Author Alice Walker Uninvited in Berkeley

Alice Walker, who you recently read about in the pages of the AVA, is in trouble again, once again for something that she wrote. The powers-that-be at the Bay Area Book Festival, which will be held May 13-15, 2022, rescinded an invitation to her. According to the book festival, “Our decision to rescind our invitation had nothing to do with comments or positions she may have taken on Israel; nor did it have anything to do with her support of Palestine. We took this action due to her repeated endorsement, in The New York Times and elsewhere, of the work of David Icke, an anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist.” Icke has also argued that humans have been ruled since antiquity by an intergalactic race of reptilians. The New Yorker magazine accuses Icke of “crackpottery.” 

Fans of Walker and advocates of free speech are attacking the book festival and demanding that Walker be re-invited and reinstated. The brouhaha probably won’t damage Walker’s literary reputation. She won a Pulitzer for her lesbianish novel, The Color Purple. Also, the controversy won’t hurt the sales of her new book, Gathering Blossoms Under Fire: The Journals of Alice Walker, 1965-2000, which was reviewed in the AVA. Walker’s publishers are promoting it as though it’s a work of genius that must be purchased and devoured instantly. 

Over the past 40 or so years, Walker, who has lived for years in Mendocino County, has been a tireless self-promoter. She has also repeatedly struck a nerve with the reading public. In 1994, two of her stories, “Roselily” and “Am I Blue?,” were removed from an exam for students administered by the California State Board of Education Learning Assessment System. The San Francisco Chronicle’s Book Review editor, Pat Holt, rushed to Walker’s defense. The stories, along with an excerpt from The Color Purple, were published in a slim volume, with an essay by Holt and with the word “Alice Walker Banned,” on the cover.

Ban a book and you arouse instant curiosity. Once upon a time, the words “Banned in Boston” practically guaranteed big sales for a novel. That happened with James M. Cain’s noir fiction The Postman Always Rings Twice, which recounts the steamy sex that takes place between a drifter and a woman, who also happens to have a husband. The lovers murder the husband and turn against one another. The film, which was inspired by the novel, starred Lana Turner and John Garfield. Banning the book didn’t hurt their careers or Cain’s, either. 

“I want a year of not being ‘Alice Walker,’” Walker wrote in an entry in her recently published journals. That’s not going to happen anytime soon. Alice Walker can’t not be Alice Walker. Also, she wrote in her journal, “Why do I keep trying to figure out what's wrong with me?”

Perhaps there’s nothing really wrong with Walker, except that she thinks that there’s something wrong with her. And maybe deep inside there is something about herself that she has never figured out, though she has tried again and again. That’s what her journals suggest. 

Whether Walker is an anti-Zionist, and a pro-Palestinian should not prevent readers, whether they’re Jews, Christians, Buddhists or Moslems, from talking a deep dive into Gathering Blossoms Under Fire: The Journals of Alice Walker, 1965-2000, which is edited by Valerie Boyd and published by Simon & Schuster.

Disinviting Walker hasn’t helped the image of the book festival or Berkeley itself which has long been associated with freedom of speech. 

Rabbi Avi Shafrab recently noted in an opinion piece published in The Jewish News of Northern California, “As a former resident of Northern California, I wouldn’t have expected a Berkeley book fair to deny a platform to a celebrated human rights advocate just because she happens to be an anti-Semite.” 

The best reply to controversial speech is not to cancel it, but to open the gates to more speech and allow all points of view to be expressed. Every single person doesn’t have to speak, but it helps a community greatly if all perspectives are aired.