actually writing about the book...

not that it's any good, but it does work towards supporting my argument.

jargon alert.

***

Linking Walker’s work with Lorde and Bambara, the spiritual thread in TCP ultimately commemorates strength of solid community works and bonding. Most of the key responses and interests in the text, like the intervention of Squeak, are collaborative efforts, and Nettie articulates pan-African concepts in her letters to Celie. The book celebrates community consciousness and sharing of love as the ultimate holiness, epitomized by the unconventional configurations of the family by the end of the novel. What makes the family structure successful is that each person is able to grow into some version of a whole individual based on his or her individual strength. This utopian realism is a world in which struggle, pain, and suffering are ultimately alleviated by a specific community-oriented dynamic, a certain type of relationship that is self-defined and socially responsible.

The first of these relationships in the novel is in its form: Celie addresses God directly while she is still a child, who has already had children. Celie’s relationship with God changes dramatically over the course of the book, but it is marked by this specific type of relationship that Walker valorizes in all of her novels: relationships are a conscious and cyclical movement between inner psychological and spiritual questioning and honest and erotically charged (though not necessarily sexual) exchange in one’s external relationships.

The writer in this book is always a black woman subject, who writes to someone she loves: God, Celie; someone she can trust, who shares connections. Celie is speaking through pain and struggle, using the voice of an intimate connection with God. At first this is an act of defiance and obedience--a doubly written inscription that traces Celie’s need to share her pain with someone and her need to follow instructions that her stepfather gives her. Tell nobody but God about this (1). Celie cannot disobey, nor can she keep quiet—so she begins to speak through that struggle. Celie’s healing parallels her grasp of language—as she heals more, she becomes more articulate about her state of mind through her maturity.

Celie’s relationships with the men and women in the novel are far more complex. She has been so beaten down that she is distrustful and jealous, yet naturally drawn to honest and healing relationships. Her first profound exchange with Sofia indicates that she is capable of the honesty needed to heal some of her mistakes (such as telling Harpo that he should try to beat Sofia). Her longing and desire for Shug, her admiration of other beautiful and/or strong women, suggest that her lesbian desire links with her desire for human connection—that there is an erotics of relationships that she is clued into even if she doesn’t trust or know what to expect from people, she can still be clued into that sense of what’s sublime and exciting about someone like Shug.

What is exciting about Shug is her outsiderness, her transgressiveness, which is most often depicted as her sexuality. It’s the healing of the outsider status, of the color purple, of the sexuality, that makes it so special—she heals by presenting possibilities, by showing Celie her own dignity, and by being honest about herself and who she is. The Color Purple proposes, among other things, that honesty is the only way to resolve true emotional conflict; this is quite different from Now Is the Time, in which Kate’s desire for self-discovery is the right thing to do.

Yet I wonder about this honesty—what skepticism can hold here? How can you be transparent about something like an identity, that does change? Walker suggests that being honest about where you are at each moment is truly the solution—for instance, Shug’s honesty about her need, later in the book, to go on that adventure with the younger guy; the honesty of Mr. _____’s transformation from an honest fool who beats his wife to an honest kind man who loves the women he’s around and the presence of good company.

This book is full of a variety of spiritual expressions: Nettie travels with missionaries. The family that takes Celie’s babies is a reverend’s. Celie speaks to God; Shug shares her thoughts about God; they share a spiritual-sexual awakening. In each case, Walker’s Color Purple treats love as the consecration of a God-Spirit and sexual love as another expression of this spirit. The book emphasizes the presence of a supernatural or spiritual force in daily life, especially as something that can be witnessed in nature and can be held by maintaining an aware and calm consciousness.


Sofia’s spirit is crushed because it isn’t conciliatory. She is so strong and defiant, as are all of her “amazon” sisters—the warrior ladies. However, she is ultimately beaten down—why or how?

Celie as a radical woman prophet. Celie’s letters can be compared to David’s Psalms or Paul’s letters to the apostles—holy communications that establish the word of God. At the beginning, it seems that God is just the only person available to hear Celie’s thoughts—thus like Job or David, by the end, they are more like Paul’s letters—doctrinal observations. As someone who has been victimized, Celie proposes a gentle liberation theology that gives her room for her creative acts. How is it possible to see a victimized woman as an empowered subject?

Shug as a radical woman prophet. In Shug’s theology, God is everywhere, an embodied presence that has desires—it wants you to respond with love and activity. Shug walks from the juke joint to the church & back. Sexuality is really the healing force, but as the book suggests by the end, it is a healing force not only in relationships, but in connections with the universe around you—by noticing the color purple.

Walker writes against destruction of the spirit, abuse and neglect and unfair treatment of women; and towards an open-hearted acceptance of the love available in life, regardless of its structure or demands. As Mr. _____ learns about sea shells, Shug travels and brings shells back to him, cementing the creative growth in their relationship and in them individually. The process of sharing this discovery suggests their love developing.
This point reminds me of Toni Cade saying that the natural response to challenge and pain is renewal to and growth; in a similar way, Walker’s novel argues or represents the natural inclination is to grow, change, develop spirit in everyday life and and observe and consecrate it always.

Walker writes against the systematic and seemingly small racist incidents that destroy individual black people’s lives, creating repercussions throughout a family and community (like the woman’s response to the mayor & his wife). The root cause of a lot of the suffering and pain is “little” racist incidents—why do I trivialize those? The thing with the shop is not little not so little, it actually destroys a livelihood and so much other stuff. The racist incidents set off chain reactions that are insulated from the white people because they don’t take the time to try to discover the truth about the situation (cf Eleanor Jane and Sofia).