Controversy shades "The Color Purple'

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In last month's issue of Socialist Action, Zakiya Somburu reviewed "The Color Purple," a novel by Alice Walker and a film of the same name by Steven Spielberg. Walker's work has unleashed a great amount of debate and controversy. Reflecting this discussion, we are printing below another view of "The Color Purple."—The Editors "In me there is a rage to defy the order of the stars despite their pretty patterns" (Alice Walker, "Revolutionary Petunias"). "The Color Purple" by Alice Walker won the Pulitzer Prize in 1982 and was recently made into a movie by Steven Spielberg. Very few films stand up to the richness of the novels which they're based on. "The Color Purple" is no exception to this.

What's good, however, is that perhaps movie-goers will be enticed to enjoy the richness of Walker's novels.

Few Black women artists have generated as much controversy as Alice Walker. "The Color Purple" is only the latest episode in this controversy.

In her review of "The Color Purple" in the March 1986 issue of Socialist Action, Zakiya Somburu joins other critics in the Black and feminist communities who charge that Walker portrays the Black man negatively. "The reasons for this negativity are not made clear," Somburu complains. Other critics charge that Walker wrote the book for a white audience.

Walkers' novels have always gone against the grain in one form or another since her first novel in 1970, "The Third Life of Grange Copeland." The essential theme that recurs in each of her novels is struggle, pain, and rebirth.

In each of her novels, Walker shows how racism is capable of distorting analysis within one's own community. In this manner, the hatred and powerlessness that Grange Copeland feels toward the racist sharecropper system of the South is misdirected in a violent manner toward his own family. In the novel "The Color Purple," the same theme is reiterated and portrayed negatively, I believe, is due to the failure of these critics to see the positive rebirth that Walkers' men go through. Until Grange Copeland learns to love and respect himself, only then is he capable of transferring this love to his granddaughter, Ruth Copeland.

Ruth, in turn, learns to love and in the process extends this love and coming into consciousness toward the emerging civil rights movement of the 1960s. Until Mister confronts himself and his past relationship with Celie-and only until then—is he able to respect himself, Celie, and Celie's relationship with Shug and Nettie.

Walker isn't too different from some of her characters. She, too, comes from a sharecropper's family in the rural south and was active in the civil rights movement. Obtaining a scholarship to Sarah Lawrence College got her on the road to developing her writing.

Walker writes about what she knows because it has been a part of her. Walker does a very good job in weaving her own experience into the larger picture with clarity and poetry in her writing.

Some readers are critical of the fact that Walkers' novels have positive endings all the time. These readers miss the point. Walker's writings center on a process of unfolding pain and struggle. It is this process of change which is central to the positive transformations that Walkers' characters go through.

One can see a fierce love and commitment in all of Walker's novels. Barbara Christian summed it up best at last springs' women writers' conference at San Francisco State University when she said, "The most important political message in Walker's novels is the insistence on happiness, survival and life."