Walker gives readers a window into her life
Complex author sharing diaries that track 20th-century issues
Alice Walker is one of the most renowned — and complex — public figures of her generation.
Born to sharecroppers in rural Georgia and raised in homes without electricity or indoor plumbing, Walker became an activist and a prolific writer, with 41 books across genres. Her 1982 book, “The Color Purple” — an epistolary novel addressed largely to God, which focused on the experience of poor Black women in the American South — was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. She was the first Black woman to win the prize for fiction.
In recent years, she has taken positions that many have found to be antisemitic and deeply troubling. Her stances have cast a shadow over her legacy, leaving readers to grapple with how to approach Walker, and her work, today.
Carla Kaplan, a professor of American literature at Northeastern University who has written about Walker’s work, said Walker is one of many influential progressive figures who have made profoundly contentious statements.
“The question becomes: What do we do with one another when these moments happen?” Kaplan said. “One answer is that we cancel one another. Another is that we hold one another to account.”
Into this fraught conversation comes a new book by Walker, “Gathering Blossoms Under Fire,” recently released by Simon & Schuster, a collection of her diaries spanning 1965 to 2000.
The book covers the
period when Walker, now 78, became a towering figure in the American cultural landscape, and precedes the accusations of antisemitism in recent years.
For decades, she chronicled her life — mostly in lined, spiral notebooks — noting her thoughts on relationships, fame, family, freedom and politics. The book that collects these journal entries was edited by Valerie Boyd, a writing professor at the University of Georgia who died earlier this year.
Beyond the personal insights, heartbreaks and triumphs they cover, Walker’s journals track a life that has intersected with some of the most significant issues of 20th-century America. She was active in the civil rights movement and had an illegal abortion in the 1960s. She and her now ex-husband, Melvyn Leventhal, who is white and Jewish, moved to Mississippi the same summer the Supreme Court outlawed state bans on interracial marriage.
Their daughter, Rebecca, was born there. Walker had romantic relationships with men and women and wrote candidly about the evolution of her sexual identity.
Her now-public diary entries provide a window into Walker as an artist, an activist, a contentious public figure and a Black woman reflecting on her life. They offer readers a chance to walk with her as she works through the “disappointment, anger, sorrow, regret” of decades, and to consider the whole of her.
“It’s much more difficult to hold one another to account than to cancel each other,” Kaplan said, “but it opens up the possibility of more allies down the road, and keeps our attention where our attention needs to be.”
Walker and Leventhal met in Jackson, Mississippi, where they were both working for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, then moved to New York, where Leventhal was finishing law school. Leventhal said he wanted to go back to the South after graduation to continue his work. She agreed, on one condition: They had to be married.
“There was a long tradition of white men having Black mistresses in the South,” Walker said in the introduction to “Gathering Blossoms.” “That was not going to be my path. So I proposed to Mel, and he happily obliged. Apart from our love, it was important politically for us to be legally married.”
They were married in March 1967 in New York City, three months before the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed state bans on
interracial marriage.
The rights and the power of women have been themes throughout Walker’s writing. But she has also been an outspoken critic of Israel, joining a flotilla to challenge Israel’s blockade of Gaza in 2011. She broke the U.S. embargo to travel to Cuba and meet with Fidel Castro.
Among the most vociferous backlash Walker has received was in response to “The Color Purple,” which some Black people said portrayed Black men in particular, but Black women as well, in a very negative light.
But recent accusations that Walker is antisemitic have been the most significant. She has praised David Icke, who has written that
Holocaust denial should be taught in schools and that the Talmud is a racist document.
One of Walker’s poems, “To Study The Talmud,” has also attracted widespread condemnation. In it, she describes her reaction when a Jewish friend accused her “of appearing to be antisemitic.” The poem says that one should look to the Talmud in an effort to understand the state of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, which she describes as “demonic.”
Walker said in a recent interview that her criticism is not of Jewish people but of Israel, as well as of the ancient texts and practices of all religions, including Christianity, Islam and Buddhism. The poem about studying the Talmud also points to the need to “study our programming” from other religions as well.
Thadious Davis, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a scholar of Walker’s work, said the public criticism has not left Walker unscathed. Although the recent controversy has taken place in “the white world,” Davis said, and has been more visible in the mainstream media, the outcry over “The Color Purple” was equally large.
“It was enough to send her into a depression, and ultimately therapy,” Davis said. That period “really led her to go deeper inside herself and search for other means of validation, for meaning.”