Author: Alice Walker
Publication Date: 1982
Rating: 3/5
I'm a little conflicted over this. On the one hand, Alice Walker's The Color Purple is a good book about spiritual liberation, female empowerment, love and forgiveness. The writing - done in an intentionally ungrammatical, idiosyncratic way - works effectively, rarely coming off as ugly or lazy (as happened in Katherine Stockett's The Help). The characters were decent, and I did especially enjoy Nettie's letters from Africa.
On the other hand, hardly to my surprise, the moral preachiness does get a little over-trying sometimes. This was written back in 1983, yet it seems even then, it's politically correct to portray not one single white man, or even white woman, as a decent kind of person. Even the white missionaries in England are judged negatively because they go to Africa more through a sense of "duty" than explicitly stated "love for the Africans". I mean, what does this woman want? Then you have a colorful range of black women, none of whom are flawed at all, and a smattering of black men, who are mostly terrible but forgiven at the end, despite the fact that they have penises.
I did like this book. For the first half, at least, I really liked it. But damned if I'm gonna swallow its biased disregard for white people as if a book that came out and switched the races around would not be obliterated by the reading public for its racism.
"After the biggest of the white folks no longer on the earth, the only way to stop making somebody the serpent is for everybody to accept everyone else as a child of God". This presented as the insightful philosophy of those beautiful, genital-mutilating, women-suppressing Olinka people who apparently know what's what. In other words, we are all a child of God, and once the white man is obliterated we can finally achieve world peace.
Good luck with that sister.
