Little Brown Girls Deserves Love Too- Visual

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Khia Purdy 

Dr. Harris 

English 2017-064187 

29 April 2025 

Little Brown Girls Deserves Love Too

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Throughout this semester this course has helped me expand my understanding of Love & Liberation and how much of an impact that love can truly have on a person and their development in society. Love & Liberation explained by bell hooks is loving in a way that allows people to be whole, free, and fully human. This type of love sometimes challenges systems of domination. Hooks believes that love is a choice, not just a feeling, and she feels that love is a path to healing. Similarly, the protagonist in Sula still chose herself over everyone despite the hate she received from her community. Before taking this course, I only thought about healthy love in families and relationships because when I think about love the first thing that comes to my mind is romantic love. This course helped me understand that love can come in different forms such as communal love, platonic love, political love, and self love. It showed me that love doesn’t always come in the purest form; it can be very conditional at times. This is because Sula’s mother, Hannah Peace, was a material mother. She provided Sula and her siblings with the necessities they needed to survive but she was not there for them mentally or emotionally. She never held them or even told them she loved them because she felt it was understood based on the things she did for them. 

My final project was inspired by the young black girls in society who may have suffered both a physical and emotional disconnection from their parents. The text I chose to use as a representation of girls who faced this problem is Sula by Toni Morrison. I chose this text because we saw how Sula Peace had her mother, Hannah Peace, present in her life but she didn’t share a sentimental relationship with her. We observed that Sula had a father who wasn’t active in her life either. And, neither was he a good husband to her mother, it was a failed marriage. This left Sula looking for love in all the wrong places. Sula then fell victim to her environment. Sula slept with men all over the town not because she loved them or wanted any sentimental relationships

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with them, but simply because she wanted attention from men. Sula found pleasure in sex, she refused to be tied down; she did not want to procreate or be a wife like her mother or her grandmother Eva. Sula stated to her grandmother Eva,“I don’t want to make somebody else. I want to make myself”(Morrison 92). She lived her life for herself and she lived carefree of what others thought. Sula, unlike the rest of the young people in the town, didn't value the opinions of others; she didn’t even idolize her own grandmother like others did for advice. The people in the community did not respect her, they looked at her as a burden and they blamed her for all of the bad things going on in the town. Sula’s attitude towards life left her to die alone at the end but the irony to that is she didn’t mind it because she claimed her loneliness. Sula stated to her childhood best friend Nell,“Yes. But my loneliness is mine. Now your loneliness is somebody else’s. Made by somebody else and handed to you. Ain’t that something? A second hand lonely”(Morrison 143). Even though this may seem selfish, Sula’s character alone displays a love ethic because she lived for herself. Love ethics is best explained as a framework treated as a guiding tool for human behavior, emphasizing compassion, justice, respect and is often used to challenge oppression and promote healing.She was one of the few who left the community by choice and got the chance to experience something different. She had experienced college and new people unlike Nell. 

My painting displays a brown family that is broken, which leaves the young girl to navigate the world and figure out life on her own. With this painting, I wanted to express how broken parental relationships influence black females to build a wall in relationships and become hyper independent. My painting overall ties to finding love and understanding self love in society beyond broken homes. It shows a clear world on the other side of the bridge which Sula crossed alone, without the help parents she truly never had the way she needed them. Sula loved

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herself enough that she was able to persevere through life the way she wanted to, without love from close family like people would need in today's society. I really liked Sula's personality, aside from her sleeping with multiple men, because she didn’t let people stop her from living freely and being human, which ties back to bell hooks' definition of Love and Liberation. In the painting, we have a mother, Sula and then it’s her father slowly disappearing. I chose to place her mother on one side of the path because of their distant connection. Sula is in the middle and a little further up the path because she’s leaving the town. Then we have her father who is disappearing because he’s not mentioned much in the book but it’s understood that he wasn’t there for her and that he was married to her mother. The three dead birds behind each character symbolizes the bad things that happened in Sula’s life. I chose to incorporate this symbol again because there were dead birds on the side walk when Sula returned back to the community. The houses on the other side of the bridge symbolizes when Sula left the town to explore life because she wanted to. The last thing that I would like to tie into this project is that a great psychological approach that could be used to address this societal issue is the attachment approach. This is because the attachment approach starts from birth and early childhood. Bowlby describes the attachment approach as,” a deep and enduring emotional bond that connects one person to another across time and space “ (Bowlby). His approach emphasizes the importance of early relationships particularly between primary caregivers, in shaping a child’s emotional and social development (Bowlby).We see that Sula struggles drastically to have attachment to anyone, and  all of this stems from her failed relationships with her parents and grandmother.

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Works Cited 

Brandell, Jerrold R., and Shoshana Ringel. “Bowlby’s Theory of Attachment.” Attachment and Dynamic Practice: An Integrative Guide for Social Workers and Other Clinicians, Columbia University Press, 2007, pp. 29–52. JSTOR, 

http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7312/bran13390.6. Accessed 1 May 2025. Morrison, T. (1982). Sula: Toni Morrison. Plume Books.