Content warning: brief descriptions of sexual violence.
Wow… I just finished the recent remake of The Color Purple, and my tear ducts did quite a workout during the course of this movie. I hadn’t seen the Broadway musical The Color Purple, and I had also not seen the older version with Whoopi Goldberg, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. I remember reading the novel by Alice Walker for an African American Studies course in my sophomore year of college, and I remember it being just such a powerful book and so incredibly well-written. I decided to watch the 2023 movie last week, but I didn’t finish it until tonight because I was busy with some work stuff and some other stuff, so I didn’t finish the film until now. I think I just needed to have a good cry, and honestly, I hadn’t ugly cried during a movie since Elemental. I was sad that The Color Purple didn’t win an Oscar for anything, but now that I think about it, I think I put too much stock in what the Academy Award committee thinks about movies. I was excited to watch these awards shows this year, like the Golden Globes, the Grammys, the Screen Actors Guild Awards (I missed the Emmys. Darn!) and the Academy Awards. But while writing this, I had to remind myself that even if the film didn’t get an Oscar, it can still be a really good movie. I keep forgetting that there are plenty of good movies that didn’t get nominated or win Oscars or big-name awards. Art is a subjective experience, and everyone has different tastes with regards to music, literature, and movies, so I need to view the art through my own lens.
The Color Purple is a film that addresses a lot of serious issues, in particular the issue of sexual violence against Black women. Celie lives with her abusive stepfather, Alfonso, who rapes and impregnates Celie. Nettie supports Celie during the course of her pregnancy, and during her time of grief, when Alfonso takes away Celie’s children. A sleazy man named Mister takes interest in Celie, but Alfonso tells him that he can’t have her and that he should have Nettie instead, but Mister insists that he marry Celie and Alfonso lets him marry her. However, Mister is also abusive to Celie and drives Nettie away when she tries to defend Celie against Mister’s abuse. Nettie and Celie lose touch, and it seems that their friendship is over. Nettie has been writing letters to Celie, but Celie isn’t able to read them because Mister steals the letters from her and hides them so that she doesn’t find them. Celie’s life changes when a sexy performer named Shug Avery comes into town, and she is immediately smitten with her. Shug Avery represents freedom, sexuality, empowerment and independence, and she, too, develops feelings for Celie. However, Mister also loves Shug and while he treats Celie like dirt, he treats Shug like royalty, but Shug sees through Mister’s deceiving looks and understands that Mister abuses Celie and finds out that he is hiding Nettie’s letters from Celie, so she digs them up so she can read them. The film shows the power of friendship and sisterhood, especially in the face of trauma and grief, and I broke down in tears during the number where Celie gets to run her own clothing shop because I was just so happy for her after the hell that Mister and Alfonso put her through for so many years.
I really loved Sofia’s character in the film. When we first meet her, she is married to Harpo, Mister’s son, and is expecting a baby. However, she doesn’t let her husband talk down to her or treat her like a servant and has him do the domestic duties around the house. She and Celie become good friends, and she instills confidence in Celie when Celie is so broken-down by Mister’s abuse and doesn’t have anyone else that she can trust or confide in. She sings a song called “Hell No,” which basically tells Celie that she shouldn’t let any man talk down to her or treat her terribly because she deserves so much better. Later in the film, Sofia and Celie are out with her and Sofia’s kids, and this white woman named Miss Millie pulls up in her car and delivers a condescending remark to Sofia about her kids’ skin color (I wouldn’t even call what she said a compliment) and tells Sofia to come work for her as her maid. Sofia tells her to back off and a bunch of white policemen beat her and arrest her. Celie visits Sofia in prison and finds Sofia is no longer her extroverted confident self and that she has been beaten very badly. It was painful to watch this because it reminds me that when Black people have tried to assert their dignity to white authority, they are unfairly punished. It reminded me of this film I saw called Twelve Years a Slave; in the film, Solomon Northup is a free Black man who lives in New York. He has a comfortable life as a violinist and has a wife and two children, and a group of mysterious white men persuade him to join them for dinner. However, they end up drugging his wine, causing him to pass out, and they kidnap him and sell him into slavery. It was painful to watch, but it showed how brutal slavery actually was. When he was in prison, he tried to tell the white guard that he was a free man, but the guard tells him that he isn’t a free man and proceeds to call him a “runaway [n-word]” from Georgia. During the twelve years he is held captive, Solomon endures brutal treatment and the white slaveowners get rid of his legal name and refer to him as “Platt.” The white slaveowners demean and dehumanize the slaves on the plantation, and while they are all cruel people, Master Epps was one of the cruelest. After he gets out of slavery, Solomon comes back to his family, but it’s with a deep and painful heaviness because he went through these really painful experiences, and it really shook his confidence in himself and his life because he went from this environment in New York where he could live confidently as a Black man and feel good about himself to an environment in South where white people made him feel that he didn’t deserve to be treated with respect and dignity.
I love the scene where Celie leaves Mister’s house. It was a powerful scene because up until that point, Celie had put up with so many years of abuse from Mister and her father that she didn’t know what it was like to live freely. I really appreciate the characters of Shug and Sofia because they showed Celie that she didn’t have to take poor treatment from these men in her life and that she had to love and respect herself. Shug also encouraged Celie to embrace her sexuality, and I really loved the number “Push Da Button.” When I read the novel The Color Purple in college, I remember at the time I was struggling with my identity and in particular, my sexual orientation. I started looking up about asexuality, which is a sexual orientation in which one feels little to no sexual attraction towards others, and I started learning more about my reproductive health at the time, too. It was a challenge to embrace my asexuality for many years and it still is, but I’ve learned that it’s just another sexual orientation, it’s an intrinsic part of who I am, and it doesn’t define whether I am capable of a loving relationship or not. My sophomore year of college was, looking back, a time of discovery. I learned so much about myself and I learned to love my body and sexuality, too. There is a scene in the book where Celie masturbates and explores her sexuality after falling in love with Shug, and I remember that part precisely because it resonated with me at the time. Reading the part made me uncomfortable at first, but that’s because I had grown up with the people around me believing that it was taboo or a joke to explore one’s sexuality and body. But I realized at some point that many people go through their own journey of exploration, whether it’s their sexuality, their body or some other part of their life, and over time I learned to not feel ashamed for it. Exploring my body helped me appreciate it because I take it for granted a lot, and I need to become aware of its beauty and its practical functions so that I can take care of it every day. Loving my body is still a work in progress, to be honest, but I am getting better at embracing it.
Shug Avery also reminded me of Ma Rainey in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, which is one of my favorite movies. Like Shug, Ma Rainey is unapologetic and celebrates her sexuality and independence. At the beginning, she is with her girlfriend, and she comes in late to the music studio, leaving the white record executives and her back-up band wondering where she is. When she arrives, she comes with a no-nonsense attitude, and there is one pivotal scene where she demands for the record executives to get her a Coca-Cola since the recording studio is extremely hot. The executives are upset that they have to cater to this Black woman’s needs, but to be honest, I don’t think Ma could have afforded to back down and be a pushover because of the times she was living in. There is a scene where she tells one of her band members that the record executives don’t care about her as a person, and that they just want to make a profit off of her voice. She knew that these white record executives weren’t going to compensate her fairly for her work, so she had to stick up for herself, or else they were going to steal her music, which is what they did to Levy, one of her band members, in the end because he was too eager to impress the white executives with his music. Levy’s fellow bandmates kept telling him that the white record executives didn’t care about him; to them, he was just a Black person and thus not worthy of being treated with respect. But he wanted these white people to respect him, and they ended up ripping off his music by having a white band record the song that he wrote without him getting any credit. During the behind-the-scenes feature after the movie, there is a part where Viola Davis is talking about the characters of Ma Rainey and Levy, and she says that Levy was more impatient and he wanted to become a quick success, and his ego was shaky. But Ma Rainey knew her worth as an artist, and she had spent time working hard at her career. She was focused on doing her job and producing the music that she wanted. She didn’t care about catering to other people’s taste; she tells her bandmate that she loves performing blues music because it makes you feel something deep. I think as a musician, I always have to remind myself why I love music, and I think it’s because music makes me feel things. It conveys human emotions and experiences, both the good ones and the bad ones. Viola Davis says that it is important to know your worth, and I resonated with that. People can rip you off and profit off of your stuff, and not everyone is going to respect you, so it’s important to first and foremost respect yourself. I feel like when you respect and value yourself, it helps you go through the process of creating art in a more authentic way, because you’re doing your best and you’re not focusing all the time on whether people like your music or not. I think this is what I need to do more of. Like Ma Rainey, Shug has a strong sense of self, and so she is able to encourage Celie to love herself and live in an authentic way.
I really love the choreography in The Color Purple. It was so powerful, and the minute the film began I found myself jamming to the music. I can’t imagine how many hours of practice these people had to put into dance. And I love the scene where Celie is reading Nettie’s letter and Nettie is telling her that she went to Africa and they raised Celie’s kids there, and as Nettie is speaking, there is a choreography of dancers from Africa, and the movements and the syncing of these movements was just really beautiful. It reminded me of when I watched this clip of Black dancers performing to “Wade in the Water,” and while watching it I got goosebumps because it was such a moving performance. I felt the dancer’s heart resonate deep within me, and I could feel her passion with every movement of her body, every rhythm and flow. I think that is why watching The Color Purple was such a moving experience because I could feel the heart and soul that the dancers put into this choreography. I had a similar experience watching Beyonce’s video album, Black is King. It was the year many of us were in quarantine, and that summer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd and other Black people were killed at the hands of police. I was confused, pained and frustrated, and I didn’t know how to express my pain at ongoing systemic racism and police brutality. When I watched Black is King, I cried through most of it, and watching it was a sort of healing for me. It reminded me that my people are beautiful, my people are awesome, and like many marginalized groups we have fought so hard to get our humanity recognized. When Beyonce was dancing and singing to “Find Your Way Back,” I just couldn’t stop crying because it was so empowering to see Beyonce and all these Black artists create this art as a way to help people like me, who were grieving the death of George Floyd, a safe space to experience joy, hope, frustration, and beauty. The video album also features a lot of collaborations with African artists, such as Burna Boy. It was a beautiful experience where I saw Black people reclaim and celebrate their heritage and tradition, and after having to watch the killing of George Floyd’s murder on my social media feed so many times, I needed to watch something that sent the message that Blackness was something to be celebrated and embraced rather than feared and hated. It also helped me understand my connections to the African Diaspora because it’s easy for me to only focus on my experience of being Black in America, but Black is King reminded me that Black music in America has deep roots in African musical traditions and those traditions need recognition and celebration. I took an African Popular music class in college, and it was so cool to listen to a variety of different artists from countries such as South Africa, Nigeria and Ghana. I had not listened to many musicians from Africa, other than Angelique Kidjo when she sang “Gimme Shelter” with British artist Joss Stone, so it was an enlightening experience to be in that class listening to and analyzing music by African artists.
The acting in The Color Purple was also phenomenal. Colman Domingo, man, what a talented actor. I have seen him in a few films, and he has such a wide range of acting chops. He was in If Beale Street Could Talk and plays Tish’s dad. He was also in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and plays one of the people in Ma Rainey’s band. He was also in this movie I saw called Zola, where he plays a brutal pimp. I didn’t recognize the actor who played Alfonso at first, but then I looked it up and saw Deon Cole was playing him. His role in this film was a huge contrast to other stuff I have seen him in. He was in the Old Spice commercials, and he was in a show I love called black-ish, where he plays this loveable but also goofy character named Charlie. It was different to see him go from playing this sweet and funny character in blackish to playing this really cruel character. But this reminds me why I love movies and actors so much, because they play a variety of roles and bring a sort of versatility to each role they play. I also really love Taraji P. Henson’s performance, and I hadn’t heard a lot of Fantasia’s music, but I loved her as the older version of Celie. Overall, this is a beautiful and moving film, and I recommend it.
The Color Purple. 2023. Directed by Blitz Bazawule. Rated PG-13 for mature thematic content, sexual content, violence and language.
The Arts Are Life 