By Steven G. Fullwood

In her landmark book of essays, In Search Our Mothers' Gardens, Alice Walker offers a fascinating way to consider genius:

"We are a people. A people does not throw its geniuses away, And if they are thrown away, it is our duty as artists and as witnesses for the future to collect them again for the sake of our children, and if necessary, bone by bone."

From the essay, "Zora Neale Hurston: A Cautionary Tale and Partisan Review."


 

Walker specifically used the case of Zora Neale Hurston, extraordinary writer and anthropologist who died destitute and was buried in an unmarked grave, as an example of genius. Black genius. Hurston's best-known work, Their Eyes Were Watching God, continues to astound readers some 70 years after it was published with its pre-feminist, self-actualization story of Janie Crawford, a Black woman in the living in the South, searching for herself as a wife/lover in the complicated arms of the community.

Alice Walker's The Color Purple: Edited by Kheven LaGrone

I was introduced to Walker and Hurston's work as an undergraduate student who constantly grappled with Black genius-what it was, it could be, but most often how black genius, particularly the works of W.E.B. DuBois, Ralph Ellison and James Weldon Johnson, were used primarily to sponsor uplift race narratives. In the age of Obama, this troubling class-based philosophical narrative, penned mostly by Black male writers, continues to thrive as the end goal de facto of Black people despite the complexity of Black life throughout the Diaspora.

Walker's genius is indebted to Hurston's, similar in that it privileges the once silent voices in of Black women in American literature-the diverse and complicated voices of my mothers, sisters, aunts, grandmothers, cousins and friends. To hold in my hands two decades later, Alice Walker's The Color Purple, edited by Kheven LaGrone, speaks of the impact of this work. It was difficult to write a review that would both share the sparkling insights of the book itself, and to also hold it accountable for its of-the-moment philosophical and academic sensibilities. The work is immeasurably useful in parsing the varied philosophical strands of Walker's controversial novel, as well taking hold of the text by examining the harsh criticisms that were burgeoning when the book was published some twenty-five years later.

 

It was important to me to begin this review by talking about Black genius because Alice Walker is, without a doubt, a genius.
Her creative body of fiction, non-fiction, essays and poetry has informed and continues to inform a generation of writers who bear witness to racism, sexism and homophobia in their respective communities in their work as novelists, poets, critics and cultural workers. Indeed, who among us can imagine the world without The Color Purple, the book or subsequent film? This canonized text arrived with blazing insights, feeding the undernourished readers of literature who were hungry for a book that had at its center a Black woman.

It was somewhat radical for those who were not used to or had no use for the Black female voice. Since its publication, through the success and controversy of The Color Purple, Walker has become an institution. She most certainly will not be buried in an unmarked grave. Alice Walker's The Color Purple helps to illuminate why.

In the editor's introduction, LaGrone's recounts and reveals an expansive and commonly held complicated view of Purple. Initially his impressions was that of the "triumph and transformation" of Celie, born Black, female and severely oppressed to personal power, sexual renewal and redemption. He begins with his initial appreciation for the work based largely on his own experience, to critically asserting that Walker, like the popular gansta rap group, NWA, successfully sold the "nigger" or violent Black male to the masses. This assured Walker not only financial success but also helped to establish her place among the great writers of the late 20th Century.

While the argument is persuasive in some respects but also begs certain questions. Are Black writers, ghettoized by virtue of their race, are obligated to tow the uplift narrative at the expense of telling truths? More importantly do race critics undermine art in general by suggesting that one's work be viewed solely through the lens of race politics?

Due to the pervasiveness of Black stereotypes, similar charges have been lodged against a plethora of writers including James Baldwin and Toni Morrison, groundbreaking intellectuals who have dared reveal similar, unsettling truths about certain aspects of Black life to the apparent applause of the larger white community. Implicit in LaGrone's sweeping analysis is the complications of race matters and its consequences for Black artists in general. In the absence of the white normative literary gaze, who exactly is The Color Purple for?

 

14 critical essays take on this and other poignant questions with supreme confidence.
Divided into five sections, "Rendering the (Womanist) Hero," "Theology of Liberation," "Dear God...Dear People...Dear Everything," "The Spirit of Space," and "The Classic Beneath the Polemic." Among the most absorbing and expansive essays include "Alice Walker's Womanist Reading of Samuel Richardson's Pamela in The Color Purple" by Apryl Denny rethinks how the novel has use beyond the normal critiques of it. Denny's juxtaposes Purple with Pamela, an 18th Century novel at the center of which is a servant-class heroine who demands a morality reserved generally for middle- and upper-class women.

This complex critique enjoyable and at times brilliant as the author reveals one of the crucial differences between the main characters of each novel, Celie and Pamela. While the former seeks a value outside of male authority by gaining her own, the latter does little more than pledge her allegiance to it. Where Denny's meditation traverses literary spaces, Danielle Russell's "Homeward Bound: Transformative Spaces in the The Color Purple," delves into how space "and identity" is "irrevocably entwined with place." That the search for and recovery of identity will "entail both physical and imaginative locations," writes Denny, is thoughtful and remarkable.

And while I disagree with the framing of the blues in Courtney George's "My Man Treat Me Like a Slave": The Triumph of Womanist Blues over Blues Violence in Alice Walker's The Color Purple, the essay is powerful to begin to consider the role that the blues plays in self-actualization by revealing abuse in the home in public setting. Walker's novel is not a blues novel; certainly not like Corregidora by Gayl Jones or Eva's Man, also by Jones. The womanist sensibility, along with the epistle construction of Purple actively resists the blues narrative, but George's critique is valuable in revealing the complexity and the impact of the novel.

Many of the other essays consider these issues with insight, wit and authority.

LaGrone's editorial hand is confident and necessary. Alice Walker's The Color Purple is an invaluable gift to scholars and lovers of literatures, Alice Walker enthusiasts, and, of course, admirers and critics of the novel itself.