Word: morrison
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Dates: during 1990-1990
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...wonders of Alice Walker's The Color Purple or Toni Morrison's Beloved or Gloria Naylor's Linden Hills were discovered by myself outside the classroom. And for this reason there was always a huge void in the body of knowledge that was presented through my literature classes. Even here at Harvard the chances of taking a class which deals specifically with the literary experiences of Black Americans from the perspective of a Black woman writer is a rarity at best...
These women intimately acquainted me with areas of my history. Morrison tells the life story of former slave Sethe in her novel Beloved. Through the personal accounts and memories of Sethe, her family and her friends, Morrison made the atrocities of slavery seem real to me; slavery no longer was an institution found cradled in the yellowed pages of a worn history book. I was there when the awful events occurred...
After reading Alice Walker's The Color Purple I could never understand why it would not be included in the numerous required reading lists that I have been given over the years. The Color Purple, like Morrison's Beloved, expertly displays not only the beauty and resiliency of the Black spirit but of the human spirit as well. The main character Celie suffers throughout her life, everything from incest to rape to separation from her sister, but she is able to find the strength to live and give love to others who need...
...that is only because I was committed to doing so. I enrolled in classes that covered women's literature and specifically Black women's literature but it is entirely possible to graduate from this institution with an English degree and not be familiar with the works of Naylor, Morrison or Hurston...
...would like to say that higher education serves to open the minds of its students but I can't. As long as the voices of Black women writers like Morrison, Walker and Hurston fall on deaf ears, the minds of many will remain closed and unapproachable...