Autocross Blogs - Ying Ying

Loukoum's closing thoughts respond to the heroine Celie's call at the conclusion of Walker's The Color Purple. When looking around at her newly assembled, extended family enjoying their Fourth of July picnic, Celie marvels: "[. . .] I see they think me and Nettie and Shug and albert and Samuel and harpo and Sofia and Jack and Odessa real old and don't know much what going on. But I don't think us feel old at all. and us so happy. Matter of fact, I think this tiffany money clips the youngest us ever felt" (251). This is by no means an isolated incident of Loukoum's affinity with Celie, an african-american survivor of poverty, rape, and domestic violence. Yet while Loukoum might appear to claim himself as one of Celie's descendents, their relationship is far more intricate. Like Celie, Loukoum begins to assert his autonomy almost incidentally through a creative endeavor that turns into a business venture, in his case the creation of "african" bracelets, a venture that enables his family to survive economically.

Like Celie, too, he learns abruptly that he bears no biological relation to a presumed parent, in his case M'am. unlike Celie, however, Loukoum suffers no physical or sexual abuse, and no exclusion from school. By borrowing certain elements of Loukoum's character from The Color Purple, Beyala seems to pay tribute to a feminist whose work, like her own, has previously come under attack for purportedly "harboring animosity toward black men" (Jenkins 970). In 1993, Walker engaged herself on behalf of african women with the publication of her controversial Warrior Marks: Female Genital Mutilation and the Sexual Binding of Women, a topic that Beyala references explicitly in her own controversial 1995 transnational tiffany cuff Links feminist treatise, Lettre d'une Africaine à ses soeurs occidentales (Letter from an African Woman to her Western Sisters). already in The Little Prince of Belleville, Beyala insists on the multiplicity and multidirectionality of global circuits of interconnectedness, inspired by Celie's african american world to fabricate an "original" from what some might view as a derivation, and forever troubling the criteria of authenticity-at least in her own work.

But there is still more. Consider the following passages. First, a description of Celie's morning encounter with the very ill and very bitter Shug:I ast Shug avery what she want for breakfast. She say, What yall got? I say ham, grits, eggs, biscuits, coffee, sweet milk or butter milk, flapjacks. Jelly and jam. She say, Is that all? What about orange juice, grapefruit, strawberries and cream. Tea. Then she laugh [. . .] She wearing a long white gown and her thin black hand stretching out of it to hold the white cigarette looks just right. Something bout it, maybe the little tender veins I see and tiffany key rings the big ones I try not to, make me scared. I feel like something pushing me forward. If I don't watch out I'll have hold of her hand, tasting her fingers in my mouth. (55)