Alice Walker won a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the first African-American woman to win the award, for her 1982 novel about Celie, an African-American Southern woman surviving poverty and domestic violence in the early 20th Century rural Georgia. The novel opens with the 14-year-old Celie pregnant for a second time by her father, forced to give away the child. Her father marries her off to a brutal widower with three wild children who had originally asked to marry Celie’s younger sister Nettie. Nettie soon joins her seeking to escape rape by their father, but Celie’s husband has similar intentions. When Nettie refuses to submit, he throws her out and the sisters are separated. While Celie is meek under her husband’s abuse and even allows him to bring his mistress, traveling singer Shug Avery, into their house, she witnesses the hardship of the assertive Sofia, the wife of her stepson Harpo. Shug and Sofia become Celie’s friends, and Shug helps Celie leave her husband.
Steven Spielberg (a producer on the 2023 film) directed the 1985 cinematic adaptation, which although nominated for 11 Academy Awards, including Best Actress for Whoopi Goldberg and Best Supporting Actress for Margaret Avery (Shug Avery) and Oprah Winfrey (Sofia), won no Oscars.
During the panel discussion, Winfrey recalled, “‘The Color Purple’ changed my life in 1985.” Reading the book was a revelation for Winfrey “because until that time I didn’t know that there was language for what had happened to me, and the first line of the book is, ‘Dear God, I am 14 years old. Please help me know what’s happening to me.'” That spoke to Winfrey’s personal experience because, “I had been raped and had a child at 14 who later died, and I did not have any language to explain what that was.”
Later, Scott Sanders and Oprah Winfrey produced the stage musical (book by Marsha Norman and music and lyrics by Brenda Russell, Allee Willis and Stephen Bray), which originally ran on Broadway from 2005 to 2008 and won a Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical (LaChanze). It’s 2015 revival garnered Cynthia Erivo a Tony in the same role as well as a Tony for Best Revival of a Musical.
While it’s been over 30 years for “The Color Purple” on the silver screen, the journey for Bazawule has been faster. He recalled that in 2019, “I made a small movie in Ghana for $40,000 of my own. I screened it across the street for about 3 people who were there.” He added, “This journey of going from unseen to seen which is Celie’s ultimate story” is a tremendous blessing, particularly coming from Ghana “where we’re told we cannot participate; we cannot compete.” Born in Ghana, but now based in New York, Bazawule was nominated for a Grammy in 2020 for directing Beyoncé’s “Black Is King.”