Book 95: Inspiration and Finished.

"I think us here to wonder, myself. To wonder. To ask. And that in wondering bout the big things and asking bout the big things, you learn about the little ones, almost by accident. But you never know nothing more about the big things than you start out with. The more I wonder, the more I love."

In a single glance, you wouldn't think I have a lot in common with the character of Celie. She is abused from a very early age, raped by her father, and put through more struggle and strife than most. It isn't her pain that I connected with, but her awakening.

Celie, over a long course of time, learns who she is and how to cope with the things that have happened to her. She learns to accept and understand her past for what it is and to move forward into a much happier future. It takes a long time for Celie to come to terms with the things she has been given.

But she realizes that if she wants things to change, she must change. Rather than accept the life and pain she has always known, she has to push outside of the box she was placed in. She awakens and the transformation is simply amazing. And inspiring.

I was riveted by her courage to leave a life of pain behind to take a chance on something she loved. She didn't settle for what was right there, but took a chance and made something of herself. I admire that kind of courage.

I wish I could do that. I am a lot of talk about the things I want to do and what I wish for. But rarely do I go for it, no matter what happens. I like to be safe and secure. I take what is given to me and accept it. I could stand to take some of Celie's courage and use it to make something of myself. I struggle with this-this want to make something of myself, to make a difference and to inspire. I have goals, dreams, but I never just go for them. I need to. And it took Celie to remind me.

The other character who truly inspired me was Sofia. Sofia is a strong black female character who refuses to bow to the power of the men around her. She refuses to be beaten and put into her place as a female. Her courage had me cheering for her. I loved her spunk and attitude and the way she refused to accept society's role that was given to her.

Many of the female characters in the novel echo those same thoughts. Oppressed by the men around them, some manage to escape and challenge that role. Some don't. Reading about their journeys made me appreciate what I have and how our society has changed a little. But we still have a long, long way to go.

I walked away from this reading of The Color Purple inspired and moved. I remember from my previous reads that this was a powerful novel, but in the place than I am now, I gained far more knowledge about the power of women who stand united and the dark and nasty things that many women have to go through. I didn't remember the scenes from Africa and those were quite the shocker for me on this read.

This is a novel that everyone must read at some point in their lifetime. Not only does it address a variety of social and racial issues (including female-male relationships, homosexuality, abuse, rape, mutilation, incest, class, race, etc, etc), but it does it in a haunting and gripping way. As a reader, you are pulled directly into Celie's pain and her struggles. When she cries, you cry. When she pulls away in that climatic dinner scene, you whoop and jump for joy. And at the end? You feel her utter joy.

To say that it is moving is an understatement. The Color Purple is an experience, and one that will grab hold of you in a way that you have never experienced before. It will change you, it will inspire you, and it will make you want to go for it-whatever "it" may be.

I know that I have a renewed faith in my own goals and the dreams that I have set. I will not doubt myself or tell myself "no." Most of all, I will continue to love those around me and cherish them for what they are.

"Everything want to be loved. Us sing and dance and holler, just trying to be loved."

Thank you Celie.

Book 95: On Rereading...

I first read this as a high school senior. I picked it at random from the AP list my English teacher had given out. I didn’t know what it was about going into it. I think, had I known then, I wouldn’t have chosen it. What I read shocked and scared me. The book was so real, so violent, and in my face. Looking back at it, I’m surprised I finished it. It was nothing like what I expected.

Now, I am reading this from a completely different perspective. I read this again in college for an African-American Literature class and gained a whole other point of view to read it from. I learned to appreciate the subtleties and language, the pain and the suffering.

I’m reading this from the same edition I read in high school. It is full of little comments and insights that make me laugh-not because they’re funny but because they’re pretty shallow. I missed so much depth and complexity in that first read, that I am learning a lot from myself as a reader.

The things that I have underlined or starred are nothing that impact the actual power of the story. I also have way too many things misspelled for my grammar loving heart. But I really love seeing my little "aha!" moments as I read, when I begin to piece things together and jot them down.

This is truly the joy and pleasure in rereading. I seem to be in a little spurt of rereads recently, and they have all shown me how much I have grown. Now I am seeing how Walker really uses language to draw her reader in from the beginning. She is clever and sharp, making me feel Celie's pain as if I was there with her. While I remembered the lingering feeling of pain from my previous rereads, I forgot the beginning.

What makes this such an emotional and powerful story is that Walker brings us directly in to Celie's world. Nothing is sugarcoated. From the beginning, we are hit with raw, ragged pain as we begin to understand what is happening to Celie:

"He never have a kine word to say to me. Just say You gotta do what your mammy wouldn't. ..when that hurt, I cry. He start to choke me, saying You better shut up and git used to it. But I don't never git used to it," (1-2).

See? From the beginning, we are pulled in to the pain that Celie suffers (I did leave a small but out in the middle of that quote). I forgot the beginning and the strong feelings it already invokes.

I wonder what else I will suddenly remember as I continue onward. Already I am jumping ahead in my thought process and remembering bits and pieces, names, people. I am already yearning for that scene that makes me so proud of Celie, but I know I'm not there yet. :) For now I will just continue to soak up and enjoy the mastery of Walker's words and the memories they bring back.


**I'm sorry if the formatting is wonky. I am pre-scheduling these and this was written in word and transferred over. It seems to have messed up a bit, at least from what I can see on my preview screen**

Book 95: The Color Purple and Book Stats.

Title: The Color Purple
Author: Alice Walker (1944- )

First Published: 1982

My Edition: Pocket Books (pictured at right)

Pages: 295

Other Works Include: Meridian (1976), To Hell with Dying (1988), Finding the Green Stone (1991), The Same River Twice (1996) and more...

I have eyed this one on more than one occasion since starting this project. I usually picked it up whenever I saw a review, since it is such a powerful book. I have read it twice before, but not recently, and the time has certainly come. I am looking for one of those powerful, "move me emotionally" kind of titles, and this certainly fits the bill.

Out of curiosity, has anyone read any of Walker's other books? I was looking around for lists of her other published titles and I'll be honest, I hadn't heard of any of them. I also can't recall seeing reviews of any titles, but that might be my brain not remembering. :)

A Classic Interview: Amanda and The Color Purple.

Today is the first post of a new feature I am installing on my blog. Last week I asked if anyone was interested in being interviewed for their own guest post here! I was happy to see that I got a great response and with that in mind, I am hoping to make this a weekly feature here on A Literary Odyssey.

One of my goals that I wanted to accomplish by creating and maintaining this blog was to really learn to relate classic novels and literature to teaching. As an English teacher, it can sometimes be hard to make connections between these "old, outdated" pieces of fiction to the modern teenager.

So I was happy to see that my friend Amanda (who I have known for a few years) jumped on this opportunity to talk about an amazing project she did on The Color Purple. So, without further ado, here is her take on The Color Purple and connecting classics to teens!

Your Name: Amanda

Favorite Book of All Time:

Hmmm... Pride and Prejudice is a big one, although I'm very partial to Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Looking for Alaska by John Green, and Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss.

Tell me a little about where you are in your life (career, school, etc):

Right now I'm a senior, going on super-senior, in college. My major is English Education, and I have a creative writing minor and just recently added on an ESL (English as a Second Language) minor. I student teach next spring, and I'm crazy-excited for it, especially since it'll be a nice break from being a waitress at Perkins.

Do you consider yourself to be an avid reader?

Most definitely. I don't usually have a lot of time during the school year, since reading a novel a week per class is typically the norm then, but during breaks and weeks where I finished the book for class early I love to pick up books my friends or favorite authors suggest to read. I've also discovered the joys of audio books, and since I tend to do a lot of driving I get even more reading done :)

Are you and avid reader of the "classics?"

I'll have to give this one a resounding "sort of." Similar to you, Allie, I'm kind of shocked at how little I had to read the "classics" in high school and college. In high school, I mostly took speech/writing classes, and a couple of drama classes, so I didn't read very much, and in college I had to take the basic survey courses because I have to pass my PRAXIS (teacher certification) exam and it'll cover more than I'll have time to read in the next few years even. However, I do try to read some of the "classics" on my own during those joyous breaks from school. Some of them I haven't gotten to yet, but I try to read at least one "classic" for every couple of non-classics I read.

Sometimes books that are called "classics" get a bad rap, why do you think this might be?

I think a lot of people associate the "classics" with one bad high school English class; they feel that the book will be over their head or that whatever their interpretation of it is, it'll be wrong. I think that sucks, and I wish more people could have the ambition and the time to read "classics" outside of school, because literature is what you make of it, and a lot of people don't get that.

If you could recommend one "classic" novel for everyone to read, what would it be and why?

Probably To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. It was the first "classic" I read on my own, and I think it did a really great job of teaching me without preaching to me. There are tons of others I could recommend, of course, but if I have to pick one, I think that has to be it.

I understand you just finished teaching the novel, The Color Purple to a group of students online. Can you tell me a little bit about what you did?

Well, for one of my English Ed classes this semester, our class of 21 students was split up into groups of 2 (and one group of 3) to teach the novels The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest Gaines, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie, Fallen Angels by Walter Dean Meyers, and The Color Purple by Alice Walker. All of these novels deal with ideas of race, identity and discrimination in some way.

In pairs, each group taught its novel to students we "borrowed" from two very different, but both very impoverished, schools from around the state of Wisconsin. One school was in a mostly white rural town, while the other was a school in inner-city Milwaukee that was mostly African-American. Through our online classroom database called Desire 2 Learn (D2L), the students responded to our weekly questions and follow ups about the novel, as well as had discussions amongst themselves about their lives, their interests, and even about the novel.

This went on for 8 weeks before last Friday when the students came here to our campus to spend the day with us, meet each other face-to-face, and give their final projects on their novels. When they were here, they were grouped with all of the students that had read their book, so there were many different kinds of projects, since there were two different pairs of teachers for each book. It made for a really fun experience.

I just read a bunch of their anonymous feedback forms yesterday, and for the most part their favorite part of the day was eating in our buffet-style dining center, but a lot of these students used to feel as though they wouldn't be welcome in a college atmosphere, or that they weren't capable of going, and most of them seemed to change their minds through the day. They universally loved meeting the students from the other school and learning how much they really had in common, and even the students who didn't do so well on the online discussions really did a great job with the projects and presentations.

My favorite part was seeing the way these students connected our novel, The Color Purple, to their own lives, especially the white students and the boys. When I started this project, I was terrified that my boys wouldn't find anything worth enjoying in this book - the main character is abused by every man she comes into contact with for the first half of the novel, and she's a lesbian. Not a whole lot of good role models for the boys. However, they seemed to still really enjoy the book and I'm incredibly grateful for that.

Had you read The Color Purple before? If so, did this experience change your perspective on the book?
I actually hadn't (which shocked most of my classmates, as I have a really pathetic obsession with the color purple - the literal, physical color), but two of the other ladies teaching the book had, and they said it made a huge difference. They had both kind of hated the book before, but really learned to love it now that they were older, and were looking for interesting parts to teach to our students. I loved it, too, but I didn't have a past experience to compare it to.

I noticed that another group in your class had to teach Fallen Angels, which is more of a contemporary YA kind of book than The Color Purple. Do you think your students benefited more from a teaching of a "classic" in place of something more modern?

Yes and no. Yes because it made it really easy for us as teachers to find resources to help them when they were lost, and also because it was something that had a lot of really timeless themes. However, those many wonderful resources were used to plagiarize a couple of final projects (I just graded those today, it hurt to have to give such low grades to students who did so well on the discussions). Also, I do think Fallen Angels has potential to be a "classic" sometime soon. It's worth noting that these students clearly needed help with the subject - one of the students reading Fallen Angels actually commented that Vietnam was "like the first war we were really in."

What did your students think of the book when they were finished? What were parts that were really significant to them?

We got some mixed reviews at the end of the novel. Almost all of the students said they really enjoyed the book, and that it was much more fun to read than the kinds of novels they usually read in English classes. They were also all really excited about the ending, because they weren't expecting anything happy at all to come from this book right from the beginning. However, a couple of them were still a bit iffy about it. The lesbianism in particular seemed to give a few students a hard time, and they tried to explain it away a bit.
I was surprised by how many of them cited the scene where Celie finally stands up for herself to Mr. ____ as their favorite scene, and the scene near the end where they seem to be like friends as their next favorite. I was really excited about the first, because many of these students have been through harder times than I ever have even, and it's good to know that they won't let themselves get walked all over the way Celie did. However, I was surprised by their happiness over the blossoming friendship, because many of them truly despised Mr. ___ for most of the project. Mind you, many of them truly believed that Celie was a slave, and that her Pa sold her to Mr. ___. That took more than a few weeks to remedy.

When I was teaching English, I was always amazed at the insights my students had about what we were reading compared to what I thought!

It is always pretty amazing. One student mentioned that Celie and Shug started being friends because they had both been with the same man, and that girls tend to band together when they have that kind of shared experience. While I've experienced that firsthand, it didn't cross my mind in the slightest. Sometimes, I think it just helps to step out of our academic, grown up minds and remember what things were like when we were teenagers.

Would you like to teach the novel again to a different group of students (perhaps a group that couldn't relate as well)?

I think it would be really helpful to see how other students react to this novel. I couldn't relate as well as some of my students this time, which was almost weird for me. At the same time, I think it'd be really interesting to see the insights a student who has less in common with the main characters could make. I'm always really impressed with the connections my students make.

Since you're a soon-to-be, if not already educator, what do you think the value is of teaching books like The Color Purple in schools today? Are these "older" titles still relevant?

Oh, incredibly relevant. Like I've said, my students found a ton of connections to their own lives, which helped them to connect with each other as well. It's also helpful to teach this novel, and other "classics," to show students that the pains, the tortures, the insufferable horrors that they've been going through in their adolescence have happened before, happened to all of us, and we all survived - and some survived worse things too. The human condition is something that we need to teach our youth, and nothing more adequately shows us the human condition than the literary classics we teach.

Any last thoughts?
This project taught me a LOT about teaching literature to high schoolers, most importantly that I need to remember not to underestimate them. It also taught me a lot about reading the classics - they can speak to anyone at any age, even after all these years. My students (after they realized that this DIDN'T take place during slavery) learned a lot about themselves and literature from this novel, and I think they really grew as people - and really, what more can a teacher ask for?

Amanda also provided me with a link to the article that was written about this project. If you are interested in learning more about what she and her classmates did, go here to read all the details.

This was a great project and was such a great way to highlight a wonderful book.




If you are interested in being interviewed and having your own guest post on the classic piece of your choice, please e-mail me (my e-mail is on my profile page). I would be happy to have you!