Stop the hate and appreciate

         Reading the three assigned essay for class this week, I found myself experiencing a number of different emotions. At moments I was angry, sad, and curious, but the emotion that resonated with me through most of these essays was the lack of understanding. It seemed to me that all three of these articles bashed and downgraded The Color Purple into a pulp. Being an English major, I am accustomed to commenting on and analyzing books, but I found much of the criticism in these three essays to be completely dependent on the essay writer’s experiences, ideas, and opinions. These experiences, ideas and opinions are completely subjective and one hundred percent dependent on one’s experience in life. It is my feeling that Alice Walker wrote a book constructed from her own personal experiences in life, and she should not be criticized in the way that she is for The Color Purple in these essays. 

Many of the essayists we read for today’s class argue that The Color Purple failed in numerous ways. Saying that it bashed African American males, depicting them as uncontrollable sexual beasts, insulted African American women in Celie’s submissiveness, and more generally did not accurately portray African American lifestyles. I would counter this argument in saying that Celie is one person, in one town, in one part of the country, in a specific time period. I think it would be ludicrous to assume that because Walker creates Celie (along with others) as a very submissive woman with low self esteem that all African American woman are like that. I would present the same argument for all of the male roles in The Color Purple. Pa was one twisted, perverted, mentally ill individual that took horrific action against his daughter. Mr. ______ is essentially on the same level as Pa, with the exception of the end of the book where Celie and Mr. ______ seem to form a real connection with one another. I just find it unfair and unreasonable to place the responsibility of portraying the African American race on Walker’s shoulders. 

I would also add that I do completely understand the argument many of the essayists asserted in their works. Many of them pose a strong and compelling argument, but I think that many of their ideas are much too harsh and presumptuous. Similar to how I described Walker as writing about one person’s experience; Celie, in a specific time and place, not standing in for the entire African American experience, Trudier Harris’ argument revolves around one group of freshmen students, in one class, at one university etc., etc. I would like to think that we as people are too intelligent to allow one book (or even a collection of books demonstrating similar experiences and ideas) to shape our opinions and feelings toward an entire race. Perhaps my way of thinking is a new type of thinking that allows me to unpack The Color Purple for its’ literary and moral value, rather than thinking of it as a way to place the African American experience. 

 

                I think that the service I do at Tunbridge, once again, has some true and fascinating connections to the readings. I found myself thinking about how people form ideas about other races and people that are different from themselves. The answer I came up with is this: people shape their ideas about other races and peoples through the experiences we have as young people especially, but through our whole lives as well. 

Many of the students and staff at tunbridge are African American, and I would estimate that about 90% of the student body is black with the other 10% white or hispanic. Each week I find myself forming stronger and closer relationships with the students, some more then others. I can only hope that my experiences with these children are always positive, and that in turn they will perhaps form a positive image of whatever race these children see me as. (Although I do look caucasian, I am half Colombian which allows me to identify as hispanic as well as caucasian) 

Although I had never really thought about this until sitting down to write this blog post, I truly believe that my experiences with these children is slowly but surely allowing them to see parts of themselves in me, and parts of me in them. What better way is there to form a positive image of a specific race than realizing that you are much more the same than you are different?! In addition, through working with these children I am seeing  myself when I was younger! I think that we are learning about and from one another,  as well as appreciating and enjoying our experiences together. 

Dispelling the Notion of the Universal Truth

Portrayal plays a huge role in all three critical essays we’ve read for today.  Whether it’s positive, negative, fictitious, or truthful, they way we portray ourselves and others is important.  As seen in all three essays, the way we portray our own truths can often be misconstrued by others.  Knowing this, it is important to understand that there is no one, universal truth, and that all portrayals, no matter how praiseworthy or derogatory, expresses someone’s sense of reality.  

In her essay, Phallus(ies) of interpretation: toward engendering the black critical “I”, Ann duCille disproves the claim “(1) that there is an essential black experience; (2) that there is an absolute historical truth; (3) that art absolutely must tell the truth...” (2).  Responding to criticism that black, female writers often receive for depicting incredibly harsh and/or abusive black, male characters, duCille calls for critical self reflection.  Unless readers, whether they be male or female, black or white, young or old, can recognize their own biases when studying a text, they will never come to recognize the beauty and value of different truths.  From different lenses, the same text can be viewed as a work of female empowerment or male castration, a piece about white dominance or black subordination.  Whatever the viewpoint, it is necessary to understand that each holds truth, perhaps not for all, but for many.  

Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s study on how black men and women should be portrayed in art, asks questions originally posed by W.E.B Du Bois  in 1926.  One response to these questions is, “How should any person be portrayed in art?  Truthfully as the artist sees him/her “truthfully” (330).  This double sense of truth replicates the process of interpretation itself.  In seeing something, I can process it in accordance with what I consider to be true.  But in relaying this truth to others, they may analyze it to fit with their own realities.  No matter how we portray something, it is important to remember that our portrayals are not necessarily equivalent to everyone’s truths.    

Flying false colors

          When examining the critiques that various writers center on when discussing The Color Purple, the main argument that runs throughout most works argues about the lack of validity presented in the work due to the pandering of the novel to only portray unrealistic characters and stereotypes in order to continue the popular notions of Afro-American culture through the eyes of those in power rather than the plight of one’s own people. Eugenia Collier argues this point early on when she says:

I am not concerned with what white artists are prevented from knowing. I believe that the assumptions on which white people in this country are reared will prevent them from knowing black life anyway, and the rationalizations necessary to retain the American myths will prevent all but the most unusual white artists from portrayals undistorted by built-in racism. Study what is touted as American literature and you will see how white American authors have portrayed blacks. I believe that the longer we give one damn about how whites see us and portray us, the longer we will remain mentally enslaved. The real issue involves the ways in which we choose to portray ourselves. (Gates 318).

The real problem with The Color Purple as tied into the discussion in class deals with this issue of the perpetuation of myths about the realities that blacks faced because the portrayal of characters in certain manners risk the potential to continue racist beliefs that undermine the point of the work, the creation of one’s own voice to change the world around her. In fact, Ann duCille argues a similar point when she writes, “For all of us--masculinists, feminists, womanists--the challenge of our critical practice is to see both inside and outside our own assumptions. Texts have a way of becoming what we say they are. But what's at stake is not just the fidelity we owe to the books we read, but the way we do our jobs, our own intellectual integrity.” (duCille 10).

            Therefore, in this sense, it appears as though the novel carried some power with it as it progressed the story of Celie, Mary Agnes, Sophia, Nettie, and others as they strove for the betterment of their world, however much like Huck Finn, the lack of a change in character betrayed us to the reality that the work covered up. Trudier Harris emphasizes this problem when she writes, “The fabulist/fairy-tale mold of the novel is ultimately incongruous with and does not serve well frame its message. When things turn out happily in those traditional tales, we are asked to affirm the basic pattern and message: Good triumphs over evil.” (Harris 160). Therefore, not only are we betrayed by the author, the characters, and its story, but we also betray the story by continuing to believe in the false realities that the novel presents. 

Systems of discrimination

            A recurring theme in, The Color Purple is the structural nature of racism and sexism. Celie is a victim of both of those oppressive practices. She is repeatedly abused by her stepfather and her husband. There is little she can do because she is both black and female and the nature of society is structured against her so she just accepts her role, at least in the beginning.

Another example of the structural racism is with Sofia and the mayor. At first the mayor’s wife asks Sofia to be their maid to which Sofia replies, “Hell no”. The mayor then slaps Sofia for her response and to defend herself Sofia strikes back, for which she is imprisoned. Sofia was trying to go against the grain of society and not just accept her place and for this she finds herself in prison because she is a black woman. After Sofia is arrested, Squeak, who is half white and half black, tries to get Sofia out of prison. For her attempt she is raped by the warden. This is just another example of the nature of sexism and racism.

Lessons learned in The Color Purple are very applicable to the service I do. Baltimore, being a predominantly black city, faces racism constantly. It is important to know about the nature of racism when doing service in Baltimore. It allows for a deeper understanding of the community. There are systems and institutions in place that allow racism and even perpetuate it. I believe that an integral part of service and not just the service itself but the learning about the issues facing the communities because it only after realizing the systems in place that a change can truly be made.

There's No (Place Like) Home

            In reading Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, as well as in reading a few of the other texts that we have studied in class semester, I was struck by the lack of a sense of belonging, or a sense of “home.” In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, we followed Huck through his journey to find a sense of understanding of his world in order to feel a certain sense of contentment with himself and his environment. We encountered much of the same situations with Candide, but in The Color Purple, the problem of disconnection with one’s surroundings and lack of belonging is slightly different.

            The Color Purple presents us with the character, Celie, who does not feel at home even in the house that she lives in. She refers to it, not as her home, but as Mr. ______’s. This struck me as odd from the start and I cannot imagine such a feeling, but Celie accepts this as her reality and is grateful simply to have a roof over her head, regardless of how much she feels she belongs there. Even beyond actual location, there is a deeper sense of disconnect between her and the household itself; Celie is taking care of children which are not her own and who refuse to fully accept her into the role of mother that she is taking on. Celie is a visitor, or as one of Sofia’s sons puts it in describing his own mother’s situation, a “captive” (103) in what probably should be her “home.”

            On an even broader level, though, Celie is not accepted as belonging in the Southern society she lives in. Being black in the early twentieth century South, Celie and her family members, as well as much of her community, are not truly accepted as “belonging,” because of their race. Celie and much of her female friends, on top of this, are pushed aside because they are females. There is nowhere in their own country where these people feel they belong, nowhere to call home. For many of the white members of society, Celie and her family’s home is in Africa. Black Americans were not considered natives, regardless of whether they were born and raised on American soil or not, causing these children to grow up already thinking that they are not welcome here and are definitely not at home.

            For us, today, reading the novel, we know that this is not true; that those people should be calling America home and that they are, indeed natives. This is a major problem in the novel though and one which has been struggled with for years. For my other English class on contemporary literature, I have been reading Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard, a collection of poems connection Trethewey’s personal experiences of  being biracial in Mississippi with the struggles of slaves and black American’s during the Civil War, specifically those in the Native Guard. A key idea that runs through Trethewey’s poems is the feeling of being alienated in one’s own home. In one poem, “Miscegenation,” Trethewey even traces her feelings of not belonging back to her parents’ illegal marriage by being of different races. She writes about the people who fought for their country and their freedom, but were not credited as such because society saw them as “African” and therefore “different,” not at home here, in America, fighting for land that belonged to them, but as “others.”

            The intense feeling of “other”-ness is evident throughout both Trethewey and Walker’s writing and it is truly tragic. Trethewey quotes E.O. Wilson in the introduction to her poem, “South,” writing, “Homo sapiens is the only species to suffer psychological exile.” This idea of “psychological exile” is exactly what was and probably still is being ingrained into the minds of minorities in society and it has more to do with the way people are perceived by others than how they perceive themselves. Some people are never really given a chance to belong or have a home because they are not welcomed into it, instead, they are left extremely alone, lacking a connection between themselves and their world or anyone around them.

WBS

The summer after I graduated eighth grade, I spotted a purple envelope in my mailbox.  An all too familiar cursive looped across the front.  As soon as I opened the letter, all of the memories came flooding back.  Suddenly, I was eight years old again, reading a letter from my best friend.  

Writing letters was all Tara’s idea.  Though we sat next to each other in our second grade class, and though we lived just blocks apart, she decided we should become pen-pals.  Because I idolized her and everything she did, I instantly agreed.  The letters started off on simple sheets of looseleaf.  They were short and sweet, sometimes only a line or two long, but they arrived in my mailbox every few days without fail.  As time progressed, the letters became more intricate.  We each bought personalized stationary, wrote with neon colored ink, and began to share secrets and stories that we kept hidden from everyone else.  Though we saw each other every day at school, we never spoke about the letters.  They were our own personal form of communication, something sacred between the two of us.   

A year later, my parents announced that we would be moving to a new town.  Devastated, I had to tell Tara that we would no longer be sitting next to each other in school.  With a smile, she reassured me that we would still write to one another, and she kept her promise.  For a while, the letters flowed back and forth as they always had.  My change of address gave us so much to talk about.  I would tell her about my new school and all of the new friends I was making.  She would tell me about teachers, and boys, and everything else that was going on around town.  For those first few months, the letters kept us connected.  But naturally, as we got older, the time between each letter grew longer and longer.  Days turned into weeks, and weeks into months.  Eventually, they just stopped coming at all.  Separation caused us to grow apart, and without the letters, Tara seemed to just float away from my life.  I had forgotten about her until that very day when I spotted the purple envelope.   

Though it had been nearly five years since we’d last exchanged letters.  Tara wrote as though we’d just spoken the day before.  She told me about the years that had passed as if they’d just been fleeting moments.  She acknowledged that we’d grown apart, but was eager to rekindle our friendship.  When I saw her signature at the bottom, I nearly laughed out loud.  Before her name, she’d written WBS, the acronym we always used in second grade to urge one another to write back soon.  To this day, Tara and I still write letters to one another.  She wrote to me in January in response to a letter I sent her in June.  I still have yet to write back.  It may be weeks, or months, or years, but as we’ve learned, WBS is a relative term.   

There’s something so personal about letter writing.  I often tell Tara things that I would never tell anyone else.  Writing letters is like keeping a diary that someone else can read and validate, but only because you in turn read and validate theirs.  Sending your personal thoughts into the world for another person read and keep forever is an exercise in vulnerability and trust; which is perhaps why Alice Walker chooses to structure her novel, The Color Purple, in the form of letter writing.  Celie, the novel’s protagonist, writes letters to God in order to tell her story.  Torn from her family and married off to a man she despises, Celie feels as though she has no one to turn to.  Her letters to God express her truest feelings.  She tells God how she was sexually abused as a child, about how much she misses her sister, about her obsession with her husband’s mistress.  In her letters, Celie spares no detail.  They are open, honest, and intimate, just like the letters I share with Tara.  

Midway through the novel, Celie discovers that her husband has been hiding mail from her.  She finds that her long lost sister, Nettie, has been writing to her for years.  As she reads them, Celie instantly finds connection with her sister.  The years of separation seem to immediately disappear as Celie reads through Nettie’s letters.  Nettie’s feelings and emotions are shared with the same vulnerability as Celie’s letters to God, allowing Celie to experience a deep emotional connection, even though her sister is not physically present with her.  As readers, Nettie’s letters provide us with a story, but for Celie, the letters offer her a link to the family she thought was long gone.  Walker’s choice to introduce Nettie’s letters halfway  through the novel only reiterates Celie’s feelings of loss and longing.  Deprived for so long, Celie seems to forget about the love she had for her sister.  But the familiarity of the letter offers great comfort to the previously downtrodden Celie.  Just like Tara’s letter that showed up at my doorstep all those years later, Nettie’s letter to Celie represents a new beginning, a turning point that will hopefully change her life for the better.        

All You Need is Love

Women in The Color Purple are forced into two categories: the submissive housewife and the unrelenting warrior. Celie and Sofia could not be more opposite in their approach to men. Celie is physically small, meek and completely trampled by the men that rule over her. She has no interest in men other than abiding by their rules to avoid further abuse. And then we are shown Sofia, a large, assertive woman with a heavy fist. She’s outspoken and emotional. Sofia has been attacked by the men in her life, but she bites back. 

When Harpo asks what he should do with his belligerent wife, Sofia non nonapologetically says to beat her. Of course, a berated woman like Celie wouldn't find a beating from her husband cruel and unusual, it's just part of a man and woman's relationship. However we can see that Sofia's response proves otherwise:
     “All my life I had to fight. I had to fight my daddy. I had to fight my brothers. I had to fight my cousins and my uncles. A     
     girl ain’t safe in a family of men. But I never thought I’d have to fight in my own house. She let out a breath. I loves 
     Harpo, she say. God knows I do. But I’ll kill him dead before I let him beat me. Now if you want a dead son-in-law you 
     just keep on advising him like you doing.” (46)

Sofia is Celie’s first role model, she is a fighter. Celie reveals, “I say it cause I’m jealous of you. I say it cause you do what I can’t. What’s that? she say. Fight” (46). Perhaps Celie thought that being hit every once in awhile is just part of the marital vows, but she also seems to think that Sofia can handle herself and for that reason she is jealous. She is envious that Sofia is strong enough to fight. Although men have mistreated Sofia, she still has the capacity to love herself and others. She tells us she loves Harpo, but can't bear to sacrifice her self-worth to appease his desire to be seen as a dominant, masculine figure. Clearly, Sofia values herself as a woman, and a person who has just as much worth as anyone else. She has no problem hitting her husband, talking back to a white woman or slugging a white man. Although she gets herself into a lot of trouble, she does not sacrifice her self-worth for anything. Not even the husband she loves is safe. Sofia loves herself first. 

Celie has lost the capacity to love. Everyone she has ever loved has either died or vanished without much explanation. She cares for Albert's numerous children, but she tells us she does not love them. And without the love of others, Celie loses her self-worth. She is constantly being beat, raped, verbally, and emotionally abused. And what does Celie do? She just sits there and takes it. She is empty inside. “I make myself wood. I say to myself, Celie, you a tree. That’s how come I know trees fear man” (30). Sofia ends up in prison because of her temper, but at least she’s doing something rather than wallowing in self-pity. This reminds me of Martin Luther King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail when he declares that it is better to be radical and enraged by something, then to be moderate or lukewarm.

Alice Walker once said, "The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any." Whether or not she believes it, Celie has power. She has a voice, her letters are a testament to this.