We've been dealing a lot with literary texts that have themes of gender and sexuality and one of these texts which was treated in class is "The Color purple" by Alice Walker.
I have a thing for novels dated as far back as the 1900s compared to what we have today. Writers of my days are all about romance and erotic story lines which really doesn't teach much in my opinion just for some young people to masturbate and for common entertainment.
The color purple by Alice Walker is set in rural Georgia and follows the life of Celie the protagonist of the novel who experienced different forms of abuse from the hands of men beginning from the man she knew as father to the husband she married. With all this abuse from men going on in her life, she resorts to getting attracted to women as she feels all men are the same and would always want to dominate and prove masculinity when it comes to issues concerning women.
Before changing her sexuality to liking the same sex, Celie writes letters to God telling him of all the abuse she was going through in the hands of the men he created. Remember, this Novel is set in the 1900s so the use of letter writing to communicate was the only form of communication available to women at the time.
Celie uses this mode to write to God but stops when Shug, the lady she falls in love with, tells her that God is not a person but is an object that doesn't hear. She later uses the same medium of communication to write to her sister Nettie who she thought was dead not knowing that she had been writing her ever since the day they separated from each other but her abusive husband hid all the letters from Celie but with the help of Shug Celie recovers the letters her sister had sent to her and writes back as the duo kept in touch with each other sharing their experiences and creating a string bond as they fought to navigate through the world of patriarchy.
What I love about this book is the gender issues it raises. Though it was criticized and banned in America at the time for the use of offensive language and same sex issues, the book raises serious gender questions about the dominating characteristics of men, women's exclusion from education, gender and racial oppression and many more but what concerns me more on this topic is the dominating character men possess.
I was about to get on a public vehicle today and two men were already closely seated. If I had gotten in, I'd be making the third person at the back seat and then one passenger would seat in front. About getting in to to take my seat,one of the men got down and asked me to sit in the middle, summing his statement with the fact that I'm a woman and supposed to be in the middle of men.
I got so pissed and refused to get in the middle because I actually don't conform to such traditional gender stereotype. I made sure that before I walked away from the vehicle I was to board, I gave the man free lessons and told him to wake up from his slumber of living in the stone age where women were subjugated as women are now asserting themselves and fighting for their rights.
We're all humans in this world we came to and owe our identity to no one. Back then at the time this epistolary novel was written, women owed their identities to men. They were portrayed as weak, docile and uneducated, especially black women.
The world has actually revolved and in my opinion, any man or society that is still in the business of subjecting women should wake up.
One characteristic of Celie I admire is that she later asserts herself after she has grown to womanhood and understood the ways of men. She becomes independent and unapologetically takes charge of her life. Independence is what every woman need to survive out here.
You should read the book if you haven't, you're really gonna love it but if you don't, we're all entitled to our opinions.
Thanks for reading this far 💜.