What Is The Color Purple? by Anshika Sharma at Spillwords.com

What Is The Color Purple?

What Is The Color Purple?

written by: Anshika Sharma

 

The sun shone bright today, not unpleasant but a little brighter than usual. I was in the bus on the way to college and was reading a novel but then the bus took a sharp turn and two sun lit blocks fell on my book. The blocks were well-cut, as if tailored to cover those two opened pages. It took me a moment to register what just happened because surprisingly the light from the sun erased every word from those pages. All I could see was two blank pages emitting borrowed light just as the moon does. Following that moonlight when I looked out, I could see the entire landscape had turned white, except a small patch of flowers, blooming more colourful than ever before, amidst a long stretch of field and a girl playfully circling around them. To my surprise, it was Celie, sniffing the flowers and smiling freely in that white field. She seemed happy so I did not give much of a thought to it and simply pulled the book closer to my chest, shut my eyes and fell asleep like a contented cat.

After that when I opened my eyes, I was in my class and The Color Purple lay open on my desk. “It was a dream”, I sighed and went on to read but with a thought inevitably playing in the back of my mind. Why was Celie’s life so horrendous? Why couldn’t she have a life I had as a child? Why those pages talked of her being raped by her father when they should’ve shown her playing in the garden full of flowers?
What Walker showed in the book is reality for many and ghost for the rest of us, let loose to talk straight into our faces so that we, as readers can see the color purple in the fields when we go by and maybe ponder over the beauty of its existence.

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