Toward the Survival and Wholeness of the African American Community: A Womanist Reading of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982)

Abstract

This article attempts a womanist reading of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. Walker provides a gendered perspective of what it means to be “black,” “ugly,” “poor,” and a “woman” in America. This perspective is ignored in the majority of male-authored African American texts that privilege race and class issues. Being “black,” “poor,” “ugly,” and a “woman,” underscores the complexity of the African American woman’s experience as it condemns African American women into invisibility. However, Walker’s characters like Celie, Sofia, Shug, Mary Agnes, and Nettie fight for visibility and assist each other as African American women in their quest for freedom and independence in a capitalist, patriarchal, and racially polarized America. This article therefore maps out Celie’s evolution from being a submissive and uneducated “nobody” (invisible/voiceless) to a mature and independent “someone” (visibility/having a voice). Two important womanist concepts namely “family” and “sisterhood” inform this metamorphosis as Walker underscores her commitment to the survival and wholeness of African American people.