The pause, after "The Color Purple"

Few movies have touched me the way this one has. And after having seen it again, now that what I consider the most difficult parts of my life have come and gone, the story has taken on a new path. It has--apart from showing me the beauty in its cinematography, its actors' ability to keep everything within the bounds of understatement, its director's sure hand, and its well-written music--triggered different emotions and jump-started new insight. It's probably my age, and the keener sense to redirect perspectives that I have acquired with it, that are the roots of these feelings.

The book is miles more poignant than the film, and when I first read it, I was young, and angry, and in the middle of the quietest desperation I would ever know, against which I struggled without struggling. The analysis I wrote of it in a Contemporary American Literature class in college was a virtual treatise on the oppression of women and the importance of making one's voice heard. I had found an ally in Celie, and with that piece, I had so valiantly meant to champion her and all the women who had ever suffered in the hands of a man; and all the while, the paradox of my inability to champion myself hovered, like a shadow. The one thing I could do, back then, was to scribble passages from the book that had driven wherever home was for me, during those times.

Needless to say, I attacked the book with a vengeance, and cried my eyes sore when I first watched the movie. This morning, despite familiarity with the ins and outs of the narrative, and knowing exactly how it was going to end, I still cried, but for reasons entirely different from the ones that had so made me sniffle, the first time I saw it.

After all, it was Celie's constant reminder to herself to "just keep breathing," that had helped me through some of my darkest hours, and her heartfelt exclamation of gratitude, "I'm here, I'm here!" that reminds me of the many things I should be, and am, thankful for.