don't tell: imposed silences in the color purple and the woman warrior

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"Don't Tell": Imposed Silences in The Color Purple and The Woman WarriorAuthor(s): King-Kok CheungSource: PMLA, Vol. 103, No. 2 (Mar., 1988), pp. 162-174Published by: Modern Language AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/462432.Accessed: 06/06/2011 22:02

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KING-KOKCHEUNG

"Don'tTell":ImposedSilencesn TheColorPurple ndTheWomanWarriorOTH ALICE Walker's Color Purple andMaxine Hong Kingston's Woman Warrioropen with parentalwarningsagainstspeech.Celie's stepfather threatens,"You better not nevertell nobody but God. It'd kill your mammy" (11).Maxine's mother admonishes her daughter, "Youmust not tell anyone . . . what I am about to tellyou" (3). Despite these explicit prohibitions, boththe black and the Chinese American protagonistsproceedto tell all-on paper.Their needs for self-expression are obvious: they hang onto sanity bywriting; they defend themselves with words; theydiscovertheir potential-sound themselves out-through articulation.Less obvious are the ways in which Walker andKingstonconverttheircharacters' ocioculturaldis-abilitiesinto felicities. Celie (an unschooled black)and Maxine (a Chinese American struggling tolearnEnglish)must overcomeforbiddingsexual,ra-cial, and linguistic barriers.They work their wayfromspeechlessness o eloquencenot only bycover-

ing the historical stages women writers havetraveled-from suffering patriarchy, to rebellingagainst its conventions, to creating their ownethos1-but also by developinga style that emergesfrom theirrespectivecultures. Inthe course of theirodysseys, the destructive weapon of tradition isturned into a creative implement, and speech im-pediment becomes literaryinvention.The heroines'inventivenessreflectsthe resource-fulness of theircreators,who arepoliticallyandaes-thetically concerned with conveying ethnic andfemale sensibilities. Like so many other Americanwriterstoday, Walkerand Kingston must grapplewith a language and a literarytradition that havelong excluded their kind. But the two minoritywriters must also choose to write either in the"dominant" mode or in a mode that reflects theirown multicultural legacies. Though both authorshavemasteredstandardEnglish,neitherclaimsit asher first language, and it is far removed from thespeech of the people they write about. Their com-mon quest, therefore,is to seek waysto transplanttheir native dialects to their texts, even if they riskbeing occasionally unintelligible to the reading

majority (see Dasenbrock'sdefense of "unintelligi-bility" in multiculturaltexts). The stakes arehigh,however.For both authors, reclaimingthe mothertongue is much more than reproducinga dialect ormarshalinga newvocabulary;it is also bringingtolife a rich oral tradition in which women have ac-tively participated. And if we agree with WernerSollors that "[e]thnicityas a tenuous ancestryandthe interplayof differentancestriesmaybe the mostcrucialaspectof the Americannational character"("Literature" 648),2 these authors have instatedthemselves in the American tradition by hittingupon a syncreticidiom at once inherited and self-made. In The Color Purple and The WomanWar-rior alike,breakingsilence, acknowledging femaleinfluence, and preserving cultural and nationalcharacteristicsare a coordinated art.These "speak-ing texts" expose the layers of silence that havethreatened to choke the colored protagonists andraisethe voices thathave run the gamut (andgaunt-let) of interethnicdifferences.

Since the particularagony and exceptional prog-ress of the protagonists are inseparablefrom theirgender and ethnic backgrounds-for WalkerandKingston equally-the knotty problems of distin-guishing between authorsand protagonists and ofdrawing cross-cultural comparisons must be ad-dressed at the outset. For a critic interestedin ex-amining the linguistic struggles of the black andChinese American heroines,it is particularlydiffi-cult to adhereto the texts without referringto theblack and Chinese American authors. The dangerlies in foreshorteningthe artisticdistances in theseworksor,worse, n seeingthe narrativesas represen-tative of the minority groups depicted. Becausesome white reviewersreat the two books as thoughthey were definitive descriptions of minority ex-periences, several black and Chinese Americancriticsnot only lash out at these reviewers or theirpresumptionbut also blame the writers fordistort-ing the facts about their respectiveethnic groups.3Walkerand Kingston do drawheavilyon their cul-tures, but they are not culturalhistorians, nor arethey committed to a purelyrealistic fictional form.On the contrary, heyare feministwriterswho seek

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King-Kok Cheungto "re-vision"history (to borrow Adrienne Rich'sword). If they are to be nurturedby their culturalinheritance ratherthan smotheredby it, they mustlearn to reshaperecalcitrantmythsglorifying patri-archal values. Blinkeringthe authors by historicalor ethnographiccriteriadenies their freedom as art-ists to mingle history and myth, fact and fiction.4Todistinguisheach fictive "I" from the writer,andto avoid confusing the re-presentationof a partic-ularexperiencewith anthropology, I will focus myliterary analysis primarily on the protagonists-Celie and Maxine-but refer to the authors whenI wish to call attention to their artistry.Similarconsiderations underliemy reluctance oextrapolate general cross-cultural comparisonsbased on the texts alone. Although informed byhistorical and social factors, the narratives do notnecessarily illuminate the cultures at large. Aswomen, both Celie and Maxine have been debasedin their families. Celie is abused by her stepfatherand her husbandalike,and Maxine suffers fromtheantifemaleprejudicerootedin herparents'Chinesepast. But to conclude from readingthe two booksthat black men and Chinese people aremisogynis-tic is to stereotype these groups invidiously.5I amaware, however, that sexism in the two culturesdraws on differentroots; that black silences, deep-ened by the history of slavery,are not the same asChinese American silences, which werereinforcedby anti-Asian immigration laws. Celie's repressionis much more violentand brutalthan Maxine's,andher resources are at the beginning much morelimited. Celie expressesherself tentatively at firstbecause she lacks schooling; it is in school thatMaxine becomes totally incommunicative(becauseshe has to learn asecondlanguage).Butsuch differ-ences are not my main concerns. Despite theheroines' disparateculturalexperiences,their psy-chological imperativeto expressionis kindred.Myintent is to trace the striking parallels in the pro-tagonists' struggles and in the authors' narrativestrategies.Gender and ethnicity-inhibitive forceswhen these texts open-eventually become thesources of personal and stylistic strengths.

IWomen authors and feminist critics have been

unusually vocal on the theme of silence-as an ar-tistic tool (Gubar,Sontag), as imposed invisibility(Griffin), and as the reticence enjoined uponwomen and feltmost acutely bywriters(see Gilbert

and Gubar; Olsen; Rich; and Russ). Silence runsevendeeperin the work of minority women. PaulaGunn Allen observes that persons caught betweenculturesare most likely to be "inarticulate,almostparalyzedin their inability to direct their energiestowardresolvingwhat seemsto them insoluble con-flict" (135). Carolyn Heilbrun describesminoritywomen as "outsiders twice over" (37), excludedboth from the mainstream and from the ethniccenters of power.Some of these women are,more-over, thrice muted, on account of sexism, racism,and a "tonguelessness" that results from prohibi-tions or language barriers.The three constraintsareoften interrelated.BothThe Color Purple and The Woman Warriorbeginwith womenwho arepunishedby not beingallowedto speakor to be spokenabout. In both, it is not themale offender butthe femalevictim who suffers thepenalty for an illicit affair: he sentences her to holdher tongue. These tales are timeless variations onthe Philomela myth, in which the tongue of therapedwoman is cut off: victimization incursvoice-lessness.6Celie and later her sister Nettie are vio-lently coerced by their aggressors.Alphonso, whoCelie thinks is her father but who is actually herstepfather,forbids her to speak about his repeatedsexual assaults. Albert, Celie's husband, preventsthe two sistersfrom correspondingafter Nettie hasrejectedhis lustful advances.Nettie writes to Celie,"He said because of what I'd done I'd never hearfrom you again, and you would never hear fromme" (119).The threatprovesreal.By hidingNettie'sletters from Celie, Albert metes out the samepunishmentto Nettie that Alphonso does to Celie:the denial of communication.Silence also entombs the no-name aunt in TheWomanWarrior,who commits suicide aftergivingbirth to an illegitimatechild. Maxine speculatesonwhatmighthavehappenedto her aunt:"Some manhad commanded her to lie with him and be his se-cret evil. . . . His demand must have surprised,then terrified her. She obeyed him; she always didas she was told" (7). Maxine muses on her aunt'spredicament: "The other man was not, after all,much different fromher husband. They both gaveorders: she followed. 'If you tell your family, I'llbeatyou. I'll killyou"' (8). The auntobeys,submit-tingwithoutprotest.She can neither alkherself outof rapenor declareher innocenceafterward.Whenshe gets pregnant, she is harassedby villagers andrepudiatedby her own family,even afterher death.Maxine also has a living aunt, Moon Orchid,

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Imposed Silences in The Color Purple and The Woman Warriorwho has traveled from China to look for her hus-bandin America, only to discoverthat he has takena new wife. The husband snaps, "Whatareyou do-ing here?" Moon Orchid can only "open and shuther mouth without any words coming out" (176).The unfaithful husband, not the wronged wife,flashes anger:"He looked directlyat Moon Orchidthe waythe savageslooked. . . . She shrank fromhis stare; it silenced her crying" (177).Both the "guilty" and the innocent aunt arehushed. Maxine'sfamilytries to eraseall knowledgeof the dead woman, to carryon "asif she had neverbeen born" (3). Toexpungehername, to delete thememory of her life, is perhapsthe cruelestrepudi-ation her kin could devise.7 No less cruel is thesilencingof the living.Staredand scared nto silenceby herhusband,Moon Orchid soon goes mad. Herniece later drawsa connection betweenspeechless-ness and insanity: "I thought talking and not talk-ingmade the differencebetweensanityandinsanity.Insane people werethe ones who couldn't explainthemselves" (216).

Associating voicelessness withvictimizationandmadness, young Maxine recognizesthe exigencyofexpression, but the brutaland domineering aspectof speech gives herpause. In a hauntingtravestyofher aunts' stories, she tries to scold and pinch aquiet Chinese American girl into speech. "If youdon't talk, you can't have a personality. . . . Talk,please talk," Maxine cries. Yetin the same breathshe enforces silence: "Don't you dare tell anyoneI've beenbad to you" (210).Her frustrationwiththemute girl reflectsher own anxiety:Maxine is afraidof losing her identity, of being erased orunhinged-as her two aunts havebeen respectivelyerasedand unhinged-through silence.At the sametime, she cannot help linking utterance and coer-cion. Her protracted illness after the incidentreflects her guilt and misgivings about verbalauthority(and herpsychosomaticattemptto evadethe conflict). She views her aggressiveact as "theworstthing I had yetdone to anotherperson"(210).Not only sexist but racist repression can gag aperson.Askedcondescendingly bythe mayor'swifeto work as her maid, Sofia, the outspoken wife ofCelie'sstepson, answers:"Hellno" (86). The mayorthen slaps Sofia, who counters his blow by knock-ing him down. She is consequently jailed and tor-tured. Celie relates, "They crack her skull, theycrackherribs.Theytearhernose loose on one side.They blind her in one eye. She swole from head tofoot. Her tongue the size of my arm, it stick out

tweenher teef like apieceof rubber.She can't talk"(87; my emphasis). The black woman who darestoreturn insult and exchange blows is imprisoned,brutalized, and muted. The impudent tongue isbludgeoned-to seal her mouth.Discrimination also thickens the silencein Max-ine's family,whose predispositionto secrecy s rein-forced by anti-Asian immigration policies (Kim200). Maxinewrites,"Therewere secretsnever o besaid . . . immigration secrets whose telling couldget us sent back to China." Even though she andhersiblingsarehardlyprivyto thesesecrets, heyarecautioned against confiding in outsiders. "Don'ttell," the parents repeatedly admonish (213-14);Maxinecomments, "[W]ecouldn't tell if wewantedto because wedidn'tknow"(213).The adultsworryso much about deportation that they bid their off-spring to withhold information withheld.Silenced at home, Maxine also fails to raise hervoice at work. Herboss at an art-supplystore takespride in having coined the phrase "niggeryellow"to describea paint color. When she tries to gainsayhim, she cannot make herself heard: "'I don't likethat word,' I had to say in my bad, small-person'svoice that makes no impact.The boss neverdeignedto answer"(57). She is also disregardedby an em-ployer at a land developers' association, whochooses to host a company banquet in a restaurantpicketed by CORE and the NAACP. Maxine againmakes a feeble protest: "'I refuse to type these in-vitations,' I whispered, voice unreliable"(57-58).The minority protester is shown the door; her"small-person's oice,"already"unreliable,"s sentout of earshot and becomes wholly inaudible.

Notwithstanding Celie's quiet resignation andMaxine's impotent rage, the mayor's wife, themayor, the police, and the bigoted bosses are allcaught red-handed in the texts. The unspoken orunheard testimoniesbecome powerfulindictmentson the page, and it is throughthe written word thatCelie and Maxinegivevoice to theirgrievancesandeventuallyfind redress.At the beginning, however,composition is less a retaliatorytactic than an actof survival.

Constantly flustered,Celie and Maxine resort towriting as a way to escape mental contortions andassuage loneliness and pain. The morethey areor-deredto keep quiet,the moreirrepressibleheirurgeto cryout, if only on paper.RapedandimpregnatedbyAlphonso, Celiewrites to God, "Maybeyou cangive me a sign letting me know what is happeningto me" (11).Nettie, much later, recalls, "I remem-

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King-Kok Cheungber one time you said your life made you feel soashamed you couldn't even talk about it to God,you had to write it, bad as you thought your writ-ing was" (122). Without the unburdening thatcomes with expression, the traumatic experienceCelie has undergonewould drive her mad. She sur-vivesbyunspoken prayer: he writesto God to sharethe burden of knowing that her fathergot her withchild twice and sold her babies, that her husbandchose her the wayhe chose herdowrycow, andthatherstepson splitherheadopen with a rock.Shesur-vives by thinking, "long as I can spell G-o-d I gotsomebody along" (26; emphasis added). The wordspell nicelyconnotes the almost magicalhealingef-fect of words. Nettie experiencesthis effect as well.She tells Celie, "[W]hen I don't write to you I feelas bad as I do when I don't pray,locked up in my-self and choking on my own heart. I am so lonely. . " (122).An older and wiser Celie, who has freedherselffrom domestic violence and the shame of incest,again expressesher unspeakablesorrowin writing.Shug, her friend and lover,has become infatuatedwith a boy of nineteen and, "dying to tell some-body," describes him at length to Celie, her usualconfidante. Celie remainstight-lipped throughoutthis ordeal. "I prayto die," she writes, "just so Idon't never have to speak." She finally scribblesShuga note: "Itsaid, Shutup" (220).Thispoignantexchangeharks back to the period when Celie wastoo dumbfoundedto talk to anyoneand when writ-ing was her last resort. Hernote, to be sure, is alsoa cleverway to go from mute acceptance to verbalcommand (as exemplified by her stepfather). Butfar from exerting despotic authority, the messageconveys the heartbreak of one too distraught tospeak.LikeCelie,Maxine must write herwayout of tan-gles. As a daughter of Chinese immigrants, she istossed between theirantifemale prejudiceand herpersonalambition, between theirChinesepast andher American present: "Those of us in the firstAmerican generations have had to figure out howthe invisible world the emigrantsbuilt around ourchildhoods fit in solid America." The emigrantsconfuse their offspring, who are "alwaystrying toget things straight, always trying to name the un-speakable" (6; myemphasis). The greaterthe con-fusion, the strongerthe need to name, and therebyto understand. Maxine tries to achievesome orderin her life by writingdown and sorting out herpar-ents' jumble of totems and taboos. Even after she

has left home, when life has become less of a mud-dle for her, she has to keep speaking her mind tosoothe her "throatpain" (239).Celie and Maxine feel the spell of verbalpowerat an early age, but it takes time for them to learnto fight and create with words.In the process, theyuse words to describe wordlessness;writing is notthe chosen but the desperatealternativeto speech.II

The difficulty of speaking is compounded forCelie by prohibition and for Maxine by a secondlanguage. Alphonso has used just about everymeans to silence Celie, short of cutting out hertongue: intimidation, deprivation, and false accu-sation. At her cry during his first rape he snaps,"Youbetter shut up and git used to it" (11).He en-sures Celie's submissionbydeprivingher of school-ing: "You too dumb to keep going to school, Pasay" (19). Though the adjectiveaccuratelydescribesherreticenceat the time, Celie is not "dumb"men-tally, as Nettie reassures her. Not content withhisdual attempt to stifle Celie, Alphonso (in his needto keephis sexual assault a secret)makes surethateven the little she speaks will be doubted. He tellsAlbert, who is about to marryher, "She tell lies"(18).Preventedboth fromspeakingand frombeingbelieved, Celie accepts domestic violence withouta whimper throughout the early part of her life.Told repeatedly that she is ugly and stupid, shehardly knows better. With little education or en-couragement,she canexpressherselfonly haltingly.Maxine's voice also faltersinitially.Just as Celieis judged "dumb" by her stepfather, so Maxine(who has to learn English among native speakers)is considered retarded by her American schoolteachers. Unable to express herself in class, inspeech or on paper,she "flunkedkindergartenandin the firstgradehad no IQ-a zero IQ" (212). Sherelatesin haunting detail the curse that hangs overher:Mysilencewasthickest-total-during the threeyearsthat I coveredmyschoolpaintingswith blackpaint.Ipainted ayers f blackoverhousesandflowers ndsuns,andwhen drew n theblackboard,putalayer f chalkontop.Iwasmakinga stagecurtain, nd t was he mo-mentbefore hecurtain arted r rose. .. I spreadthepictures]out (so black and full of possibilities)andpretendedhecurtainswere winging pen, lyingup,oneafteranother, unlightunderneath,mightyoperas.(192)

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Imposed Silences in The Color Purple and The Woman WarriorUnlikeCelie, young Maxine is acutely awareof thediscrepancybetweenherexternalsilence and her in-nerpossibility. She does not simply paint layersofblack; she paints them "over houses and flowersand suns." To call the layerof chalk "a stage cur-tain"impliesthat it will one dayrise.But only Max-ine herself knows what is behind the curtain. Thepoignancy of the passage lies not so much in thefact of silence as in the tension between layersofblack andthe concealedsunlight,betweenthe thickcurtain and the resounding operas. The sense ofimagination being buried alive-shrouded inblack-is suffocating.To facilitate the painful process of breaking si-lence, Celie and Maxine commune with imaginarybeings-Celie with God, Maxine with a legendarywarrior.Yet heseheuristicfiguresalso manifest thevery masculine attributes that have restrictedtheprotagonists' self-expression. The problem withGod is that he neveranswersCelie's letters. Worsestill, trust in him leads herto acceptthe statusquo:"This life soon be over," she reassures herself."Heaven asts allways"(47). Worstof all, she iden-tifies him with the oppressive father, as suggestedbyherresponsewhen hermother demands to knowwhat happened to Celie's newborn baby (Al-phonso's child): "I say God took it. He took it. Hetook it while I was sleeping. Kilt it out there in thewoods" (12). In context "He" refers to Alphonso,but grammatically the pronoun refers to itsantecedent-God. Male. In Celie's subconsciousmind the almighty God merges with the all-powerful earthly father.Shug laterarguesthat thetraditional divine image does indeed epitomizemale dominance: "Man corrupt everything . .He on your box of grits, in your head, and all overthe radio. He try to makeyou think he everywhere.Soon as you think he everywhere, you think heGod" (179).ForCelie, who has been tyrannized byone man after another, God is a wrathful being:"He threatenlightening, floods and earthquakes"(179).Though writingto God is heronly emotionaloutlet at the beginning, she writes with restraint.When she turns from a divine to a humanaudience-from God to Nettie-her lettersbecomelonger, more exuberant, and more dramatic.Maxine has, right from the start, a much morecongenial tutelary genius-Fa Mu Lan, the legen-dary woman warrior.For someone besieged by si-lence, self-expression is a heroic act, an offensivewith verbalartillery.In her fantasy Maxine mergeswith the warrior,who must trainrigorouslyand en-

dureharshdisciplinebeforewieldinga sword n bat-tle. In her real ifeMaxine has to takespeechtherapyand workthrough "layersof black" before shecancontrol the voice and the pen that are herweapons.Her apprenticeship as a writer is strenuous, herachievement remarkable. (Her status progressesfrom retardedpupil to "straightA" student and fi-nally to writer.)Whilethe warrior egendopens Maxineto an un-conventional wayof assertingherself-both fight-ing and writing being traditionally malepreoccupations-it still sanctions patriarchalvalues. As with the female writerwho must assumea male pseudonymto be takenseriously, he womanwarriorcan exerciseherpower only when she is dis-guised as a man; regaining her true identity shemust once more be subservient, kowtowing to herparents-in-lawand resumingherson-bearingfunc-tion. "Now my publicdutiesarefinished,"she saysto them. "I will staywith you, doing farmworkandhousework, and giving you more sons" (53-54).Her military distinction itself attests to the sover-eignty of patriarchalmores, which prizethe abilityto be ruthless andviolent-to fight like a man. Try-ing to conform to both the feminine and the mas-culine ideals of her society, Maxine as warrior iscaught in a double bind.It is disturbing,though understandable, hat thefigures to whom Celie and Maxine first turn forhelp and inspiration hark back to those who sub-jugate them in real life. Celie'sGod, likeAlphonsoand Albert, demands submission and threatenspunishment. Maxine's heroine desires only maleprogeny and distinguishes herself by excelling inmanly exploits. Internalizing the communaldenigrationof women,the protagonistsbeginbyas-sumingthat only "manthropomorphic"beingscanoffer guidance, inspiration, and salvation.

IIIBut both Celieand Maxineovercometheirinitial

dependence on imaginary beings. They come tocommand full articulation andattainpositiveiden-tities as women through the influence of actual fe-male figures: for Maxine these are the no-nameaunt and BraveOrchid(Maxine'smother);for Celiethey are Sofia, Shug, and Nettie. Subdued aswomen, Maxine and Celie gather strength througha female network.Maxine speculates about the aunt she is forbid-den to mention and attemptsto conjurethe circum-

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King-Kok Cheungstances that could have resultedin an affair. In oneimaginaryversion the aunt is not a rapevictim buta seducer. As a rebel-a breaker of conventions-she is Maxine's "forerunner"(9). Maxine writes,"Unless I see her lifebranching nto mine, she givesme no ancestralhelp" (10).The aunt is punishedforproducingan illegitimatechild, for having"crossedboundaries not delineatedby space" (8). In "nam-ingthe unspeakable"-presenting the prodigalauntin the first chapter-Maxine at once sanctions theno-name woman's nonconformity and announcesher own ambition. By inventing a seditious story,she too engages in forbidden creativity.Maxine's mother, Brave Orchid, who at firstseems an accomplice in enforcingfemale silence, isyeta "champion alker" 237). (Herbehavior s con-sistently contradictory.)She enjoins Maxine not tomention the no-name aunt: "Yourfather does notwant to hear her name" (18). Yet she herself dis-obeysthe husbandby tellingherdaughterthe story.She predicts that Maxine will grow up to join thecompanyof wives andslaves,yetshe teaches her thesong of the woman warrior,Fa Mu Lan, who excelsin an arena traditionally closed to women.8 BraveOrchid herselfhad defied traditionby working in-dependently as a doctor in China-an unusual ca-reerfor Chinese women at the time.

As a child, Maxine resents her mother's confla-tion of fact and fancy, insufficiently awarehow theeloquent and valiant BraveOrchid is inspiringher;as a writer,she herself resorts to this conflation asa narrativetechnique. She puts Chinese notions inAmerican idioms, but she derives both the raw ma-terial and the strategy for her art from thematrilineal radition of oralstorytelling:"Isaw thatI too had been in the presenceof great power, mymother talking story" (24).Celie does not encounter any extraordinarywomen until well into her adulthood. Her firstglimpse of a female existence beyond that of bat-tered wife or slave isthroughSofia, the big and out-spoken wife of her stepson Harpo. Celie puts herhopes in an afterlife, but Sofia sees things differ-ently: "Youought to bash Mr. head open.. . . Think about heaven later" (47). Sothoroughly has Celie internalized the tenets of fe-male subordinationand so envious is she of Sofia'sstrength against Harpo, however, hat she counselsher stepson to beat his wife into compliance. Con-frontedby Sofia, Celie confesses herjealousy. Dis-armedby the confession, Sofia tells Celie: "Allmylife I had to fight." "I lovesHarpo," she continues,

"But I'll kill him dead before I let him beat me"(46). Sofia is a black womanwarrior;heraggressionis her means to preventothers fromsubjugatingher.Her defiance in the face of brutal treatmentpro-vides Celie a model of resistanceagainstsexualandracial oppression.Celie's transformation is furtheredby Shug Av-ery,a sexyand snappyblues singer.Just as Maxinespeaksup for heradulterousaunt, so Celie defendsShug, another allegedly "loose" woman. Maxinerebels against her mother's moral (that a womanmust subordinate herself to her society, must con-form to its patriarchalcodes); Celie questions thevalues of her conservative community. The localpreachercasts aspersions on Shug: "He talk bouta strumpet in short skirts . . . slut, hussy, heiferand streetcleaner"48-49). In retelling he episode,Celie alters the moral perspective:"Streetcleaner.Somebody got to stand up for Shug, I think" (49).She does not relaythe moral-that God scourgesthe wicked-but presentsthe preacher'ssermon asan unfair accusation.

Like Maxine, Celie gains strength from thewoman she tries to vindicate. Shelearns a new lan-guage from her female idol. Shug, singer of sweetsongs, also has a "mouth just pack with claws"(53):her vocalorganhas built-inweapons.Celie re-lates how, when Albert tries to make advances toShug, she snaps at him: "Turn oose my goddamhand . . . I don't need no weak little boy ..."(51). Noting and recording Shug's brazentongue,Celieeventuallyappropriatest;shewillone daycallher abusive husband "a lowdown dog" to his face(170).But it is Nettie who, by disclosing the arbitrari-ness of social conventions and the bias of certainorthodox religious teaching, finallyconfirms whatCelie has learned from Sofia andShug. Describingthe life of the Olinkapeoples, Nettie writes to Celiethat these peoples have a different version of theAdamic myth, that to them Adam was not the firstman but the "first man that was white" (i.e., "na-ked"in the Olinkadialect),that Adam and Eve weredriven out not byGod but by blacks (239-40). TheOlinkamythinverts he racialhegemonyinAmericain the same way that the Chinese myth of thewoman warriorpartiallysubvertssexualhierarchy.To be sure,Nettie herself is an "object of pity andcontempt" to the Olinka, whose women are"looked after" by men (149). But Nettie's accountof another world with a different setof rules,alongwith hersingular example,makes Celie all the more

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Imposed Silences in The Color Purple and The Woman Warriorconvincedthat, like Sofia and Shug, she must holdher own: "our own self is what us have to hand"(238).

Writing about Sofia, Shug, and Nettie allowsCelie to reliveand rehearse theirspeech or action,therebycomposing a new self. Theyare to her whatFa Mu Lan, BraveOrchid, and the no-name auntareto Maxine: feministmodels daringto assert au-tonomy, challenge patriarchy,and shed femininedecorum. These women (notably Shug and BraveOrchid)also teach Celie and Maxine how to speakand write. By stressingthe formative influence ofthese figures,Walkerand Kingstoninsist on givingwomen their due; their protagonists drawliterarystrengths ess from the books of men than from thetongues of women.9 (Nettie, who does adhere toconventional diction, is the exception that provesthe rule; her prose pales beside Celie's.)

IVInspirited by female figures, Celie and Maxinetransform themselves from victims to victors by

throwing angrywords back at their volubleoppres-sors. But just as their earlierdependence on mas-culine idols keptthem in thrall,theirappropriationof patriarchalrhetoric and codes of behavior couldbind ratherthan liberate them. The two women gobeyond the violent behavior and abusivelanguageof the tyrantto becometrulythemselves; heirmur-derous impulses give way to artistic acts.Bid to be quiet, Celie yet bearsthe brunt of brut-ish remarks.Both stepfather and husband showerindignities on her. Alphonso tells her that she is"evilan alwaysup to no good" (13). Albert taunts,"Youugly. You skinny. You shape funny. Youtooscared to open your mouth to people. .... Youblack, you pore . .. you a woman. Goddam .you nothing at all" (186-87). While in the past shewould have absorbed suchinvectives,a transformedCelie now retorts, "I'm pore, I'm black, I may beugly.. . . But I'm here"(187). She affirms her ex-istence against her husband'salleged "nothing"bydeflecting the man's abuse, turning his viciouswords into a curse against him:

Whoever eard f suchathing, ayMr. . Iprob-ablydidn'twhupyourassenough.Every ickyou hit meyouwillsuffertwice..Shit,hesay. shouldhave ockyouup.Just etyououtto work.

Thejail you planforme is the one in whichyouwillrot, I say. (187)Earliershe had turneda preacher'ssermon into anaccusation. Now her husband'sscathingwords endammunitionto her curse.Her curseis, moreover, opotent that Mr. soon wilts in his own house.Celie herself now has a "mouth just pack withclaws": speech and act are one.10Celiespeakswitha vengeance.Shesaysto Albert,"Youbetterstop talking because all I'mtellingyouain't coming just from me. Look like when I openmy mouth the air rush in and shape words" (187).The tablesare turned:the woman now tells the manto pipedown. The senseof release spalpable n thissecularparodyof "speakingwithtongues." Openlyenjoyingthe freedom of back talk for the firsttime,Celie expressesherselfwith so much gusto that shefeels inspired by forces outside herself. Herwords,long dammedup byherdomineeringhusband,nowflow in torrents.Maxine also grows up amidst sexistgibes. She istold repeatedly by her parents and relatives:"There'sno profit in raising girls. Better to raisegeesethan girls" (54). When hermotheryells, "Badgirl " (54), Maxine screamsback, "I am not a badgirl," adding, "I might as well have said, 'I'm nota girl'" (55). Yether protests fall on deaf ears, forherparents'culturedisapprovesof freespeech, es-pecially in women: "The Chinese say 'a readytongue is an evil"' (190). Worsestill, the Chineselanguage itself propagatessexism: "There s a Chi-nese word for the female I-which is 'slave.'Breakthe women with their own tongues " (56).1Yet from this very language Maxine finds themeans to articulate and redresshergrievances.Shediscovers that the Chinese idiom for revengeliter-ally means to "report a crime" (63); to report-witness and record-the injusticesdone to her as aChinese American woman eventuallybecomes herway of fighting back, of being a warrior. In herimaginarybattle with the wicked baron-a warbe-tween the sexes-Maxine parrieswordswith words:

". . .Who areyou?" [thebaronasked.]"I ama femaleavenger."Then-heavenhelphim-he tried o becharming,oappealto me manto man. "Oh,come now.Everyonetakes hegirlswhenhe can. Thefamiliesaregladto beridof them. 'Girlsaremaggots n therice.' It is moreprofitableo raisegeese handaughters."'Hequoted ome the sayings I hated . ...

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King-Kok Cheung"You've onethis,"I said,andrippedoff myshirt oshow him my back. .... I slashed him across the faceandon the secondstrokecutoff hishead. (51-52)

The warrior'sback carries a text of scars, listinggrievances hat counter the baron's sexistlanguage.The battle is as much a verbal match as a physicalone.

Celie and Maxine speak and act aggressivelytoovercome domination and inhibition, but they alsolearn to channel anger into creativity.On discover-ing that Albert has for years nterceptedNettie's let-ters, Celie feels a compulsive urge to slit histhroat-with his razor.Shug talks her into sewinginstead, into holding a "needle and not a razor"(137). The violent behavior that Celie had thoughtnecessary to get even with Albert gives way to ar-tisanship. Sublimating righteous rage with a cre-ative act, she developsa talent for designingunisexpants. Offering comfort to men and women alike,they emancipate the wearers from their gender-specific roles. By the end the blade has fully cededto the needle-Celie is teaching a reformed Alberthow to sew.In Maxine's fantasy the blade the parentsuse tocarve words on the warrior'sback is both injuriousand empowering.HereKingston adroitlymeldstwoChinese legends, grafting the story of Yue Fei, amale general in the Sung Dynasty, onto that of FaMu Lan. In the Chinese sources, it is the male war-rior whose back is tattooed: before he left for bat-tle his mothercarveda motto on his back,enjoininghim to be loyal to his country-China. If by trans-ferringthis ordeal to the woman warriorKingstonis literalizingthe painful truth of woman as text, asGubar believes(251), she is also subversivelyclaim-ing herrightto recyclemythsand transposegender,her right to authorship. In reshapingher ancestralpast to fit herAmerican present,moreover,Kings-ton is asserting an identity that is neither Chinesenor white American, but distinctively ChineseAmerican.'2 Above all, her departures from theChineselegendsshift the focus fromphysicalprow-ess to verbalinjuriesand textual power.In the YueFei legend, only four ideographs arecarved;otherthan being a patriotic reminder,they have no ef-ficacy.In Maxine'sfantasy,the words,arranged"inred and black files, like an army,"fortify the war-rior (42).Yet for all we know, this dorsal scriptmirrors hesexist remarks Maxineputs into the wicked baron'smouth; those remarksecho the demeaning sayings

Maxine has grown up with-etched into her con-sciousness by her parents. The mementos ofgrievances are on her back because the ChineseAmerican warrior s fighting against hurtshe can-not see-prejudices against girls that her parentsbrought from old China, prejudicesthat make herAmerican "straightA's" life "such a disappoint-ment" (54). She writes, "When one of my parents. . . said, 'feeding girls is like feeding cowbirds,'I would thrash on the floor and screamso hard Icouldn't talk" (54). By transferring he insults thatused to leave herspeechlessinto the enemy'smouthand by beheading the imaginary speaker,Maxinenot only excisesthe lump in her throatbut also for-gives the parentswho have afflicted her girlhood.She goes beyond forgivenessto acknowledgethesourceof pain as the source of strength: he parentswho disparagedher have also encouraged her. Yetit takesthe magnanimous vision of the daughter-her identification with the warrior-to transformthe aching words into amulets, scars into escutch-eon, and humiliation into heroism:The swordswomanand I are not so dissimilar. . . Whatwe havein common arethe words at our backs. . . Thereportings thevengeance-not thebeheading, ot thegutting,but the words.And I have so manywords-"chink"wordsand"gook"words oo-that theydonotfit on myskin. (62-63)Maxine has neverthelessredefined heroism. Unlikethe mythicalFa Mu Lan,Maxineas warrioravengesherself essby brandishinga swordthanby spinningwords. Instead of excellingin martial arts, Maxinehas learned the artof storytelling fromthe motherwno "funneledChina" into herears(89). BraveOr-chid'sendless tales, which could well havecloggedthe memory of young Maxine, have actuallynourished her imagination. From this mothertongue-her Chinese heritage-she now inventstales that sustain andaffirm herChinese Americanidentity.

Breaking the hold of a dominant tradition is astep toward self-deliverance for artists. Judged bystrict academiccriteria,Celie'sproseis illiterateandboth hers and Maxine'ssmack of deviance.Kings-ton andWalker,however, ransform iability nto as-set. Maxine's first tongue, which has impeded hercommunication in English, now invigorates heradopted language with new idioms, freshmetaphors, and novel images. The Chinese ideo-graphsfor revenge "reporta crime")are writlarge

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Imposed Silences in The Color Purple and The Woman Warriorin this self-vindicating autobiography,where Max-ine not only breaks her own silencebut gives voiceto the other wronged women in her family-theravishedaunt, the jilted aunt, and even BraveOr-chid (a renowned Chinese doctor who must resignherself to being a nameless American laundress).Maxine writesin an English that is inalienablyandpowerfullyherown because it springsfrom a bicul-tural stream:"'chink'words and 'gook'wordstoo."Even as she parrotsthe slursothers have directed ather-revealing the sting of racism by understate-ment-she exults in her intertextualself, in her fe-licity (and facility) as a minority writer.Celie, though less sophisticated than Maxine,also makes "defectperfection."Unable to produce"proper"English, she writes colloquially, yet herBlack English is what enables herto assert herself-hood forcefully:"it is uneducatedbut personal,dif-ficult but precise"(Fifer 158).Along with herotherbreachesof norms-wearing trousers, leaving herhusband, taking a female lover-it frees herfromthe demandsand stricturesof dominantmores. Theliberated Celienot only feels fine about herdialectbut even resistsher sewing companion's attempttoteach her to "talk proper," thinking to herself:"Looklike to me only a fool would wantyou to talkin a waythat feel peculiarto yourmind" (194).Put-ting wordsdown the way they sound and feel, Celieallows her self to shine through the pages and en-dows her prose with a disarming grace.Her seemingly artless idiom certainly outshinesNettie's stilted diction. Where Celie learns fromShug-someone from her own language commu-nity-Nettie is taught by her guardians, mission-aries who have been socialized into the dominantculture.In Nettie'sincreasingly ong-windedletters,noticeably more bland than Celie's, we arehearingwhat issues from the tongue of Nettie's mentors.Walker seems to imply that Celie's vernacularidiom, because it is hers alone, is all the more"proper."Both Maxine and Celie have made a virtue outof necessity. Unable to speak at first, they haveturned to writing for relief. Because their proseserves as a "mouthpiece"-taking cues from theirmothertongues-it dissolvesthe boundaryseparat-ing the spokenfrom the writtenword andpercolateswith a vigor often absent in formalwriting.We canhear, not just read, Maxine's talkstories, whichreverberatewith the lore and rhythm of the Can-tonese oral tradition. Similarly, Celie's telltale di-alect talks us into her consciousness, spelling apersonality. 13

VAs theygainconfidencein their femaleidentities,Celie and Maxine find newvoices and newmodels,

supplanting martial with poetic ideals and switch-ing allegiance from an imposing authority to afriendly muse. No longer blinkeredby gender op-positions, they perceive differences among bothsexes. Conventional dichotomies are dismissed infavor of personal variations.Celie,gratifiedby her newfound rhetorical alentand her increasing mastery of language, evolves

along with herwriting-from a littlegirlbaffled bywhat is happeningto her to a self-awareand under-standing woman, from a passive recorder of un-structured facts to a conscious artist. When shebegins writingshe merely ots down her immediateexperience, notingthe events around herwith littleintrospection or analysis. Even in the face of out-rage,such as Sofia'sdisfigurementbythe police, shejust swallows the unpalatable fact: "Scare me sobad I near bout drop my grip.But I don't . .. andI start to work on her"(87). Gradually,however, hefacts she presents begin to generatequestions andjudgments. When she learns her shocking familyhistory from Nettie, she begins to doubt the Godwho has hitherto made her accept everything si-lently. In her valedictory epistle to "Him," shewrites:

DearGod,My daddy ynch.Mymamacrazy.All mylittle half-brothers ndsisters okinto me.Mychildren otmysis-ter and brother.Pa not pa.Youmustbe sleep. (163)

Fed up with a god who does nothing to curb in-justice, Celiereplaceshim with a winsome "It":thespirit that always tries to "please [people] back,"smiling on all that people enjoy (178).Neither male nor female, this spirit seems to re-lax the tension between the sexes and eraserigidgender categories.Celie learns to transcendher dis-gust with men and to love evenAlbert, the man shewanted so badly to kill and who now sews besideher. It is duringher conversationwith him that sheexplicitly challenges the putative notions of man-liness and womanliness. The discussion beginswhen Albert tells Celie that he lovesShug because,like Sofia, she is more manly than most men:

Mr. thinkall this is stuff men do. ButHarponot like his,I tell him.Younot like his. WhatShuggot

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King-Kok Cheungiswomanlyt seem ike o me.Speciallyince heandSo-fia the onesgot it.Sofia andShugnot likemen,hesay,buttheynotlikewomeneither.Youmeantheynot likeyouor me.

They hold they own, he say. And it's different.(236;emphasisadded)Celieand Albert, sewing amicablytogether,are notengaged in a "feminine" (and therefore "un-manly") activity.'4Although they envy Shug andSofia's aggressiveness, they do not consider it un-womanlyor specificallymasculine-or intrinsicallysuperior.Both sexes are allowed to craft their differ-ent lives, fashion their own destinies.The dialogue also revealsCelie'sincreasingmen-tal agility,incisiveness,and sophistication.Thoughquickto retort,Celie is learning hat there s anotherside to the cutting edgeof language.She has turnedfrom writing to the God who is "big and old andtall and graybeardedand white" (176) to writingNettie, her devoted sister. Unlike her starklydescriptive etters o God registeringheroppressors'voices, her letters to Nettie wax sweetly poetic. Inone she writes:"Nettie,I am makingsome pantsforyou. ... I plan to make them by hand. Everystitch I sew will be a kiss" (192). The intimate fig-ure of speech threading together her three creativemodes-writing, sewing, and loving-acquiresfreshness and distinctiveness by being so much apart of her self.Celie's changing style reflects her growing self-awareness. Her letters progress from a simplerecording o a sophisticatedre-creationof dialoguesand events, charged with suspense, humor, andirony (Fifer 10). She tells of her sorrowafter Shughas deserted her:Italk o myselfa lot, standingn front he mirror.Celie,I say,happinesswas usta trick nyourcase.JustcauseyouneverhadanybeforeShug,youthought t wastimeto have ome,andthat twasgonlast. Even houghtyouhad thetreeswithyou.Thewhole earth.Thestars.Butlook at you. WhenShug eft, happinessdesert. (229)Although the passage expressesthe pains of a lostlove, the contemplative tone, the ironical perspec-tive, and the metaphorical language show us howfar Celie has traveled as a writer and how muchmorein control she has become than when she firstwroteto God forhelp.Herdialect,once broken,hasassumed a lyrical cadence. The woman who was"too dumb" to learn now createspoetry.Similarly,Maxineevolves from a quiet listener to

a talker of stories.Havingtransformed he militarywarrior nto a verbalfighter,she recognizes hat sheherself is a powerful spinner of yarns and not justa receptaclefor hermother's tales. Although manychapters of her autobiography are in a sense col-laborations between mother and daughter, thedaughter becomes increasingly awareof her owncontribution, especially in the last section of thebook: "Here s a story mymother told me, not whenI wasyoung, butrecently,whenI told her I also talk-story. The beginning is hers, the ending, mine"(240). It is towardthe end of this storythat the tonenoticeablysoftens. UnlikeBraveOrchid,the motherwho would "funnel," "pry,""cram,""jam-pack"the daughterwith unabatedtorrents of words,andunlike young Maxine, who has "splintersin [her]voice, bones jagged against one another" (196),adult Maxine modulates her notes to the music ofher second tongue, in the mannerof Ts'aiYen,theheroine of her final tale.

Kingston reinterprets he legend of Ts'ai Yen-apoet amid barbarians-and, as she has done withthe storiesabout the no-name aunt and the womanwarrior,subverts its original moral. The Chineseversionhighlights the poet's eventual returnto herown people, a returnthat reinforces certaintradi-tional and ethnocentric Chinese notions: "the su-periority of Chinese civilization over the culturesbeyond her borders, the irreconcilability of thedifferentwaysof life . .. and, aboveall, the Con-fucian concept of loyalty to one's ancestral familyand state"(Rorexand Fong). Kingston'sversion,bycontrast, dramatizes interethnicharmonythroughthe integration of disparate art forms.Ts'aiYen,Maxine's asttutelarygenius,resemblesbut transcends the various other influential femalefigures in her life. Like Fa Mu Lan, Ts'ai Yenhasfought in battle, but as a captive soldier. She en-gages in another art hithertodominated by men-writing-yet she does not disguisehersex, thus im-plicitly denyingthat authorship is a male preroga-tive. Like the no-name aunt, Ts'ai Yen is ravishedand impregnated;both give birth on sand. But in-stead of being nameless and ostracized, Ts'ai Yenachievesimmortal fame by singing about herexile.Like BraveOrchid, she talks in Chinese to her un-comprehending children, who speak a barbariantongue, but she learns to appreciatethe barbarianmusic. The refrain of this finale is reconciliation-between parents and children, between men andwomen, and between different cultures.It is by analogy to Maxine-alienated alike fromthe Chinese world of herparentsand the world of

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Imposed Silences in The Color Purple and The Woman WarriorwhiteAmericans-that Ts'aiYen's ull significanceemerges.The barbariansattach primitive pipes totheir arrows, which therebywhistle in flight. Ts'aiYenhas thought that this terrifyingnoise is her no-madic captors' only music, until she hears, issuingnight after night from those very flutes, "musictremble and rise like desert wind" (242):Shehid nher entbutcouldnotsleep hroughhe sound.Then,out of Ts'aiYen'sent,whichwasapart romtheothers, he barbariansearda woman's oicesinging,asif to herbabies,a songso highandclear, t matched heflutes.Ts'aiYen angaboutChinaandherfamily here.Herwords eemed o beChinese,butthe barbarians n-derstood heirsadnessandanger. . Shebroughthersongsback from hesavage ands,and one of the threethathasbeenpasseddown o usis"Eighteen tanzas ora Barbarian eedPipe,"asong hatChinese ing otheirowninstruments.t translatedwell. (243)Recallingyoung Maxine'sambivalencetoward an-guage(becauseit is frequentlyassociatedwith dom-inance),an ambivalence hat is in a sense reinforcedby the lethal text on the warrior'sback, we can ap-preciateall the morethe poet's alternativemode ofexpression. The American language, Maxine dis-covers, can send forth not just terrifying "deathsounds"-threats, insults, slurs-but stirring unes.Caughtin a cross-culturalwebof East6rnand West-ern chauvinism, Maxine too conveys sadness andanger through high-sounding words. She does not(and does not want to) return to China, but shereconnectswith her ancestralculturethroughwrit-ing. Instead of struggling against her Asian pastand her American present, she now seeks to emu-late the poet who sings to foreign music. Not onlyhave herChinese materialsand imaginings "trans-lated well," in the course of such creativetransla-tion she has achieved an inner resolution. As thelyricalendingintimates,Maxinehas worked he dis-cords of her life into a song.

That the injunctionto silenceshould provokeex-pressionis not so paradoxicalas it might seem, forthe relief sought by those frustratedby silence-forbidden or unable to speak-can only comethrough articulation. Urgent and passionate, thetestimonies of Celie and Maxine arein one sense acathartic release.Their voices, moreover,have car-riedthem furtherthan theyhad expected:from sur-

viving to protesting to recognizing themselves asspecialstorytellers.Despitethe excruciatingprocessof changeboth women haveendured,eachtext con-veysa sense of triumphthat is due, I believe,less tothe happy ending itself than to the way the finalstage is negotiated, to the means by which a voicetruly one's own is fostered.To monitor the uplifting effect in these texts-texts that revolve so much around alienation andisolation-we must return to the connections be-tween charactersand authors. Walkerand Kingstonhave allowed their protagonists to break throughconstraints to createopportunities.Although Celieand Maxine have suffered in their communities,theyalso tap communal resources: oo human to be"nothing" in a white society, theyturn to their an-cestralcultures o emulate heroinesof their own hueand to reclaimbeliefs that subvert the existing hi-erarchy;hamperedbydialects,theytransformputa-tive defects into stylistic effects. The credits for thetransformation go ultimately to the authors. An-ticipatingMaryDearborn's nsightthat "Americanselfhood is based on a seemingly paradoxicalsenseof shareddifference"(3), Walkerand Kingstontakein the differences of beingfemaleand coloredto in-vent self-expressivestyles that bestrideliteraryandoral traditions and project ethnic and nationalheritages.As they write about the voicelessnessen-demic to minority women, they pay tribute to thefemale bearers of cultures. Asthey venturebeyondlinguistic norms, they perpetuateand revitalize hepolyglot strains peculiar to America.To emphasize these achievements is not to sug-gestthat we forgetCelie's and Maxine'snightmares,accept their afflictions, or discount their losses.Their ultimate successonly remindsus of the manywho, despite struggle,cannot achievepersonalvic-tories. I have called attention to the triumphantovertones to underscore he protagonists'resilienceand the authors' determination. These writersdareto be themselves-to listen to their ownpains,to re-port the ravages,and, finally, to persist in findingstrengths from sources that have caused inestima-ble anguish.Theirwayout of enforced silence is notby dissolving into the mainstreambut by renderingtheir distinctive voices.15University of CaliforniaLos Angeles

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173King-Kok CheungNotes

i Showalter refers to these stages as Feminine, Feminist, andFemale (13). The final stage perceivedby Walkerand Kingston,however,seems closer to that advocatedby Cixous (Conley 129)and Kristeva 33-34), which goes beyondthe dichotomyof mas-culine and feminine.2 Sollors takes his cue from Handlin, who writes, "Once Ithoughtto writethe historyof American mmigrants.Then I dis-covered that the immigrants were American history" (3). Sol-lors's theory, which he expounds further in Beyond Ethnicity,is endorsed by Dearborn (4).3 Kramer, Johnson, Lewis, and Steinem are among thereviewersand journalists attacked;the attackers nclude Chan,Chin, Harris, and Reed (Chapple 17).4 Walkeradmittedly "liberated"Celie (based on the author'sgreat grandmother) rom the character's wn history (AnelloandAbramson). Kingston disclaims that her writing is representa-tive of China or of Chinese America (Islas 12). When askedwhethershe considered The WomanWarrioro be fictionor non-fiction, she answered that "it's closer to fiction" (Brownmiller210). She may have contributed to the generic confusion in al-lowing Knopf to classifyher book as autobiography, hough au-tobiography itself is often an "art of self-invention"(Eakin).5Sollors points out rightly that minority literature "is oftenread and evaluatedagainst an elusive concept of authenticity"(Beyond 11).While this concept has its value,it does not do jus-tice to artistsuninterested n objective representation.Kingston'sbook, in particular,reveals highly subjective truth, filtered attimes throughthe lensof a girlboth endowed and plaguedwithan unbridled imagination. The elusiveness of objective realityis an insistentmotif. Forinstance, Maxinesuspectsthat her fre-numhad been cut to stuntherspeech, but her motherinsiststhatshe performed the operation so that Maxine "would not betongue-tied," so that her tongue "would be able to move in anylanguage" (190). I do not know of any Chinese or ChineseAmerican whose frenum has been cut. Maxine eithergrowsupin an untypical ChineseAmericanfamily-if there s evera typi-cal one-or she has made up the incident. (She explicitly writesat one point that her storiesarehardlyfactual but are "twistedinto designs" [Woman189].)In anycase, the episode is remark-ably effective in attributingverbal difficulty and facility to thesame origins.6 After being rapedand silencedbyTereus,Philomela weavesherstory"withpurple / On a whitebackground" Ovid 148;em-phasis added). Walkermight have had this myth in mind inchoosing her title and in telling the story of Louvinie (a slavewoman in Meridian whose tongue was cut out). See also Rowe(53-58) for the connection between enforced silences and talespinning in the Philomela story.

7 Name is also crucial to personal identity in The Color Pur-

ple. Celie advises Squeakto insist on being called Mary Agnes,her realname,and Celieherself,though she appears completelysubmissive,subversively eaves out Albert's name in her letters,therebysuggestingthat her husbandhas no personality;that heis personified machismo: "Mr.8 Juhasz observes, "In telling her daughterstories of femaleheroism that directly contradict many of her other messagesabout the position of women, the mother shows her daughteranotherpossibilityfor women that is not revealed n herequallystrong desire for her daughter's conformity and thus safety ina patriarchal system" (180).9 It is popular among French theorists (e.g., Derrida, Cixous,and Kristeva)o associatespeech (orthe authoritativevoice)withthe masculine,andwriting orthe playon textualdifference)withthe feminine. But where literacyhas been traditionallya maleor white privilege, it is women who have been the bearers of in-fluentialoral traditions.In China Men Kingstonnotes that eventhe stories about her male ancestors are told to her by femalemembers of the family: "Many of the men's stories were onesI originallyheard from women" (208). See also Rabine 487-92.10Brienza explicitly compares Celie's curse to "speechacts"--words that do what they say.1lThe word is kY,used by women inancient times as a self-reference, hereby"breaking hemselveswith their own tongues."That wordis now obsolete. For the Chinese usage of this word,see Cihai 2: 2510.12Chin et al. argue that "Asian American sensibilities andcultures . . . mightbe relatedto but are distinctfrom Asia andwhite America" (viii).13Walkersaid that "[w]riting The Color Purple was writingin [her]first language" (Steinem90). But actuallyboth Walkerand Kingston interweavenative idiom and standardEnglish:Walkeruses the two alternatelythroughthe lettersof Celie andNettie;Kingstoncombinesthe two by translatingand transliter-ating Cantonese idioms into English.14 Hence I disagreewith Stade, who accuses Walkerof emas-culatingAlbert and Harpo (who likes to cook) "bygivingthemthe courage to be women, by releasing the woman already inthem"(266). Quite the contrary,Albert and Harpo are now freeto be their own men.

15 Research or this essaywas facilitatedby an Academic Sen-ate grantand a grant from the Instituteof American Culturesand the Asian American Studies Center,Universityof Califor-nia, Los Angeles. I want to thank Kenneth Lincoln for his inci-sive readingof an earlierversion of the article;Martha Banta,RosalindMelis, and Jeff Spielbergfor their thoughtful sugges-tions; and Gerard Mare for his bountiful encouragementandcriticism.

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Brienza,Susan. "TellingOld Stories New Ways:NarrativeStrate-gies in the Novels of ContemporaryAmerican Women."Symposium entitled "CreatingWomen," U of California,Los Angeles. 8 Mar. 1986.


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Hong Kingston, Author of The WomanWarrior."Made-moiselle Mar. 1977: 148+.Chan, JefferyPaul. "Letters:The MysteriousWest." New YorkReview of Books 28 Apr. 1977: 41.Chapple, Steve. "Writingand Fighting:Ishmael Reed."Image14 June 1987: 17+.Chin, Frank. "TheMost PopularBook in China."Quilt4 (1970):6-12.Chin, Frank,et al. Aiiieeeee An Anthology of Asian-AmericanWriters.Washington:HowardUP, 1983.Cihai:TheEncyclopaedic ChineseDictionary.3 vols. Shanghai:

[Ci Shu]; Hong Kong: Joint, 1979.Conley,VerenaAndermatt."AnExchangewithHelene Cixous."Hedlne Cixous: Writing the Feminine. Lincoln: U ofNebraskaP, 1984. 129-61.Dasenbrock, ReedWay."Intelligibility and Meaningfulness inMulticultural Literaturein English." PMLA 102 (1987):10-19.Dearborn, MaryV.Pocahontas's Daughters:Gender and Eth-nicity in American Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 1986.Eakin,Paul John. Fictions inAutobiography:Studiesin theArt

of Self-Invention. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985.Fifer,Elizabeth. "Alice Walker:The Dialect and Lettersof TheColor Purple." Rainwater and Scheick 155-65.Gilbert, SandraM., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in theAttic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-CenturyLiterary Imagination. New Haven: YaleUP, 1979.

Griffin, Susan. Pornography and Silence: Culture's Revengeagainst Nature. New York:Colophon-Harper, 1981.

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