#51 The Color Purple

Usually in English classes, the whole class is given one book that you’re going to study out of for the next six weeks or however long it takes, and that is how it went most of my freshman year of high school.  Towards the end of second semester, though, my teacher did something pretty cool: he showed us five different books and each of us got to choose which one to read.  We’d be forming five groups, each group would study their chosen book and then we’d present it to the class.

Three of the books had mixed genders in their groups, but one ended up being all-boy and the other was all-girl.  I ended up in the all-boy group reading Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, which was the best book I read that year and is still among my favorite war novels.

The all-girl group read The Color Purple by Alice Walker, and when I read it this past week, I can’t help but be surprised that the teacher permitted these 14-year-old ladies to read it.  The first ten pages aren’t even done before we find that the narrator, Celie, has been raped and had two children from her dad.  And that’s just the start; Walker delves into lesbian sex and extramarital affairs, and is unsparing in looking at all kinds of home abuse imaginable.

I’m not being an entire prude here.  I’m genuinely confused.  See, the next year, we would have a sex-education week, where we would go into all about sex is, the physical implications from STDs to how your body reacts to sex, the various types of birth control and how to properly use them, and we got to do this in lieu of our regular biology class.  If this wasn’t the best and most entertaining week of the year, it was certainly the most memorable.

We had to get parental permission well in advance before this class started, and there was even a meeting for parents to oversee what we would be learning.  It strikes me odd that there was so much red tape to cross for a sex-ed week, and yet the year before, a group of 14-year-old girls were given one of the most erotic novels going through the school system.  There’s a strange double-standard going on and it makes me wonder if the teacher had read the book himself before giving it to his students.

But was it worth reading before I died?  Meh.  It wasn’t the worst thing I could have done.

It’s a life story about black women over the course of 30 years.  Celie is an abused daughter who gets trapped in an abusive marriage raising his ungrateful brats, and she doesn’t get out of it until Shug (a very popular showgirl and someone Celie fell for) gets her out of the situation, and then is left alone when Shug becomes a cougar and chases after a significantly younger man.

If you’ve been reading my previous posts, you’d know that the content here is not too edgy for me.  This story got old fast, though, and part of it may be an audience disconnect.  Celie is man hater (her most repeated phrase is, “Y’all are just frogs to me.”)  and being a man myself, even though I completely understand that men in her life have been awful, it was difficult for me to feel any sort of bond to her.  There are very few cases where I’m invested in a story but not in the protagonist.

There are two things going for this novel: the first is Celie’s sister, Nettie.  The Color Purple is an epistolary novel, composed mostly of letters that Celie writes to God and then later to her sister, Nettie.  Midway through, we start reading letters from Nettie, telling her story of being a missionary to Africa, the strange and wonderful circumstances that brought her there and the adventures she’s had in educating the Olinka tribe and the family she creates there.

Nettie’s story is filled with pain but also with great love.  You see the pain she goes through in helping to raise a couple children, as well as having to watch the Olinka tribe disintegrate because of the march of modern industrialism.  This is a theme I’ve come to care about a lot in recent years, how the worship of money undermines the true value of the earth.  It’s heartbreaking to see their simple homes with banana leaf roofs be replaced by these monstrous cages of tin and forced into laboring for the invading company.

The other thing is a conversation Celie has with Shug about God.  Celie has become an Atheist because in her view, if God is there then He is too lazy or selfish to come down and fix the things that are wrong with the world.  It’s the age-old question of “why do bad things happen to good people?” which is really asking, “Why does God let the bad things happen?”

I don’t agree with all of Shug’s answer.  Not by a long shot.  But the dialogue is real and it’s completely understandable how each character would choose to see God in the way that they do.  In a way, the real story wasn’t about Celie dealing with her relations or racism or even the search for love, it was about her finding faith in something higher, even though it seems to go unrewarded.  The last chapter encapsulates gratitude very well indeed.

It’s not a bad book.  I just found it too ham-fisted and emotionally, it felt like I was being pushed away rather than welcomed into the story.

I do have a stylistic quibble, and it’s strictly for lit geeks: would it have killed her to use quotation marks?

This is a convention of James Joyce, the seeming father of the modern literary elite.  Joyce, for reasons I cannot fathom, hated quotation marks.  He found those “little squiggles” repugnant and unnecessary, that somehow they disrupted the flow of narration and that readers should notice when a character is speaking and when the narrator is talking.  Alice Walker clearly agreed with him because there is not a quote mark in sight.

And it drives me nuts.  Quotation marks aren’t useless, they’re helpful.  In a way, they signify action in literature.  In movies, if they want to give you a sense of motion, they move the camera around instead of keeping it in one fixed place.  In books, quote marks are the writer’s way of moving the camera around.  They signify people talking, that action is going on, and I notice that I tend to read faster and am more engaged with dialogue than I am with any other part of a story.

It’s also helpful in distinguishing between something spoken and something that’s just a thought.  I’m so happy that most people in the world don’t even know about this ridiculous tradition.  Of course, most people in the world don’t really like to read, so… not that they’re going to care anyway.