Some six thousand former slaves gave accounts of their lives during the eighteenth and nineteen centuries.
The genre of slave narratives came about when slaves began to tell the tales of their experiences. For instance, it has often been said that The Color Purple parodies the tradition of the slave narrative. These characters often focus both on protecting the present, in order to ensure a healthy future, and on dealing with the past. Their female characters have been kept in cages for too long and are finally learning how to sing. Other notable authors who have written in this tradition include Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Maya Angelou. In their disjointed and dislocated communities, these women are often mothers who seek to protect and bring together their families for the sake of future generations. In these novels, we often meet women who fight against all odds for their survival and for the survival of their families. This tradition of novels tends to deal with the oppression of African-American women, not only by means of white domination but also by specific white and black males. The Color Purple is often used as an example of a “woman’s novel.” For Walker, womanist writing is that which focuses on African-American women in twentieth-century America.
Although Walker wrote the novel in 1982 and Celie’s story takes place in the early 1900s (probably 1909–1947), these women fundamentally share a common path. In fact, the whole novel focuses on the journeys of its women. In her preface to the Tenth Anniversary Edition of The Color Purple, Walker explains: “This book is the book in which I was able to express a new spiritual awareness, a rebirth into strong feelings of Oneness I realized I had experienced and taken for granted as a child a chance for me as well as the main character, Celie, to encounter That Which Is Beyond Understanding But Not Beyond Loving and to say: I see and hear you clearly, Great Mystery, now that I expect to see and hear you everywhere I am, which is the right place.” Clearly, this novel is Walker’s spiritual journey as well as Celie’s, which unites the two women as comrades on the journey.
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