BOOK CLUB ❖ The cradle of power and The Color Purple
a study of God in Alice Walker's book
The Color Purple by Alice Walker is harrowing and heartening. As a novel that holds unflinching eye contact with abuse and oppression, it accomplishes the highest calling of any writing tackling disempowerment: to ultimately inspire compassion, awe for human resilience and empowerment. Spoilers ahead!
The novel follows a nearly illiterate black girl, Celie, in early 1900s rural Georgia who writes her story through letters addressed to God. We as readers sit quietly in this private confession booth where we witness Celie’s story as told by her at her most vulnerable and honest.
She is sold as a domestic slave to a ‘husband’ and is sexually and physically abused from childhood. She looks down on herself not in a dramatic, violently self-hating way, but in the passive, matter-of-fact, wilting way of someone who truly can’t imagine being treated any other way: “He beat me today cause he say I winked at a boy in church. I may have got somethin in my eye but I didn’t wink.” That is more or less all she has to say about the event. And she self-deprecates herself for because she is “pore, black, maybe ugly and can’t cook”.
In addition to being wildly but forgivably mistaken about her failings, she is also blind to her virtues. While she is meek and passive, she is also sharply perceptive about people. She thinks herself stupid, but in her letters she privately says smarter things with fewer and simpler words than those around her. She is good to the children who are not hers and who she does not feel much for. She offers herself to the abusive husband to spare her little sister.
On the face of it, it seems like there’s not a lot here, because these are not tales of heroic triumph that can be sold as inspiration porn. But in fact, I think they illustrate something much truer and purer: they are subtle rebellions to a life of cruelty demonstrated by a fundamental attitude of kindness and curiosity.
It is a subtle form of courage, like pinpricks of light penetrating through a dark cave, or like the edge of the sun cutting against the bleeding bruise sky with pure gold. And if we were not close enough to her life, we might almost miss it, as Celie cannot see it herself.
But at least one person (and in fact several) can see this as they get to know the Celie we know, and one such person is Shug Avery, a strong-willed older woman and local celebrity whom Celie falls in love with, and possibly the first person other than her mother and her sister to love her back.
Celie and Shug
Shug represents something significant to Celie: she represents power and will, especially against all odds as a black woman. She is talented, funny and doesn’t take shit from anyone, and as the love interest of Celie’s husband, she even holds a form power over Celie’s abuser.
It is never made explicit in the story what exactly it is that Shug sees in Celie, but as readers with a privileged vantage point, we can infer. We can infer that perhaps what Shug sees and loves in her is some umpteenth of the virtues that we as readers see.
My theory for why Shug can see this is that she has a particular perceptiveness that hunts doggedly for the hidden good and worthy in everything. This perception is patterned in the way that she comprehends her own idea of God:
Here's the thing, say Shug. The thing I believe. God is inside you and inside everybody else. You come into the world with God. But only them that search for it inside find it. And sometimes it just manifest itself even if you not looking, or don't know what you looking for. Trouble do it for most folks, I think. Sorrow, lord. Feeling like shit.
Everything want to be loved. Us sing and dance, make faces and give flower bouquets, trying to be loved. You ever notice that trees do everything to git attention we do, except walk?
This shows a way of seeing that is something special. Someone who can see the innate life in the flowers and peaches and fish and feeling like shit is someone who also does not have trouble seeing the life in someone like Celie, who is brutalised and abused, and by all external accounts passive, useless and ugly.
This is also telling of where Shug might draw her sense of power from. We can think of our characters’ ideas about God as stand-ins for where they believe power flows from. While Celie thinks God is the tall, graybearded white man that passes judgment, Shug sees God all around her as an abundant force that beckons her more deeply into life:
Shug: You can just relax, go with everything that’s going, and praise God by liking what you like.
Celie: God don’t think it dirty?
Shug: Naw, she say. God made it. Listen, God love everything you love - and a mess of stuff you don’t.
Now this is what I believe about power from The Color Purple:
I. Power is born in the cradle of courage
What actually is courage? I think yes, it is bravery in the face of fear, or whatever people usually say. But this doesn’t capture it precisely enough, because it doesn’t translate to our lives that lack in lions to be faced or stormy seas to be wayfared, but rather flow through eras of disempowerment that seem slow, cyclical and never-ending.
It is more both more humble and ambitious than that: it is a basic will to love and commit to your own life in the trenches of a violent life. It is the nearly-irrational impulse to survive that holds on to a 0.1% of will in a life that seems 99.9% suffering. Rilke called happiness “that over-hasty profit of loss-impending.” And yes, I think, it can also look like believing in God — even in some hazy, abstract idea of hope — not foolishly despite suffering, but in spite of it.
The fundamental message of Shug’s God is: it is OK to seek joy amidst your suffering. It is OK to give yourself power that no-one else will give to you. It is not in fact just OK, it is a moral imperative, because this is where our power to change ourselves and therefore our circumstances comes from. Interestingly, the idea of self-care which has now drifted very far from its origin, has its roots in black empowerment from Audre Lorde, who said: “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”
II. Power is raised by community
It’s important to also raise this point, because the story of empowerment is woefully inadequate as a solo hero’s journey.
Celie does not learn empowerment by herself. She most likely could not read a Jordan Peterson book and personal-responsibility her way out of oppression. And that’s because her problems are inherently relational problems: she alone cannot spontaneously generate a voice loud enough to drown out those who abuse and dominate her on a daily basis. She is so deeply blended in the brutality of her context, like water amidst dirt that thinks itself mud.
She succeeds as a product of every other woman in her story who has modelled some kind of rebellion against their own imposed narrative, and who has amplified her virtuous traits with their lovingly clear-eyed view of her.
At the same time, community — specifically relationships with black women who deeply understand her through experience — is the thing that spurs on Celie’s sense of courage. What is the point of braving a potentially cruel life if you don’t know who or what it is for? Shug says to her:
...have you ever found God in church? I never did. I just found a bunch of folks hoping for him to show. Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me. And I think all the other folks did too. They come to church to share God, not find God.
God in this context is a sense of power made by people and intended to be shared by people — not hoarded into rigid mold of unattainable perfection (ostensibly a light skinned man) that exists outside oneself.
How do you take these ideas into real life?
As I approach difficult situations, I personally want to abandon ideas about agency/personal responsibility because it feels like something that has now become so political, moralising and unnecessarily offensive to people who are really struggling.
Instead I want to ask:
Right now, how can I approach this situation with more courage?
How can I compound this persons innate courage that they need to inch forward
How can I help make risking it more worthwhile?
How can I share, rather than hoard, the power that I do have?
With the emphasis on courage in this moment, we don’t have to agree with one another on personal responsibility, agency, or any such shibboleths. Instead we can work together and focus on how to embody progress right now.
Post-scripts
This essay started as something else and I became a little vexed that I couldn’t stop writing about God, because I’m very agnostic, and yet this comes off like a text you might distribute at a Sunday church group reading.
My belief is not that God is great and must be shared, but rather the thing that God is intended to represent is very meaningful, though it is continually elusive and — though this starts to get esoteric — the most life-affirming work is the continual attempt to search and find its true meaning again and again. And I think this is also what Alice Walker is getting at. This was a snippet I wrote earlier:
There is a parable about a missionary family in The Color Purple: they arrive in Africa to evangelise their God and his ways, thereby saving these poor, unenlightened Africans who have been punished with famine and poverty. The family is fundamentally good, kind and well-meaning: curious about the Olinka people’s customs, promoting their values earnestly and providing basic education to the community.
However, as the family struggles alongside the Olinka through many years of abject material poverty, and even lose their matriarch to disease, they start to question their impact: what is all this salvation from spiritual impoverishment adding up to, really, if they can’t even alleviate the Olinka’s material poverty? Is it possible, God forbid, that their quest to spiritually save the Olinka was an underhanded quest to save themselves - to feel affirmed about their worldview, and to feel useful in the world?
Their evangelism in fact does no harm to the Olinka — it is much worse. The Olinka are, after so many years, totally indifferent to their presence: “the Olinka no longer ask anything of us, beyond teaching their children — because they can see how powerless we and our God are”. The Olinka see them not as ideological threats, but like “flies off an elephant’s hide.”
This presents a confronting and harsh truth: they have confused the fortune of their circumstances as Children of God in a wealthy country as signals of their ordained power to save, and faced with a situation over which they must accept they have no understanding nor control, realise that their own arrogance.
The other loose note I have is that studying how people relate to God is a really interesting way to study power. Studies such as this one show that low socioeconomic status is correlated with belief in higher power and divine involvement. This can have several interpretations:
Poor people are stupid therefore they believe in God more. QED
God is useful copium for dealing with suffering AKA being poor even if he’s fake. Good for you, poor people.
Suffering AKA being poor is more likely to implore one towards spiritual seeking as a means of empowerment in lieu of material power
You can probably tell which one I agree with most lol.
📱Notes from my iPhone
This message from F nearly made me cry:
📖 Favourite reads
[Humanity at its best] I Watched a Guy Eat a Barrel of Cheeseballs: The QR code revealed a landing page that was cryptic at best. The event was hosted by someone called Cheeseballman427. The description was succinct: “I will eat the whole thing. I will probably throw up.”
[Analysing people weirdly closely] Good conversations have lots of doorknobs: Why did some conversations unfurl and others wilt? One answer, I realized, may be the clash of take-and-take vs. give-and-take. Givers think that conversations unfold as a series of invitations; takers think conversations unfold as a series of declarations.
[Different ways of thinking] On shortcuts and longcuts: Shortcuts tend to be pragmatic and goal-directed; you cut across the grass to save ten seconds on your way to the library. Longcuts are more about enabling; opening up a space for activities.
Empowerment coming from the community - the womanly love between black women - is my fave thing about this book.
Also this F guy sounds pretentious af 💀