‘Look like to me only a fool would want you to talk that feel peculiar to your mind.’ ( p.184, The Color Purple)
Celie’s assertion here offers a radical revision of white, heterosexist, oppressive language with this forthright declaration in The Color Purple. She celebrates here the ‘cracks’ in rigid. dreary ‘white’ grammatically correct language that suppresses the vitality and spirit of her own, progressively black, ‘womanist’ vocabulary. Indeed it is impossible to read the novel and not experience the uninspiring ‘boredom’ of Nettie’s letters where she ironically describes her own involvement in the further oppression of other black communities through her missionary work. Nettie seems imaginatively stunted and ‘bleached white’ in her passive collusion with the langauge of her own oppressors. Indeed her narrative seems to be that of a white classic realist text.
By contrast, Celie’s letters reveal her progressive visibility and empowerment. She writes ‘inked’ with the ‘color purple’ as she takes possession of her own voice through her economic autonomy and her sexual expressiveness and fulfilment.
Her change from subjugation to subjectivity is inspiring and is represented through her rejection of her earlier commodification as something to be exchanged and sexually ‘had’ or ‘taken’ for the freedom of independent expressivity. The ‘pleasure’ of the text and specifically of Celie’s energetic vital voice is thus linked to sexual fulfilment and expression.( Literal and metaphorical orgasm!) Hardly surpisingly then, the voice of Celie gains power and vivacity as she ‘comes’ into her own!
Fabulous!