to pull himself up on the vertical surface, but it’s futile. Seconds. Get cut in half or to go underneath it? He takes a deep breath, ducks beneath.

The cover closes, seals shut. There’s no room beneath it. His lungs suck the oxygen out of his last breath with greed. He feels his epiglottis clamp shut as he claws at the cover. Chest heaving, blood rushing to his head, struggling to keep afloat. His lungs feel like they will explode. Desperately he crams his face against the cover trying to salvage any air, but it is useless. As the oxygen in his limbs runs out he starts to sink. Beside him, she reappears. She is not struggling. She treads the currents beneath the water with ease, her hair undulatingaround her.

He feels the skin and muscles of his neck straining, feels it tearing open. His fading vision shows her indicating first her neck and then his.

In describing The Color Purple (1982) as a ‘womanist’ fiction, thereby following the ethic of “women who love women —and sometimes individual men— sexually and/or nonsexually” and “feminists of colour” (Walker, 1983 in Berlant, 1988), Alice Walker effectively declares her work a critique on patriarchy and racism, of which the former will be the focus here. The ways in which Walker exacts her critique centre on several subversions and a proposed alternative model. Primarily, the subversions involve the breaking of silence through language, Black Vernacular English (BVE), laughter and song (Tucker, 1988; Hite, 1983; Abbandonato, 1991) and the use of the feminine,