Women’s Solidarity in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1981) and Mariama Bâ’s So Long a Letter (1982): A Comparative Study

Abstract

This dissertation is a comparative study between the Afro-American and the African literary works, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982) and Mariama Bâ’s So Long a Letter (1981). It examines Women’s Solidarity in both works. This comparative analysis is based on Alice Walker’s Womanism, developed in her collection of essays In Search of Our Mothers Garden: Womanist Prose (1983), and Clenora Hudson-Weems’s Africana Womanism set in her Africana Womanism: Reclaiming Ourselves (1993).Our dissertation first shed light on the issues of the black women in the African-American and the African communities. The discussion section, initiates with an analysis of how they contribute in the black women’s liberation in forms of solidarity. Then, it studies the relevant factors of how men can exert their superiority over the southern US and Senegalese black women who, in return, resort to letter writing as a means for self-affirmation, which is, in fact, the emphasis of the last chapter of the discussion section. Through the analyses of Alice Walker’s and Mariama Bâ’s works, our work concludes with the similarities and the differences between The Color Purple and So Long a Letter.