Why The Color Purple Creates A Tone Of Controversy

A good book can stay with you until bedtime, but the best book will stay with you for a lifetime. For example, there are some timeless treasures from American literature that begin with ‘THE COLOR PURPLE’ by Alice Walker. Why am I citing this specific example? It is because I am going to base this article on its theme, story, plot, and characters.

The color purple explores the fall and rise of a young African American named Celie Johnson. There is a tone of fear, exploitation, horrible teenage years and abuse by the stepfather. Alice has carefully saved the vivid images of life through Celie’s perspective and why the entire book is not Celie’s journey from Hell to Heaven and from the Fall to the Rise.

When this novel came out, it received mixed reactions from black Americans, as the abuse came from within the community itself. Walker’s work, on the other hand, was pioneering in the sense of history. This book actually created a lot of controversy in American fiction. It represents the idea of ​​slavery in the black community that destroys the basic unit and infrastructure of society that is the family. Money, on the other hand, was another great horror these people faced. Young children and especially teenage girls were sold or married to old men to have money and raise animals. It was as if making slaves and the masters who resided in the families sold them without a second thought. We always take an example and recite all the time that our families are there to protect us, but here the family led the girls into slavery, exploitation, harassment and mental abuse. If there were no families, there would be no slavery, no community, no unity, no society. This sounds like hell, but it’s true. No effective protests were seen, and as we read the book, we can actually imagine the girl forced to become a woman and how she finds love in the same-sex relationship. (Celie and Shug Avery). The writer does not follow the usual clue of the black-and-white slavery mechanism, but the black-on-black exploitation effect. Here, the lower class is affected not only by the whites but also by its own people.

Alice is an African American woman who writes about and for the African American people. The evil comes from the same community. Walker with this courageous attempt explores the gray areas that permeate his own community. This was no easy task. He received death threats and murder letters from people because everyone expected to see this as a ‘white perspective’ novel. It is easier to put blame on the shoulders of others because we cannot acknowledge our own faults. (It is not?). In this context, the roles are literally switched. An immense contradiction is reflected and a terrible reaction is seen.

I do not judge the author, the book or the community because when a writer writes he promises to portray the precision of real life. It is a shocked representation of a young black life and the villain is not the archetypal white but the blacks themselves.

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