There Is No Absolute
Experience
I found all three articles to be extremely engrossing.
They each provoked strong reactions within me. The article that I responded the
most positively was “Phallus(ies) of interpretation: toward engendering the
black critical ‘I’” by duCille. The author challenges the idea that there is
one universal truth and history. She states that “Truth, however, like beauty,
is in the eye and perhaps the experience of the beholder”(2). I agree with this
idea of a subjective truth in relation to experience. When reading The Color Purple, I never once thought
that this was the exact experience of all black people of this time period.
Foremost, I realized that this was a work of fiction. Secondly, I understood
that if this did represent an experience, it did not represent all experiences.
Yet just because this experience is not universal does not mean that cannot
represent truth.
In regards to the
article “On The Color Purple,
Stereotypes, and Silence” by Harris, there were some points I agreed and some
that I did not at all. On the first page I was immediately disturbed by the
quote, “What sane black woman, I asked, would sit around and take that crock of
shit from all those folks?” (155). For some reason this stuck me as insensitive
to Celie’s experience. The way I read this was that because Celie did not react
she is less of a black woman. What she dealt with was extremely traumatic. She
had to learn how to be a strong woman, which she eventually did. Yes, I agree
that sometimes I was frustrated with her passivity, but I never thought of her
as less of a woman because of it. I do not think that any woman, whether white,
black, etc., needs to fit into a particular mold. I felt that Celie’s character
represents the struggles (maybe not exactly, but in figurative sense) that some
women deal with. Celie’s experience is no less the truth than the experience of
a “strong” woman like Sofia.
An underlying theme that
all articles dealt with was the idea that the novels can negatively affect the
image of the black race, whether it be the men, the women, or the whole. As
discussed in the article “The Black Person in Art: How Should S/He Be
Portrayed?” there is a delicate balance between the artistic voice of the
writer and the freedom of the black race from stereotypes and oppression. I
agree that stories can feed the stereotypes that are present. Yet I also think
that each story represents its own interpretation of the truth. Just because a
novel does not represent a group in the most positive of light does not make it
a universal truth. I think that this becomes the responsibility of the reader
to recognize the lens from which they are reading as well as the fact that the
experiences of the characters do not represent the experiences of everyone.
Every author has the right to express the truth as they see it or even just a
particular part of the truth they have seen. I think that books are often meant
to cause frustration in the readers. I do not think that it is bad that women
are frustrated with Celie’s passivity or that men are upset with portrayal of
black men. Books are not always meant to make every person happy. They are
sometimes ways to open up discussion or to express one’s own thoughts.
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