A review by sidharthvardhan
The Color Purple by Alice Walker

5.0

“It is the very mark of the spirit of rebellion to crave for happiness in this life.”
- Henrik Ibsen

The African village Natie visits in this book had this ritual where members are initiated to community though facial scarring. Something easily accepted by most villagers, but with which embarrasses a more conscious Tashi:

“ Tashi is, unfortunately, ashamed of these scars on her face, and now hardly ever raises her head.”

It is a novel about people reacting to very similar scars given to them by society. Some of them protest. To someone like Sophia, the instinct to rebel comes naturally. Then there are others who must need be inspired. Celie, the protagonist, falls in this latter category. You will have to look hard to find a character in a worse social position. She is poor, mostly uneducated, ugly, homosexual and a woman.

You know how we just buy a book and just start reading it– ya, don’t do that with this one. It has the most heart wrenching opening ever. Abused by life, or more correctly, by men who should have been responsible for her happiness; she accepts it all as fate. It just doesn’t occur to her to protest.

“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any.”
- Alice Walker (not this novel) 

If she hasn’t already protested, it was because she suffered a far worse poverty- feeling of being unloved. Remember Mother Teresa, “The most terrible poverty is loneliness and feeling of being unloved.”

She did find this capital of love when she grew close to other women. And so finally she asserts her existence.

“I’m pore, I’m black, I may be ugly and can’t cook, a voice say to everything listening. But I’m here.”

No longer able to bear it, she is angry with God. Initially, I thought that writing the book in form of letters to God is just a literary trick but it was more than that. Celie stopped writing to God, being angry with him.

” If he ever listened to poor colored women the world would be a different place“

and rather choose to write to Natie instead, another symbol of how women can support each-other. Her anger also shows up in her misandry causing her to say things like

” Anyhow, I say, the God I been praying and writing to is a man. And act just like all the other mens I know. Trifling, forgitful and lowdown.”

and

Take off they pants, I say, and men look like frogs to me. No matter how you kiss ’em, as far as I’m concern, frogs is what they stay.

You know, it hurts.

Anyway, here comes my favourite part. In the end Celie forgives God. Celie’s anger was just another thing stopping her from enjoying her life. It is not enough to protect yourself from injustice and submission, even more important is to continue searching for happiness, to celebrate the beauty of life:

“I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.”

The problem with Celie and many other women taking roles expected of them by their culture is that their lives are based around men:

“All her young life she has tried to please her father, never quite realizing that, as a girl, she never could.”

Which means they won’t notice the color purple:

“ You have to git man off your eyeball, before you can see anything a’tall.”

(It really hurts.)

Despite all the fem. talk (oh Devil, I badly need some gangster guy or screwed detective book), the novel is more than a feminist story. A lot of it is about the unnatural relation between oppressors and oppressed whether it is racism or sexism. The oppressor in both cases doesn’t want the oppressed to get education and won’t talk to later except concerning work. Then too, neither of them look into other party's eyes as if of guilt. And the oppressor suffers too (to lesser extent of course); who seem similarly struck with their role. As Celie’s husband confessed in the end when they had become friend-ish “ I’m satisfied this the first time I ever lived on Earth as a natural man.”

*

“Here us is, I thought, two old fools left over from love, keeping each other company under the stars.”

“But all things look brighter because I have a loving soul to share them with.”