever was or ever will be. And when you can feel that, and be happy to feel that, you’ve found It.

Shug’s concept of God rebels against imagery with truth. We believe in what we see, and the image of men is everywhere for Celie. Nature and love don’t have to compete to be seen or prove themselves. They will be there, whether we acknowledge them or not. But how much more fulfilling is life when we awaken to see the power and beauty in the world. Even Celie needs to humble herself in order to let go of the anger and victimization that’s defined her sense of self and reforge a sense of identity as a part of God which, like all things, should be loved. Such courage! To let go of the things we depend on for our identity. One cannot embrace Shug’s concept with arrogance, marching to it and self-righteously usurping it while shouting, “I deserve this!” Celie first has to let go and relinquish control to this new idea that requires her to be part of it rather than a victim of it.

In Africa, Nettie has a similar realization, influenced by disconnected circumstances and in another world; a truth universal.

God is different to us now, after all these years in Africa. More spirit than ever before, and more internal. Most people think he has to look like something or someone – a roofleaf or Christ – but we don’t. And not being tied to what God looks like, frees us.

Even the epistolary form rebels against the traditional concept of God. No omniscient, omnipotent narrator speaks on behalf of these characters. We read their voice, their power. The letters are prayers. When Celie addresses them to Nettie, she signs them with “Amen”. God is in Connection, in Love, not an old man in the sky.

Liberation comes from self realization, not definitions and conventions imposed by the world. Celie, after a lifetime of learning and unlearning about her relationship to the world, finds freedom and power through connection to everything through love and, most importantly, embraces herself as part of it. The world can beat down the fighter, the rebel, but not she who is one with “God”.

If she come, I be happy. If she don’t, I be content. And then I figure this the lesson I was suppose to learn.

The liberation of Self. Freedom from the world through love, self worth, and humility before God.