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The Journey of Black Woman From Self–Hatred To Self-Love: A Study of ’s

Dr. Anjali Abraham Assistant Professor, Department of English M.A College, Kothamangalam Kerala India

Abstract Racism and sexism have made heavy inroads into the lives of African-Americans, these degradations of which find voice in Alice Walker‟s novels. She has brought into the limelight the problems faced by African- American women and has tried to find answers to these burning issues. Black women writers project their vision of the world, society, community, family, relationships and even themselves, through the eyes of Black women characters and poetic personae. What these writers advocate is that every woman should celebrate her womanhood. Every woman should learn to love and appreciate the kind of person that she is. Only then can she enjoy a mutually fulfilling relationship with others. Black women‟s literature is a movement into self-love, self-respect and self-determination. Alice Walker is one of the greatest of Black Women writers. Her novel The Color Purple tells the story of Celie, a battered Black woman, who stand the oppression to finally emergent triumphant over a world which marginalizes her. The character Shug, who refuses to be defeated by racism of the Whites and sexism within her Black community, helps the growth and liberation of the protagonist, Celie. It is her love for Shug and her love of self that enables Celie to bury her sad double narrative of paternal origins and construct a new identity within a female domain.

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Introduction Literature is the expression of life in words of truth and beauty. It entertains and gives pleasure to the reader and heightens his awareness of certain aspects of life. It can be classified according to historical periods, genres and political influences. The important intellectual movements that influenced the study of literature includes feminism, post-colonialism, psychoanalysis, romanticism, racism, etc. The struggle of women relies heavily on literature. It turns out to be the only vehicle for their self- expression. African-American literature has played a significant role in American literary history since the eighteenth century. Black writing owes its very nature to the oppressive conditions under which the Blacks have been subjected to in America. What motivates the Blacks to write is the condition of oppression, and what they desire of their writing is to ameliorate their condition. African-American literature has focused on a number of recurring historical and sociological themes, all of which reflect the politics of Black experiences. The political content of African-American literature includes correcting stereotypes of African-American culture, experiences and achievements, and exploring racial issues, including, institutionalized racism, internalized racism, intra-racial racism and the combined oppressions of racism, classism and sexism. These themes constitute surviving life‟s negative experiences and questions, and rectifying them the positive. Self-hatred: Effects of racism and sexism The term racism refers to the discrimination of people on the basis of race or ethnicity. The term denotes the marginalization or segregation of the coloured or visible minorities by the Whites. Joel Kovel observes that the White slave-owner … first reduced the human self of his black slave to a body and then reduces the body to a thing: he dehumanized his slave, made him quantifiable, and thereby absorbed him into a rising world market of productive exchange… Thus, in the new culture of the west, the black human was reduced to a black thing, virtually the same in certain key respects as the rest of non-human nature-all of which could become property. (18)

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It is clearly seen in this explanation that one of the methods employed in the creation of a new social system in which the Whites are masters and owners, and the Blacks are a subnormal group of property which can be sold, bartered or used as a convenient form of currency. This reduction of humans to chattels or non-humans is the first definite step towards the establishment of racism as an innate archetype of the White American civilization. In short, black symbolizes everything negative and sordid in life, culture and religion. To be worthy of love one has to be beautiful; to be beautiful one has to be white in colour. The poor Negro has no place in this scheme. That which is unattainable becomes the most agonizingly desirable thing for all humanity. So the Black man‟s soul-wrenching desire for whiteness is an indirect desire for love, respectability, honour and acceptance. It is an agonizing human experience. Being White in colour implies a series of connotations: of being attractive, both physically and culturally, desirable, intelligent and reasonable and above all worthy of love. Blackness is seen as a negative sign, a symbol of ugliness, uncontrolled, irrational behaviour, violent sexuality and so on. In short, black symbolizes everything negative and sordid in life, culture and religion. Having allotted a burden of evil, fear and diabolism to black colour, western philosophy, society and culture finally find the perfect personification of this misalliance in the Black man. The devil is an abstract entity in western thought until western man encountered the Black man from Africa. The triangle drawn with devil, black colour and the Black man is firmly entrenched in the psyche of White America. Within this atmosphere of anger, hatred and fear, with its background of blackness, began the extraordinary performance of a tragedy wherein the Black man is the principal villain. As against the more overt forms of racism, the method of racial indoctrination is much more covert. The western perspective of beauty becomes the Black man‟s burden from the beginning of his racial history in America; he has to carry the burden on his tortured back. From the times of slavery to the modern period the Blacks have to endure a whole extent of emotions like anger, envy and frustration. They appreciate the White American economy, society, culture and colour. The outcome of this destructive attempt is a decline of values like self-respect, self-love, dignity and pride in one‟s own race. This extremely subtle, but very corrosive facet of racism has its birth in American history and its maturity in modern

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American thought. This covert form of racism, which is subtle but slow and fatal in its methodical progress, is doubly injurious to the Black race. Its invisibly corrosive nature is hardly explicit. It is this type of subtle, but deeply damaging variant of racism that forms the background to African-American women‟s fiction. Cruelty, torture, lynching, rape and bestiality, the marks of traditional racism, which form an important ingredient in the writings of Black male writers like Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, do not find any place in Black women‟s fiction. Racism plays an insidious role in their writings. But the effect of this type of racism is much more devastating in its consequences. The predicament of “internalized racism” results from the psychological conditioning by which a racist society indoctrinates people of colour to believe in the White superiority. Victims of internalized racism generally feel inferior to the Whites: they are attractive, less worthwhile, less capable, and often they wish if they were White or looked more White. provides us with one of the most chilling portraits of internalized racism in The Bluest Eye in which Pecola Breedlove, a young Black girl who can‟t see her own beauty, believes she would be pretty, happy and loved only if she had blue eyes. In this novel, Morrison weaves stories of violation and hardship to examine the ugliness that racism produces. “Internalized racism” often results in intra-racial racism, which refers to discrimination within the Black community, against those with darker skin and more African features. Filmmaker Spike Lee also portrays intra–racial racism in School Daze in which students at a historically Black college form two rival groups based on the relative “whiteness” or “blackness” of their physical appearance. The term sex is a biological construct. It refers to the anatomical difference between the male and the female. The term sexism refers to the discrimination of people on the basis of sex. Gender is a social construct. There may be sexism without racism but no racism without sexism. The African-American woman has faced troublesome existence as a slave in America. She bears double-edged persecution; first as a worker, both in the house as well as in the fields; second as an object of sexual exploitation at home and at place of work by White men as well as Black men. As poor, Black and female, the African-American woman has had to generate her own definition in order to survive. There is a well-defined pattern in

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Volume III, Issue V, July 2015 – ISSN 2321-7065 the oppression: White man oppresses Black man, he in turn oppresses Black woman. White man oppresses White woman, she in turn oppresses Black man and Black woman. The Need for Female Bonding and Sisterhood The concepts of Black feminism and womanism are constructed to address the issues that the “White” feminist movement failed to address: the issues pertinent to the everyday lives of Black women and women of colour. Black feminist and womanist thought are committed to the liberation of Black women and women of colour from the oppressors of race, class and gender; they encompass both the political cognizance and the action needed to achieve this liberation. One of the theories that has evolved out of the Black feminist movement is Alice Walker‟s Womanism. Alice Walker, in the preface to her collection of essays, In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens: Womanist Prose gives a detailed definition of the new term. Walker stresses that a womanist is not a separatist; she makes connections where they exist. She stresses that a womanist loves other women, sexually and /or non-sexually; but that sexual preference is not an essential part of her definition. Instead, what is essential is that she loves herself. It is that love of self that is the impetus for her commitment to women and men and to struggle for justice. Walker‟s definition of a womanist highlights qualities that many people do not associate with feminism. At the core of this definition is a woman‟s love of herself that is integrated with her love for all living things. African-American womanism is characterized by female bonding or solidarity and it surprisingly enlists male support. The womanist lacks the radicalism of the Western feminists. In spite of that, she gains a lot of ground in the fight against sexist segregation. A womanist, like every other feminist, seeks to raise awareness on the plight of women who struggle to co-exist in a man‟s world where they are regarded as appendages. Black women encourage serious and mutual commitment between Black women in order to heal wounds linked to oppression related to race, class and patriarchal constraint. Obioma Nnaemeka states, “Women appropriate and refashion oppressive spaces through friendship, sisterhood, and solidarity and in the process reinvent themselves” (19). The feeling of solidarity usually urges women to call each other sister in the African American community. It entails more emphasis on the community and less on individual selves, and this group-oriented view represents a good opportunity for Black women to form strong bonds. This bonding helps

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Volume III, Issue V, July 2015 – ISSN 2321-7065 them build and strengthen their self-esteem. These women friends can share stories support each other, or just sit down to talk. The term sisterhood is used among feminists to express the connection of women who are not biologically related but are bonded in solidarity. The sisterhood of women often refers to their feminism, their participation in the women‟s movement, their support of other women or their recognition of female qualities that are unique to women‟s nature. The use of the word sisterhood implies that women relate to one another in ways that are distinct from how they relate to men. Robin Morgan edited a 1970 anthology called Sisterhood is Powerful that gathered writings from dozens of feminists. This sisterhood emphasized collective struggle, activism and feminist theory. Michele Wallace, bell Hooks and Audre Lorde were among those who critiqued the racist and classist assumptions of White women in the women‟s liberation movement and commented on their use of the term “sisterhood.” Empowerment through Self-love-An Analysis of the novel “The Color Purple” Alice Walker is the best known African-American writer of the second half of twentieth century. She has published four other novels, five volumes of poetry, three anthologies of essay, two children‟s books, and two collections of short stories. But the novel The Color Purple is a landmark in African-American women‟s fiction and a turning point in Walker‟s career as a writer. Walker has declared herself an African-American woman writer committed to exploring the lives of Black women. In her novel, The Color Purple, she pictures the hardships and suppression that the weak gender has to undergo in a male dominated Black society. Walker‟s fiction confronts issues like racism, intra-racism, sexism, neocolonialism and imperialism in order to transform both society and the individual. The Color Purple, is a rhapsody of joy and triumph: the triumph of one woman‟s crusade against racism, sexism and socially imposed traditions. The Color Purple is the first work by a coloured writer to win the Pulitzer Prize. In this monumental work, Walker gives the readers an inside perspective of the terrible story of the abused woman called Celie. Her condition in the novel is deplorable. Physically, sexually, emotionally and socially, she is abused. It is an epistolary novel and Celie finds her voice through a series of letters she writes to God and to her sister Nettie. The novel opens with the voice of Celie‟s sexually abusive stepfather threatening the fourteen year old Celie: “You

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Volume III, Issue V, July 2015 – ISSN 2321-7065 better not never tell nobody but God” (1). God is implicated in the conspiracy of silence surrounding the sexual abuse of which Celie is a victim. Before she was twenty years old, Celie was impregnated twice by rape, forced to give her babies up for adoption, and was married off to an older and abusive man. All the while, she prays and writes letters to a silent God: “Dear God…May be you can give me a sign letting me know what is happening to me” (19). Her suffering and the silence of God galvanize an image of God in Celie‟s mind that is removed only after Celie meets Shug Avery, her husband‟s mistress. Shug befriends Celie and eventually becomes her lover, giving Celie some of the affection and nurture she has never had as either a child or as an adult. While encouraging Celie to stand up to her husband and to enjoy her own sexuality, Shug also teaches her a new spirituality: a belief in a divine Spirit that imbues all creation. Being a Black woman Sofia has suffered a lot. Misfortune inflicts her, her ribs are broken and she becomes blind. They have made her sleep on a cement floor without a light. All these cruelties drive her to the brink of madness. Thus is subjected to worst form of cruelty out of racial prejudice. The town scene where Sofia is accused of “sassing” the White mayor‟s wife and its aftermath is gruesome and painful. We are forced to witness a strong Black woman, stranded alone, can be broken by the racist and partially sexist violence of White men and by White women. It is precisely because of her integrity and penchant of self- defense that Sofia is set upon by the White Southern racists. Walker shows in her novel, how sexist beliefs, ideas, attitudes and practices inhabit all spheres and aspects of life. As ownership, especially of money and property, is an essential ingredient of power, men own everything in The Color Purple. Albert is the prime example. He owns the money, the land and what is produced on the land; he owns the house and the furnishings in the house. But the main thing about the proprietary claims of patriarchy is that men are supposed to own women and, therefore, men are supposed to own all that women might own themselves. The most ancient and prevalent patriarchal maxim is that men are master of all they survey. From birth to death, females are continuously owned by fathers, brothers, boyfriends, husbands, sons, some man or another. But the apex of patriarchal arrogance is represented by Albert‟s having Celie shave him, without the slightest consideration of how she must feel. In slavery, the feelings of the slave do not matter to the all- powerful master. As sexist patriarchal slaves, women exist for

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Volume III, Issue V, July 2015 – ISSN 2321-7065 the wanton exploitation of men: women are objects of exploitation as sex workers and models in pornography; women are privately exploited as -wives, daughters, nieces, mothers in the family. Black woman have an even lower status than White women. The White woman is often placed on a pedestal, even as they lack independence Mr.___ agrees to marry Celie not because of the enumerated qualities, but because of the cow that is given as part of the dowry. She is inspected like an animal before the deal is finally through. As a “mule of the family,” she is belted, humiliated and is made to work like an animal. Mr.____‟s is logic for ill- treating Celie is simple: “Cause she is my wife. Plus she stubborn. All women good for” (23). Celie‟s role as a woman is to cook, breed, work like an animal; though she is expected to be abused emotionally and sexually, she remains mute under all trying circumstances. She has no freedom to act or think. Walker makes great use of this “mule” image in the first part of the novel and also in the section set in Africa. The Color Purple is one of the best sociological dramatic studies written on the subject of sexual oppression within the Black race. It treats Black female abuse as a generic function of sexism and patriarchy in Black rural society and culture. Life for Celie may be visualized as an ever- expanding field of possibilities. In the centre of this field is a great big mountain. It is the sexual mountain. Albert represents this mountain, which stands for all that is ugly and oppressive in women‟s lives. He and the mountain imprison Celie and prevent her from grasping any of life‟s potentialities. On the other side of the mountain, the positive side, where the field beckons with opportunities for the development of life, stands Shug Avery. Though she has not destroyed the mountain, she has scaled its repressive peaks of sexist bigotry and patriarchal domination. Breaking free of the fetters that would bind her down, she has been to the outside world and paid her dues. She has literally taken her life in her own hands and become a grown, independent woman who is terribly free. Her freedom is terrible; like most of her sex, she can be cut down at any moment by any number of forces seeking to put a woman like her in her “place.” But she has taken her chances and survived so far. The Color Purple, her best-known novel, explores the development of Black female identity through the story of its heroine, Celie, as she grows toward selfhood. The process of struggle for change is revealed through Celie's complex relationships with her stepfather Alphonso, God, Mr.__, Harpo, Sofia, Nettie and above all Shug Avery. In feeling the pride of being Black women who do not submit to oppression, Sofia and Shug offer her the strength of self-definition, while again Shug and later Nettie provide her with self-knowledge and a sense of self-empowerment. Thus, re-connecting

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Volume III, Issue V, July 2015 – ISSN 2321-7065 with her own self and with God through the female network system, Celie learns to become her own person. Shug Avery is representative of the genre of Black blues / Jazz women who emerged during the beginning of the twentieth century. Shug Avery is the blues/ Jazz singer articulating the sorrows, brutalities, endurances and love-fleeting moments of all those women, who, like Celie, are shackled down and rendered inarticulate in this woman-hating world. Shug feels her kinship with these women. She knows that all women are sisters. This is what Shug brings to the scene; this is what the song she sings in the tavern “sister,” means. It is what all women need most in their lives: union, family and community- in a word, sisterhood. For, only sisterhood, only togetherness can effectively combat the awesome spectre of the sexual mountain. In this sense, Shug is Walker‟s mouth piece; she is Walker‟s womanist catalyst. The novel begins with Celie, a fourteen year old girl, who is sexually abused by her presumed father and who manages to save her sister Nettie from the same fate. Celie is so cut off from everyone and her experience is so horrifying even to herself that she can only write it in the form of letters to God. Her letters take us through her awful pregnancies, the loss of her children in adoption, and the abuses of a loveless marriage. She liberates herself; she comes to value herself through the sensuous bond of love she shares with Shug, her husband‟s mistress; she appreciates her sister-in-law Sophie‟s resistant spirit and the letters from her sister Nettie, which her husband has hidden from her for many years. When her mother asked Celie who was responsible for her pregnancy she said only God knows. She did not have any other answer to give. Celie pointed out that the two children born to her from repeated sexual abuse were also taken away by her Pa. She assumed that Pa sold them to a man over Monticello. Her lack of education and mental strength made her suffer the injustice silently. But she was determined to save her sister, Nettie from such a fate. We find Celie making herself a shield to protect her sister Nettie from her Pa, offering her body to him. Celie‟s position frames a woman‟s status in African-American culture. Walker replaces the traditional sources of love with liberal sources and communicates the idea that love is the redeeming factor in The Color Purple. Walker‟s Black sisterhood, famous as a „womanist‟ theory, helps the women in the novel to liberate themselves from the bonds of oppression. It also redeems the men in the novel from meanness, violence and selfishness. The love between Shug and Celie, Sofia and Squeak, and their achievements pave way to the horizon of sisterhood and their empowerment.

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The ingredients of sexual interest and fulfilment, absent from the worries of home and marriage, are present in Celie‟s friendship with Shug. Her soul, body and mind have been bruised by men; first her father, then her husband. But women like Shug, Nettie and Sofia help her to reposses her body, soul and mind. Through friendship, Celie finally discovers love and learns to love herself, others and God. Shug for Celie is the source of relief and empowerment in all sense. It is Shug who changes her attitude to sex. Through decolonization of love, Celie gains a new experience which enables her to forgive Albert and to realize that Albert also needs love, as his relationship with Shug is a quest for love. The discovery of this radical, but fulfilling love provides Celie with self-confidence, identity and voice. She resurrects from a silent, dominated, abuse and passive life into an active, industrious and independent life. Celie finds love with herself, friends, family and God. All the loves are restored, but in the most unconventional manner. Through her letters, Celie‟s sister Nettie also helps her a lot to be bold and courageous to face everything in life. But at first the letters were stolen by Albert. Shug and Celie find out the truth and smuggle a letter out of Albert‟s pockets. This portion of the novel follows the appearance of maturity in both Celie and Nettie. Celie is finally able to break away from the oppression of her life and leaves her husband. Nettie reaches adulthood and independence by living in the jungles of Africa and struggling with daily life. The one person who loves Celie dearly is her younger sister Nettie. Nettie also teaches Celie to read and write. Thus Celie develops a new awareness of herself. Celie becomes friends with Mr.___ whom she starts to call Albert. He has taken up a shell collection and gets her to come back to his house to take a look. She is still surprised of his ability to keep everything clean and neat. He tells her that he was just too much of a fool to notice her when she was his wife. Celie and Albert grow closer as they get to know each other as friends and Celie even teaches him how to sew. All her letters to Nettie are also returned unopened to her. The Color Purple articulates personal and historical transition. The cause of transformation is woman‟s economic and sexual enslavement in a male dominated and racist society. The possibility of Celie‟s transformation is brought about by her journey away from the rural backwater to the big city. Her transformation is economic as well as sexual. Celie‟s ability to question her husband‟s domination is made possible by her friendship with the

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Black blues singer, Shug Avery. Unlike the monstrous inequality between husband and wife, theirs is a reciprocal relationship: Celie gives of herself to heal the sick and exhausted Shug, and Shug reciprocates patiently and lovingly teaching Celie to know the joys of her own body and to follow the intuition of her mind. Conclusion The women characters in Walker‟s novels form strong bonds, which develop into a community, radiating love and sisterhood. Love of self energizes them to the point that they break their chains of enslavement; change their own worlds, times and Black men. Walker‟s Black sisterhood, popularly called womanism, becomes another revolt against tradition. In this case, it is a revolt against White feminism, which has become elitist and traditional. It redeems men from meanness, violence, selfishness and ignorance. Unlike women they have no community or love. Women demonstrate love through business and creativity and reach out to the entire community, including men. This, in turn is the greatest achievement of the novel. As Celie and other women overcome their condition, not a single man is killed or injured. The subtlety with which Walker shows how this is achieved is remarkable. Instead of “hiding” in their separate cells, the women come together in sisterhood and overcome by nurturing, befriending, enlightening, sharing and loving each other, which makes each individual woman whole. This is a positive way for both men and women, highlighted by Celie and Albert becoming friends in the end. She teaches and Albert listens. Albert stops hating him so much, and he and Celie share their thinking and feelings as equals. They were never lovers. But now, at the beginning of a new day, they can be lovers, if they ever wish to. This study shows the journey of Black women from Self-hatred to Self-love which helps them to liberate themselves from the men, from cruelty, violence and selfishness. Finally this paves a way to the empowerment of the female characters through various sisterhoods.

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Works Consulted Bloom, Harold.ed. Alice Walker. New York: Chelsea House, 1989. Christian, Barbara. Black Feminist Criticism; Perspectives on Black Women Writers. New York: Pregamon, 1985. ,Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition. 1892-1976. West port, Connecticut: Green wood Press, 1980. Hernton, Calvin C. Sex and Racism in America. New York: Grove, 1965. , The Sexual Mountain and Black Women Writers. New York: Anchor, 1987. Kovel, Joel. White Racism; A Psychohistory. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. Nnaemeka, Obioma. “Introduction: Imag(in)ing Knowledge, Power, and Subversion

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Volume III, Issue V, July 2015 – ISSN 2321-7065 in the Margins.”The Politics of (M)othering: Womanhood, Identity, and Resistance in African Literature. Ed. Obioma Nnaemeka. London: Routledge, 1997. Selzer, Linda. “Race and Domesticity in The Color Purple.” African-American Review. Vol.29 (1995): 12. Sivanandan, A. Challenging Racism: Strategies for the ‘80s. Race and Class. London: Pluto Press, 1982. Print. Smith, Barbara. Ed. Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology. New York: Women of Color Press, 1983. Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. New York: Pocket Books, 1985 In Search of Our Mother’s Garden. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983.

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