blog post 8

For this week’s post, I’d like to focus on some texts that I think I’ll be working with for my upcoming seminar paper in a blues literature course. I’m interested in looking at representations of home or ‘homeplace’ in The Color Purple. My thoughts for the paper are just now really starting to crystallize, so I plan to use this blog post to think through it more fully (read: excuse my potentially jumbled thought processes that might unravel themselves here).

In the Color Purple, I’m interested in the way that ‘home’ changes places for the protagonist, Celie. I want to see what exactly she gains from this idea of a place called home. This means that the domestic space for her has to become something productive. I’m thinking about a discussion I just came out of, where a classmate of mine discussed notions of home in A Raisin in the Sun, and brought up the potential for homeplace as a space to foster that power that Audre Lorde refers to as the erotic. I wanted to shift that idea towards Celie, and wonder what ways she finds and harnesses the erotic through her engagement with home. Some questions that I think I’d like to engage in here are: how does Celie carve out spaces for herself in a ‘home’ that is often hostile? How does she create new homes for herself? How does her production of alternate homeplaces allow for a fostering of the erotic? How might that power itself be expressed- what comes of it, and where does it take Celie?

In order to address a lot of those questions, I think it would be useful to go all the way back to week 1, and our reading of Sedgwick’s “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading.” Sedgwick argues against paranoid reading, which would have  a reader go into a work assuming that they know more than the text, and they are looking for the horrible, hidden truth to be uncovered and exposed. A paranoid reading of A Color Purple, specifically, reminds me a lot of bell hooks’ reading of it, which we read in class as well. hooks seems to be reading with a sharp eye to expose, and she is certainly anticipating the worst. She accuses walker of creating a narrative that lacks any type of dialectical struggle or collective political effort. She is especially harsh in her criticism of the main character and what bell hooks reads as her entrance into capitalism and entrepreneurship- she argues that Walker prioritizes capitalism as a legitimate means to liberate oneself from patriarchal oppression over collective effort. I talked about this in a previous post, but I think it’s useful to come to hooks’ critique of Walker with Sedgwick in mind. While hooks may be bringing up some interesting arguments- now I’m wondering aobut the usefulness  of that critique. hooks here seems to be working from a standpoint of trying to expose some sort of problematic at play in the text. But now I wonder- what if we decided to read reparatively, instead? I’m interested, in my seminar paper, of doing a reparative reading where I can read Celie and her engagement with a hostile home in a way that might actually produce something more tangible. The Color Purple seems, to me, to be a book that is in need of reparative reading. It has so much healing power to offer if we work to get away from the paranoid reading that we so often approach texts with. So, if I take this idea of reparative reading towards ideas of homeplace and the erotic for Celie, what do I end up coming out with?  First of all- I think we can start to read Celie as a character who carves out healing space for herself in radical ways, even if they are tiny. This might be in the way she occupies space with her lover, Shug, for example. She and Shug exist in a domestic space that is not their own, until they make it their own. Even before this point, it is interesting to look at the ways that Celie and Shug engage the erotic with one another inside the home. I’m thinking, to start, of the moment when Shug first creates Miss Celie’s song, for example (59). Or the moment that Shug first introduces Celie to her own erotic anatomy (79). This might be one small way that Celie creates home for herself, and it is also rooted deeply in the idea of the erotic.

 Going back to the erotic, I wonder how Celie allows a sense of  ‘home’ to shift from a physical space to a spiritual space. This brings me to the question of Celie’s relationship to god and spirituality throughout the book. I think Shug opens up, for Celie, a space to harness the erotic and connect more fully with god in ways that are productive and useful. A starting point I’d like to look at is when Shug asks Celie, “have you ever found God in church?” (175). From this point on, Celie begins the work of decentering god from church and bringing that power, instead, back home. Literally and figuratively- Celie begins praying and finding god within the confines of her own home, but she also starts to find this within herself: “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” (176).

These are just some beginning points where I think Celie begins to engage with her home and her interior space in a way that gives room for god and the erotic to grow. This goes hand-in-hand with hooks’ idea of “homeplace” as a place of refuge. “Historically, black women have resisted white supremacist domination by working to establish homeplace. It does not matter that sexism assigned them this role. It is more important that they took this conventional role and expanded it to include caring for one another, for children, for black men, in ways that elevated our spirits, that kept us from despair, that taught some of us to be revolutionaries able to struggle for freedom” (hooks 385).