"Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender." ~Alice Walker
I have had these words committed to memory since I was an undergraduate student in 1989. These words come from Alice Walker's 1983 first collection of non-fiction where she first coined the term womanist in In Search of Our Mother's Gardens: Womanist Prose. I read the book and was trans-fixed because it was really one of those first moments when I learned about black women's presence in ways that went deeper than the special Black History announcements and commercials in February. I remember and re-travel that moment in my college years most clearly by looking at the black and white sketch that I did at the time: it sits in the right-hand corner of the collage pictured on this page. I intended then to turn this sketch into a purple mono-chromatic schema. I did that schema by layering many, many pieces of torn, lavender tissue paper until I achieved the color purple. I had originally planned to create a large stained-glass window that I would make myself based on my tissue paper creation (I was young and didn't even have a window so where I got this idea is beyond me). Needless to say, the stained glass window never happened and I never really liked the purple mono-chromatic scheme I created. So I carried the original sketch and the original purple schema around with me for years, 20 years to be exact, not knowing what to do with it next. I returned to the original sketch and purple schema here and sketched black defining lines onto the original purple piece. I also did a black-and-white monochromatic design to match the purple (the woman in the middle of the collage). That whole story is now layered here as collage-story based on a memory of the moment when I could first see, feel, and know that black women needed to be central to any story/intellectual tradition/theory of the world. Today, I am simply calling this collage, The Story of Purple..set to the theme song of Rachelle Ferrell's "Love Is All Around Us."I have always needed a visual image to get me moving forward. This collage was the first thing that I created for this website; everything else is literally layered on top of it. Carmen Kynard January 2013
