38 footnotes later...

I'll see you on the other side of this chapter thing, the steering comm meeting, the film festival, the grad comm meeting, &c.

The texts through which critics approach Walker’s spirituality are usually The Color Purple, as a founding text of womanism; or The Temple of My Familiar, the mysticism of which Walker identified in 1999 as “transitional,” not culminating (cite; from Anything We Love). Critics note the diasporic and spiritual elements of this novel, its transcendent vision, but shrink from discussing the specifics of Walker’s spiritualism or her 21st century drift into American Buddhism and other New Age spiritual practices.
Do I need to introduce/discuss intersectionality theory or Collins’ matrix of oppression here—or perhaps in the introduction?
This unifying strategy is grounded in Walker’s civil rights experiences: the community built by a shared struggle was tempered by its mixed success, due in part to government sabotage and in part to diverging experiences of gendered and raced subjectivity.
Like Niecy Nash, Walker tells her white friends to save themselves, but doesn’t limit her healing properties to black women or black people. It would fit in a different part of the chapter or even a different chapter—Rich’s?—to discuss Walker’s role for white women as the spokeswoman for black women’s writing, and how that suggests some lazy-ass reading.
Do I need to summarize the controversy here?
Much is made of the rural and impoverished conditions in which Celie lives; although certainly by universal human standards, her family struggles to make ends meet, by Jim Crow standards they are a comparatively prominent and successful family. See Jenkins and ? You read this somewhere.
Jenkins also calls this “an aspiration, most often but not only middle-class and female, to save or rescue the black community from white racist accusations of sexual and domestic pathology, through the embrace of conventional bourgeois propriety” (973). The salvific wish, arising from struggles to counter white narratives of black deviance, has turned women’s domestic propriety into the central tenet of black uplift strategies (974-975).
As recently as a January 2008 interview with Vegetarian Times, Walker is identified as “the Pulitzer Prize-winning author” whose “best-selling … novel, The Color Purple, inspired not only a film but more recently a Broadway musical.” Although most prominent writers are invoked by their best-selling or award-winning work,
Add this article to Works Cited.
This is an interesting echo or prediction of Audre Lorde’s discussion of the creative uses of difference. Celie comes to understand her differences from the norm as evidence of the divine rather than as a limitation to her acceptance by a powerful male. Similarly, Lorde suggests that we address conflict or difference as a site of potential, rather than difficulty. Especially in our dealings with people we traditionally think of as “other” and therefore a threat, Lorde advocates that we instead find out more about the nature of the differences, discovering how we can work together or at least not in conflict because of them. Celie comes around to the idea that her troubles with God and real live men are, similarly, the places where she can begin to test her limits and discover a new approach to life. Please see Chapter Three for a more thorough discussion of Lorde.
This twist is even more poignant in contrast to Celie’s simultaneous loving and sexual awakening with Shug.
The relation of the erotic and the divine will be explored further in the chapter on Audre Lorde.
It is significant to Walker’s ambiguous commitment to racial unity that the figure must be re-imagined as African American: to imagine a figure without gender, but with race, is to suggest that race surpasses gender in the experience of the divine. Although I think that Walker refuses to suggest this as a lasting theoretical position, Shug suggests this image to Celie so that Celie can love her blackness—a necessary step in the process Walker describes. This sense of security and self-love is essential in all of Walker’s work, and suggests, unlike what some critics have charged, that black identity remains at the center of her concerns.
Walker’s piece also defends Jackson’s asexuality, arguing that a white woman critic’s labeling of Jackson and her partner as closeted lesbians misrepresents the revolutionary nature of their platonic spiritual partnership. INSERT QUOTE HERE. She argues that Jackson was consciously asexual and that the best way to use her as a role model is to accept her own terms.
I will discuss in the following chapter how Meridian Hill, as a martyr figure, represents a similar cultural outsider who serves as the moral compass of the text.
See Anzaldua Borderlands, etc.
However, over time, I believe that Walker discovers two major problems with this embodiment vision: causes pain for the person who experiences the “troubling” body, and it pulls the heroine into her individual body, apart from the possible community. She suggests that transcendence, as part of a process, can ease this pain, as long as one is still accountable to some community as a human (spiritual) being.
Hello, footnote, nice to see you. Perhaps cite an essay or a study of these one or two. Ask your good friend Shelby Crosby for suggestions. As Moody argues, this moral code empowers black women in their racial identity, but constricts their movements as woman, since they are forced to become the bearers of a high moral standard that limits sexual expression and acceptable femininity (cite Moody).
This totalizing effect is an interesting trend at that time and worthy of further study. Whiteness studies, perhaps.
Footnote peers

Walker’s epigraph reads:
To the Spirit:

Without whose assistance
Neither this book
Nor I
Would have been
Written (TCP epigraph)
And this is sort of bullshit because if you’re living in a community, you have to be accountable to the community’s demands, even if they’re not fair, because that’s what community is: meeting needs, trying to understand them, to be accountable to them. She doesn’t think she is, I don’t think. Or is it that her community’s changed? She says: people have always misread this. It’s not about sex and learning to love the body. It’s about spirituality and learning to leave the body that has troubled you. That’s disturbing. Yah.

Too many pages of Buddhist intro?
She begins herself in an interview as “homospiritual” (cite) rather than of any particular sexual orientation, suggesting that she was beginning to experience herself as a spiritual being, rather than a racialized subject limited by social definitions.

Chodron’s best-known series of tapes, Awakening Compassion, is a series that the CEO of SoundsTrue sent to Walker after an interview (cite Walker & Chodron in conversation). Chodron has also released a number of books about tonglen practice with titles like The Places that Scare You and When Things Fall Apart. I suspect that one of the reasons critics evade Walker’s new direction is because of her association with Chodron, who evokes a whole set of West Coast, upper-middle class religious practices that have developed out of the well-meaning strategies of post-sixties liberal activists. The sampler platter of New Age religion is not a dish to serve along with a unified nationalist or feminist front. It also perhaps does not mesh with African American women’s Christian practice.
Tonglen meditation practice is intended as a healing practice, a form of political action in which the meditator breathes in suffering and breathes out relief, building a sense of well-being through the ability to endure and transform emotional and physical distress. It is an accessible but advanced practice for people who have already meditated, as Walker has been since immediately after her divorce from Mel Leventhal in 19--. Pema Chodron advocates for it as the primary solution to what ails the world, from being an approach to handling immediate physical illness to a general prescription for how world leaders could approach moments of difficulty in their political negotiations.
Which I should probably sketch at least roughly here or in the paragraph.
Walker uses, for instance, one of Pema Chodron’s most common metaphors for tonglen as an illustration of the power of Buddhism against the pain of racial suffering .
The above quote suggesting that The Color Purple was her Buddha book without Buddhism is included in We Are the Ones.
Cite Kakutani and other reviews to illustrate.

This parable also features a development in Walker’s literary career, a signal that her novels transitioned into a more religious vignette style. Although Walker has always favored smaller vignettes (including The Color Purple’s brief epistles), her contemporary work has long favored a kind of parable formulation. Meridian featured brief chapters of the segments of Meridian’s difficult life; Possessing the Secret of Joy adopted a prismatic narrative style, discussing Tashi’s efforts to heal from each character’s point of view; and 1999’s By the Light of My Father’s Smile interspersed mythic concoctions of the fictional Mundo tribe with dream sequences and narrative. Now Is the Time To Open Your Heart extends this practice by presenting the entire text as an answer to a moral conundrum.
footnote
This reading is confirmed by an event later in the text when the shaman tells her: “no sex” (49), because it would interfere with her connection with Grandmother, the spirit that guides their chemical psychological wanderings.

Lauren Berlant has argued that Celie’s business success creates a tension in Walker’s radical, anti-capitalist novel. Although Berlant is correct in this reading, it simply illustrates for me how Walker’s work, even her best-known, has always pulled away from prescribing a specific political strategy, arguing instead in favor of a more subjective spiritual radicalism, which may in fact rely on wealth to be successful. Walker splits the public and the private in order to scribe the elements of the private that are so often overlooked.
The radicalism of this inscription, like the radicalism of other feminist texts, was to write the subjective experiences of racism, which often led to crippling results for folks who were not adequately consciousness raised. Ordinaly people experiencing racism in private. That is, what makes it private is that Walker writes down what people experience in private, not what people think about socialism. This also makes it radical: it is not theoretical, it is fictionally real.
Evoking Toni Cade Bambara’s saying that the natural response to challenge and pain is renewal to and growth, Walker’s novel suggests that the natural inclination is to grow, change, and develop spirit in everyday life. No matter the level of your pull to abusive or self-destructive behavior, there is always the possibility for growth and change.