On The Color Purple

Don’t read this book if you like “light” reading. The first page is shocking, and the first quarter hideously depressing.
Do read this book if you want to rage, cry, laugh and feel alive and enlightened. Read it if you’re interested in african-american history, read it if you’re interested in feminism, or how a feminist culture might be born within the heart of a cruel, misogynistic time and place. Read it if you are prepared to grieve for oppressed people, and empathise with traumas so awful that life and humanity seem irredeemable.

This book makes me think of African-American feminist Audrey Lorde’s famous statement: “There is no hierarchy of oppressions” which somebody quoted recently. The Color Purple exemplifies that there is no hierarchy of oppressions, but that there is certainly a hierarchy within the oppressed. Be prepared for your views on gender, sexuality, and race to be challenged. Be prepared to think over your own conceptions of history, of culture, and of human relationships. And, at the risk of sound cliched, be open and encouraged by Walker’s uplifting picture of the hope and love that can be fostered within the most trying and unlikely circumstances. But I really don’t need to say any of this, because reading this book will do the work for you.

My favourite part of The Color Purple was a conversation between Celie and Shug. Perhaps its the turning point of the novel, perhaps it’s just pertinent to me personally. Either way, when I reached page 168, my eyes jumped ahead down the page of their own accord, faster than I could comprehend the text. I turned a page back and started again. Then I put the book down and sat in bed. And I just smiled.

Excerpt (abridged):

“When I found out God was white, and a man, I lost interest… God ain’t a he or a she, but a It… I believe God is everything, say Shug. Everything that is or ever was or ever will be. And when you can feel that, and be happy to feel that, you’ve found it.”

“People think pleasing God is all God care about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.”

“Well, us talk and talk bout God, but I’m still adrift. Trying to chase that old white man out of my head. I been so busy thinking bout him I never truly notice nothing God make. Not a blade of corn (how it do that?) not the color purple (where it come from?) Not the little wildflowers. Nothing.

You have to git man off your eyeball, before you can see anything a’tall… whenever you try to pray, and man plop himself on the other end of it, tell him to git lost, say Shug. Conjure up flowers, wind, water, a big rock. But this hard work, let me tell you. He been there so long he don’t want to budge. He threaten lightening, floods, and earthquakes. Us fight. I hardly pray at all. Every time I conjure up a rock, I throw it. Amen.”

Four weeks and now The Birds

Dear June,

Well it’s been four weeks since you rolled around and I’ve become nothing but a consumer. No purchases (I’m broke), living off rice and veggies (and the charity of friends and family). But still I consume. I’m all input and no output these days.  Day after day I sit (the stool, the bed, the sagging purple couch). I sit and I stare and I listen (words, images, noises). These are my life now – I am nothing but a sponge, soaking it in. Oh, I know it’s wrong, (but what else is there to do, darling?) And the words and the pictures are so pretty, so delightful. And the wind and the rain so cold outside this time of year. So much better to stay in.

And, oh! Did I tell you about The Birds? I ate Pizza in the dark and watched them attack again and again – the crows and the sparrows and the seagulls. And all the people running, in their pretty clothes. And the sets catching fire, the children with the blood on their faces. I drank it all in, yes, I did.

I almost forgot to tell you about her, Melanie Daniels (her real name’s Tippi Hedren, or maybe it’s not since the ‘Tippi’ was in quotations). All polished and bronzed, with those cornflower blue eyes and batting lashes. That’s the spectacle really, you see darling. Oh I know what Laura Mulvey says (don’t I know!), but how I wish sometimes I didn’t (because it’s so lovely just to look, darling). To watch her preen and strut and flutter, and to watch the man that watches her.

The last scene – (I must tell you!) I was breathless and waiting, waiting for Hitchcock‘s parting blow. There always is one, you see (a death, a revelation, a murder). And there it was – the blood again (this time her blood), and the pain and distress and horror. There was gasping and crying, as her hair came loose. Her face (oh yes!) that half-orgasm look of agony and ecstasy as they pecked at her flesh and flapped and thundered and scratched at her face. And those close-up shots (the lips parted, face tilted, her eyes half closed and half opening), my god, it was almost too much. Oh I know it’s nothing but pure sadism, darling – but (even if he is a misogynist), he really is a genius, isn’t he?

- Your faithful Hitchcock fan.