Ode to ‘The Color Purple’ by Alice Walker

I love this book, that is all. 

The Color Purple written by Alice Walker and published in 1982, has always been a sort of literary spectre that has hung over most of my reading life. I was 12 when I first attempted to read the book. To say that I was unprepared is a woeful understatement: I found the book frightening and bewildering. From the first page we learn that Celie, the book’s narrator, is 14 and that she is pregnant for the third time with her Pa’s child. Walker refuses to hold the reader’s hand, she expects us to be able to witness things clearly, without shadows or a screen to diffuse our senses. It would be the first time I encountered the concept of incest and domestic rape (perhaps this is one of the last vestiges of childhood, not knowing that these concepts exist). I quickly abandoned the book, and for almost twenty years, I felt a sort of shame for not finishing it.

A couple of weeks ago I had an opportunity to re-read it again, and this time, I was determined to finish. This time, I would not look away. It did not take very long for me to find the book readable, even pleasurable, and no sooner than I recognised it, I fell in love with the novel, which is so much more warm and soul-soothing than I could ever imagine, much less give it credit for. An entirely epistolary novel, Walker must write in fairly narrow parameters, but that’s what makes her prose stealthily brilliant—Celie’s voice is ever vivid, distinctly beautiful, even at its most inchoate. The book, set in the Deep South in the first half of the 20th century is, in part, a record of pain, of racism, of gendered violence, of intergenerational trauma, of colonialism and other, multivalent, forms of oppression, but it is also a story of a Black woman who emerges, like a chrysalis, to discover the beauty of her own body, mind and self-will. The elements that so frightened me when I was 12 are still there, but they are much more muted than I remember (or more likely, I have become a better reader). What emerges, most vivid, is a towering work of feminist fiction (Walker would coin her own term to describe her work: womanist); a tremendous record of female strength and resilience. 

I want to write more, but I also wish people to experience the book with largely fresh eyes, and (hopefully) find themselves enraptured with it as I have become. When you discover late in the novel what Walker means when she writes of the colour, purple, perhaps you will feel yourself transmuted by it, as I did, the world seemingly more lovely and familiar, and I, more grateful for being part of it. 

(June 2020)