Survival, Resistance and Emancipation in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and Sapphire’s Push

Abstract

Black women were destined to face and to struggle against oppression. Oppression was and has always been part of black history and of black women’s history. The Black woman was always exposed to all forms of slavery and abuse. Throughout history, she was subjected to sexual and physical abuse either from the white master or the black man. Hence, black women have repeatedly been marginalized, exploited, abused and dominated. In brief, black women suffered and faced oppression much more than black men, but maybe more, yet they were and are always active to achieve independence and resist their own oppression. If black men were marginalized, then black women were doubly marginalized, yet black women worked to end this double oppression. This study is a comparative one that examines the protagonists’ emancipation process in Alice Walker‘s epistolary novel The Color Purple, and Sapphire’s cult novel Push. Walker and Sapphire did not limit themselves to describing the sufferings of African American women only but suggested to all women a path to follow in order to free themselves from the dominance of patriarchy and sexism. 2-Purpose of the study: The purpose of this study is to critically compare selected texts by African American authors; Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and Sapphire’s Push, which depict the political and social struggles within African American society in the early 1980s and late 1990s. Walker’s and Sapphire’s works present incidents of women life experiences deemed acceptable and unacceptable, behaviorally and ideologically. The thesis argues that celebrating the concept of womanism allows African American women characters in the novels resistance