Reading Journal 2023: The Color Purple

Reading Journal 2023: The Color Purple
Author: Alice Walker

My feelings about this classic are complex. Real, but complex. Alice Walker’s exploration of the lives of African American women is both stark and raw in its appraoch. Nothing is buried here, and the book glides through many an uncomfortable reality without censorship. If that does leave the emotional experience a bit at arms length, I feel like this is intentional. It felt to me like Walker wanted to ensure that such human experiences also retained their context and their distinctiveness. She shapes a language both familiar and foreign all at the same time.

I wouldn’t doubt that readers experiences of this book will be shaped by the narrative approach as well. Walker tells the story of two sisters, tCelie and Nettie, seperated by birth and hanging on the hope that they will one day be reuinited. The primary perspective is that of Celie’s and we gain this perspective not through prose but through a collection of letters, first between Celie and God, and secondly, in the back half of the book, between Celie and Nettie. This singular perspective keeps the book intimate in both scale and depiction. Thus the depiction of domestic and sexual abuse is left largely without outside commentary. The experiences of Celie and Nettie speak for themselves, unsettling us all the more as we hear Celie processing these dynamics in particular and almost normalizing ways.

That intimacy and lack of commentary though does not mean a lack of a genuine arc. Who these characters are in the beginning of the story is not who they are at the end. The world isn’t reshaped or hidden away in light of this essential transfromation, it simply becomes part of how these characters learn to see the spirit and reconcile things like love and joy within such a world. Its engrossing. Its also quite powerful in its own, uncensored an unfiltered way.

Part of my challenge was that I was reading this book at the same time as I was reading another one (The Lost Year). I was so taken with The Lost Year, in a fresh addition to my all-timers list kind of way, that it kept stealing me away from The Color Purple. Thus, when I finished The Lost Year and came back to The Color Purple, I knew I was reading something powerful and profound, and was legitimately hearing and feeling that truth as I went, but I found myself relegating it to a cerebral experience rather than an emotional one, Which admittedly is more on me than the book, but it does speak to the books overall approach. Saying that, there is little doubt that this book is a classic in the truest sense of the word, and a must read, especially as a cultural touchpoint.