blog post 9

In this week’s blog post, I’d like to expand on what I talked about last week in regards to my seminar paper. I’ve done more research/outlining since then, and have come up with a few more specific ways I’d like to engage my primary text, The Color Purple. I’m still interested in doing an overall reparative reading of the text. That is, I’d like to read the text openly, with the eye of having something to gain. I want to see how reparative reading of Walker’s work can be a healing process. I also want to put The Color Purple in conversation with a few other works by writers like Audre Lorde and bell hooks.

            In this post, I want to briefly outline the structure of my essay and my main ideas (I’m really trying to use this post to get my paper-writing making sense to me). Generally, I’m interested in how we can read The Color Purple as a womanist text. I want to see how womanism opens the door for what Audre Lorde calls the power of the Erotic. I’m interested in seeing how Walker uses her main character, Celie, and her relationship with others to create a guideline for womanist living. I also want to show how Walker offers us womanism as a guide towards an erotic spirituality. This type of reading is deeply reparative.

            To do this, I want to start out by first defining womanist theory. I’ll here be pulling a lot from the works of Alice Walker and Audre Lorde, but I also will be working with several other definitions offered up by different black feminist theorists. I want to clearly delineate womanism from feminism. Where this becomes a difficult thing to do, I will turn towards The Color Purple for textual clarification. But, very briefly, I’ll be working with an idea of womanism that follows this logic: “just as self-hatred and anger have been turned in on us, so we womanists must work ourselves with the hatred and anger against and between oppressed peoples…womanists are ‘committed to the survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female…wholeness implies a movement toward health.’” (Martin 50).  In my contextualization of womanism, I will also bring up the black feminist tradition of “love-politics” and offer this as another lens through which we can reparatively read The Color Purple.

            From here, I want to move into a contextualization of Audre Lorde’s idea of the “Erotic.” I will provide her own definition of the phenomenon, but also plan to situate other theorists’ readings of the power of the erotic. This is where my discussion of body knowledge and sensuality in The Color Purple will begin to emerge as being intricately tied to Celie’s movement towards a true ‘god.’ I want to provide ample room to show how Audre Lorde’s development of the “Erotic” is played out in Celie’s life. As outlined in “Audre Lorde and the Power of Touch” by Sarah Chinn, Lorde’s definition of erotic moments is moments that “exist in that space between ‘the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.’ They speak to a role the body plays that is larger than function but that does not participate in a fantasy of transcendence from the body. Moreover, they are about a sensory connection with others, ‘the sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual’ that embraces the entire body, that ‘flows through and colors…life with a kind of energy that heightens and sensitizes and strengthens all…experience.’” After I’ve made this understanding of erotic sensuality and spirituality clear, I will turn towards the text more decisively to show how Celie’s development characterizes erotic living as 1) her relationship with Shug grows 2) she asserts herself within her home and 3) she becomes more aware of the power of the things she creates (writing, quilting, sewing.)

            This first point, Celie’s relationship with Shug, is a huge catalyst for Celie coming to view her own body as her erotic (zoom in on the scene where she explores her own body’s reflection in the mirror with Shug’s guidance), viewing every-day activities as erotic, and viewing god as erotic. Shug awakens Celie to the type of specifically womanist love that is the only way towards these other things. From that point, I will move on to Celie’s move away from Albert’s home and spend some time on that scene, and then on what happens in the new and other homes that Celie occupies. I want to spend time looking at Celie’s labor, specifically, and show how her laboring is an erotic act itself. I argue that her labor and creation is, in contradiction to what bell hooks has argued, a womanist act against capitalism. Celie finds erotic pleasure in her work once she has become in touch with the power within her own body. Walker shows this through the magical pants she creates, but also throughout the novel at earlier points when Celie is sewing and quilting with other women. I want to show how this type of labor is a healing act rather than an alienating act, because it is done with a womanist ethic, with a collective in mind, and with a conscious erotic pleasure to be gained from it.

            I also want to show how womanism is reparative itself. Celie’s womanist politics allow her to begin a process of healing from a lifetime of trauma. And as she begins this process, Albert as well is allowed to move towards healing from the scars of his own wrongdoings. I think Walker wants us to read Albert reparatively, in a womanist way, that makes room for his healing alongside Celie’s.