Storytelling as Embodied Knowledge: Womanist Praxis in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple

Abstract

Central to womanist thought and mobilizations is the investigation of Black women’s identity formation that is celebratory of Black women’s moral struggles and achievements (Floyd-Thomas 2006a; and King 2004).¹ Toward this end, womanists have adopted and theoretically extended Alice Walker’s four-part definition of womanism in order to gain an appreciation for and offer a positive reassessment of the complex experiences of being Black and female in a racist and patriarchal society. Womanists analyze Black women’s literary texts in order to retrace the fictional characters’ interrogations of the limits of their selfhood as well as their ultimate claiming of a full humanity as a lived praxis of social justice. They additionally portray the events shaping the characters’ lives as manifestations of real-lived instances of oppression and resistance, shadowing, in effect, anonymous or documented historical figures. Following Walker’s own assertion that her characters in The Color Purple wanted to speak through her (Walker 1983, 356), Katie Cannon affirms that the Black female literary tradition “cryptically records the specificity of the Afro-American life” (1996, 60). Cannon also suggests an investigation of Black women’s writings that will help facilitate an “understanding of some of the differences between ethics of life under oppression and established moral approaches that take for granted freedom and a wide range of choices” (Cannon 1996, 60–61).²

[B]lack writers seem always involved in a moral and/or physical struggle, the result of which is expected to be some kind of larger freedom. Perhaps this is because our literary tradition is based on the slave narratives, where escape for the body and freedom for the soul went together.

Alice Walker (1983, 5)