네오 샤머니즘과 하이브리드 영성

Neo-Shamanism and Hybrid Spirituality in Alice Walker's The Color Purple

An epistolary style of The Color Purple (1982) by Alice Walker is the form in which the sender is the main character, Celie, poor and dispirited in despair, and the receiver is God, supposedly believed as the Absolute Being to help her out. The fiction is thus filled up with a hopeless complaint to the 'White God' of her own destiny, absurd and unacceptable, which white-people-dominating social structure gives Celie, a black woman living in the South of America. Perhaps Walker raises an issue of Neo-Shamanism in questioning the White God of Christianity: "a new form or a revival of an old form of Shamanism," where the so-called neo-Shaman, putting together various beliefs and practices related to communication with the spirit-world, is assumed to fight social injustice and racial/sexual discrimination in case to build a better society and lead a new spiritual direction, for example, for the South black community over the white. So, as a woman, Celie takes recourse to a secret of joy in her sexuality and body through physical, spiritual intercourses with another character, Shug, supposedly the figure of a neo-Shaman reviving a primordial ritual for the American black community with Africa-origin blues songs and dances; and Celie is further aware of mystic spiritualism, a kind of hybrid spirituality, coming from life forces and spiritual living power in African woods and tribe, Olinka, through Nettie, who, a young sister of Celie, is dispatched as an American missionary to the West Africa. Consequently, religious values by Walker appear so perplexed to be something mystical and spiritual, yet hybrid as is expressed in the color 'purple' itself as it is everywhere in nature, especially in the African spirit-world, while transcending the socio-cultural conditions of sexuality, race, class, location, and age, as suggested in the American political, religious system of White/Male-dominating society.