I was 16 years old the first time I read Alice Walkers The Color Purple, and I was shocked. Looking back, Im not sure why. It wasnt as if Id never heard that kind of language. It wasnt as if Id never witnessed domestic violence or didnt know people who dated other people even though they were already married to someone else. It wasnt as if Id never been attracted to a woman although, I never would have admitted it at the time. I guess Id never seen it all together inside a novel. Later, I went to see the movie with my dad and step-mom, and when (spoiler alert!) Shug Avery kissed Miss Celie, my step-mom gasped, and my dad whispered, Its not like that. But I knew it was like that. When I started the book I thought, as a white teen growing up in rural California in the 1980s, I could not possibly have anything in common with a black family living in rural Georgia in the early 1900s. I was two-thirds of the way into the book when Miss Celie always so meek and oppressed and sad gets angry and tells her abusive husband shes leaving, and then curses him. Until you do right by me, she says, everything you even dream about will fail. Ooh, thats a powerful scene, and it spoke to me. Maybe I didnt have much in common with Celie, but I knew how it felt to want to curse a man. In a 2012 Democracy Now interview with Amy Goodman, Walker explains how in that moment Celie is not speaking as one woman to one man. Shes speaking for all oppressed women as well as the earth. Celie basically curses all the misters in the world unless people are doing right by the poor of the world, by the downtrodden, and by women, generally, they are doomed. Our culture, our society, our world is doomed. Soon after The Color Purple was released it became a best seller in China. When she visited China in 1983, Walker asked what made the book so popular there. The answer: The oppression of women is global. Thats the magic of great literature. It reaches across all boundaries to shed light on whats universal within us. Because I could identify with Celies anger, I had empathy for her, and, though Id never experienced it myself, suddenly I could understand racism as more than an abstraction. It affected the characters I loved. Sofia, Celies daughter-in-law, is beaten and goes to jail for refusing to be the white mayors maid, and then shes forced to be the mayors maid. Celie finds out her dad was lynched by white men. Shug has to drive through the night because theres nowhere for her to stop and sleep, eat, or even use the bathroom. Sure, its fiction, but its also not fiction. Im re-reading the Pulitzer-Prize winning novel right now and remembering who I was at 16, and thinking about how the novel shaped me in ways I didnt even recognize. For example, I was an atheist. The novel didnt change that, but Shug and Celies conversation about religion opened a door in my brain that allowed me to think about God in a different way, a less angry way. It aint a picture show It aint something you can look at apart from anything else including yourself. I believe God is everything, say Shug. Everything that is or was or ever will be. And when you feel that, and be happy to feel that, youve found it. I didnt remember those lines years later when my daughter was born, but they were butterflying inside of me so that as Ive mentioned here before with her birth I was open to the idea of agnosticism. But maybe at 16 I had some kind of premonition of how I would change, because when I finished reading it, I decided that if I ever had a daughter Id name her after one of the characters in The Color Purple. Thats just what I did.

Tricia Caspers is an award-winning poet and journalist. She may be reached at pcaspers@westtrestlereview.com

See the original post here:
Another View: 'The Color Purple' is just as brilliant as ever - Auburn Journal