The Color Purple

My mass market paperback copy of The Color Purple says on the front, "The Wondrous Pulitzer Prize Winning Novel--Now a Major Motion Picture." And the novel is wondrous.

The form is letters--letters from the narrator, Celie, to God, morphing into letters to her long-lost sister, Nettie, as Celie loses her faith in God, and then concluding with a letter to God, "Dear God. Dear stars, dear trees, dear sky, dear people. Dear Everything. Dear God," when she rediscovers faith in a sort of pantheism.

Celie's voice is not grammatically correct--she uses "us" to mean "we," among other things. I started listening to this novel on CD, with Alice Walker reading, and the affect of the writing is to make Celie a very sympathetic character (I finished the novel in print).

The novel conveys the psychology of abuse: Celie's step-father (who she thinks is her father) sexually abuses her (Celie bares two of his children). Celie, as the older sister to Nettie, does her best to protect her sister from that abuse. From such a childhood her spirit is almost entirely broken, and she simply does whatever she needs to do to survive. She enters into an abusive marriage in order to protect her sister from their step-father. It is not until she meets her husband's lover, Shug, that her spirit begins to return.

The novel also includes letters from Nettie to Celie. Nettie is a missionary to Africa. The letters (which Nettie writes, although she's almost certain that Celie isn't receiving them, and, indeed Celie doesn't receive them till years after they were written) explore the complications of conversion--of bringing a new religion to a people with their own set of beliefs. The letters from Nettie also articulate the troubles caused by colonialization and by traders coming to grow rubber; the troubles caused by, for instance, the construction of a road to the village that the missionaries have joined. In addition, the letters deal with the missionaries' response to the practices of ritual cutting and Female Genital Mutilation.

The novel, so filled with grief and trouble, also contains a good bit of hope and contentment in the midst of very difficult circumstances.


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