The Color Purple - Alice Walker

"Celie has been raped by the man she calls father; her two children are taken away from her; she has been forced into an ugly marriage. She has no one to talk to but God. Then she meets Shrug Avery, singer and magic woman, and Celie discovers not the pain of female rivalry but the love and support of women."

+  It is an epistolary, confessional novel.
+  It is written in the first person present tense by Celie.
+  Walker uses blunt, violent language and imagery -- Celie writes that her father "kilt [her baby] out there in the woods. Kilt this one too, if he can" -- to show how normalised this kind of behaviour is to Celie.
+  It's set in rural Georgia, America, between 1910 and 1940. The setting is vague and the novel (kind of) divorces itself from its context, with no dates or historical events mentioned and little sense of passage of time, which allows the story to be more accessible.

"Shrug say, Us each other's peoples now, and kiss me."

Walker presents the love between Celie and Shrug as far purer and more caring than the other examples of love and relationships in the novel; it is the only completely positive example of romantic love depicted. Shrug is the only person, other than her sister Nettie, to listen and appreciate Celie -- "you is a wonder to behold" -- and it is Shrug's love which helps Celie to grow as a person.

Shrug encourages her to take control of her own narrative, re-imagining God as an "it" that loves everything instead of a white patriarch "like all the other mens I know" and reinterpreting her sexual history to call herself a "virgin".     

"Us sleep like sisters, me and Shrug."

Celie and Shrug's relationship is at once intimate and sexual, and sisterly and familial, with Walker showing sexuality to be more complex than Celie first thought at the start of the novel.

"Hard not to love Shrug, I say. She know how to love somebody back"

Shrug is the first person, other than Nettie, to love Celie, and in The Color Purple, being loveable is about the ability to love other people. Another example of this is Mr.__ -- once he shows care for the people in his life, they reciprocate.

"They know I love Shrug but they think womens love just by accident, anybody handy likely to do."

Here Walker, through Celie, refutes the idea that homosexual love is somehow lesser than hetrosexual. The love Celie feels for Shrug is more powerful than anything she's known -- when Shrug tells her that she's leaving her for Germaine, Celie says "my heart broke... if words could kill I'd be in the ambulance." The simple language helps emphasise how simple and heartfelt her emotions are.

Walker also writes about unconditional love. Adam, despite his "initial stupid response" to the facial sacrificion ceremony -- "carving their identification as a people into their children's faces", carves "scars identical to Tashi's on his cheeks" to help ease her self-consciousness. Celie and Nettie, after being separated most of their lives, come together with an innate understanding -- "us totter toward one nother like us use to do when us was babies".