Dhe September 22, 1985 was a day with two “memorable moments” for Alice Walker. She was on the set of her novel The Color Purple, which has been a huge success since its publication in 1982, winning the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Whoopie Goldberg starred in the film adaptation and was directed by Steven Spielberg. On that sunny morning of September 22nd, Whoopie Goldberg told her she had never read the script. And Steven Spielberg told her that he considered “Gone with the Wind” to be the “greatest film of all time.” His favorite character in it is Prissy.
This is what Alice Walker reports in her diaries, which are currently being published in German under the title “Collecting flowers under fire” (by Ecco Verlag). Prissy, Spielberg's favorite character in what was once the most expensive film of all time, is the house slave of the white plantation owner Scarlett O'Hara, the main character of this story from the American Civil War, who hardly shys away from a racist cliché. Prissy is a kind of funny noodle who speaks in a childlike manner and thus causes mild laughter. The fact that this character, of all people, thrilled the director of “The Color Purple” must have seemed more than “memorable” to Alice Walker, because Celie, the main character of her novel, which Spielberg made into a film at the time, is also a very young woman at the beginning and speaks “weirdly”. “, childlike, without awareness of themselves or their surroundings.
That's exactly what “The Color Purple” was about, and it wasn't meant to be funny at all. Rather, this was Alice Walker's literary project – she wrote from the narrow perspective of a young woman in the country in the American South in the 1930s, who initially had no language at all, only fragments of words, a woman who had no worldview but only a counterpart who calls her “God”. She writes letters to this authority about children, men and violence, becomes more fluent in telling stories over time, learns to differentiate, recognizes feelings, gains a bit of experience in the world, discovers her own sexuality and develops as she acquires and grows language Competence as a narrator to the subject – she becomes literate, so to speak. It is this movement and the description of brutal reality through the eyes of a woman who is initially denied rights that makes “The Color Purple” so influential and important in the history of black American literature, not the story of two sisters who are torn apart and find yourself again, which also happens in these just under three hundred pages.
What Steven Spielberg didn't understand about The Color Purple
Spielberg's film confirms that he didn't understand this. He turned the bildungsroman into a touching piece in letters – which in turn greatly benefited further sales. But this placed not only “The Color Purple” but also Alice Walker’s entire work of prose, poems and memoirs, comprising more than 35 books, under suspicion of kitsch. In fact, her book titles often sound like sayings on gift cards: her first is called “The Way Forward is With a Broken Heart,” her second is called “You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down,” and a later volume of poetry is called “Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful”, and so it goes on up to “By the Light of My Father's Smile” or “Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart”. “The Color Purple” is now also available as a musical, and a second film adaptation, this time directed by Ghanaian rapper and filmmaker Blitz Bazawule and co-produced by Alice Walker, was released in 2023.
Alice Walker is not only a writer, but also an activist, and her political commitment has accompanied and sometimes interrupted the life of a writer since the civil rights movement of the 1960s – a way of life in different modes that Toni Morrison, for example, rejected for herself. Alice Walker's concerns range from election calls to campaigns against female genital mutilation and a vehement protest against Israel's policies in the Middle East. Alice Walker increasingly had esoteric influences. It was a shock to read a good ten years ago that it not only forbade a translation of the “color purple” into Hebrew, but also increasingly agreed with the absurd ideas of the conspiracy theorist and ardent anti-Semite David Icke. Her poem entitled “It Is Our (Frightful) Duty to Study the Talmud,” published on her website in 2017, is, in its crude content and poetic language, a betrayal not only of her emancipatory ideas from the civil rights movement, but also of her literary vision as it appears in a book like “The Color Purple”.
One text does not erase all others. But the Talmud poem and her anti-Semitic statements elsewhere sit like a shadow over this woman's larger, important texts. And yet it remains the case that “The Color Purple” is not only Alice Walker's best-known and most important book to this day, but also a pioneering literary work in the American canon of the last century. With this book, Alice Walker stands on the shoulders of Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes and Maya Angelou and can in turn be considered an ancestor of younger authors such as Jesmyn Ward. She turns eighty this Friday.
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