The Complexities of Pressed Purple Flowers: A Reflection on Alice Walker’s Anti-Semitism and Choosing Love Over Hate

By Olivia Simone

At the beginning of autumn 2022, I read Living by the Word by Alice Walker – a book of selected writings written between 1973 and 1987. As explained in the preface, each text was created without this collection in mind, which I loved the idea of.

Walker begins by illustrating how her journey into adulthood drove away her childhood wonderment of the world – of ‘week-long days’ worshipping the sun without shades of death and human destruction infiltrating her gaze. Through this melancholic opening tone, however, Walker depicts how these writings reflect her reconnection with a view of life entwined with the natural world; with history, art, cultures of the past and present.

Her words do not shy away from the harsh realities of human histories but instead use truths – negative and positive, personal and worldly – to comment on her state of being, and the ways in which she has learned to traverse through the world. Feeling in a somewhat liminal space at the time, the sentiment of the book conveniently aligned with not only what I was looking for but with what I needed.

In the essay ‘Am I Blue?’, Walker describes a horse, named Blue, who lived in the meadow opposite a house she rented in the country. The chapter retells the story of the summer when Blue (a seemingly lonely animal), welcomed the company of a female horse, Brown. Blue and Brown were inseparable and soon welcomed Baby into their life. Shortly after, Walker awoke one morning to a solo Blue – thrashing his head against the fences, waning viciously in his loss of Brown and their foal.

Through this relatively ordinary story, Walker weaves in the narratives of many of those enslaved – ‘put together’, igniting bonds in the shadows of unimaginable horrors before being stripped away from one another in order to be sold on, isolated, or moved for no other reason than a slave owner wanting to exert their hard, whitened power over them.

Confronted with the brutality enslaved people endured through a story that began so hopeful and comforting was harrowing. Walker delves into the pain, anger, grief, and disgust for life and humanity Blue subsequently experienced and explains that we have learned to believe animals want this life, just as children ‘want’ to be frightened, and women ‘want’ to be raped.

Walker comments on how such discourse is linked to history – it began when someone’s great-great grandfather said, ‘women can’t think’ and ‘ni**ers can’t faint’. By asking readers to question the perceived happiness of an animal, like Blue – still seen as beautifully majestic from the other side of a window – Walker prompts us to question the other ‘truths’ we have been told to believe; the ones embedded within the seams of society but which simply reflect the narrow lens of a white man’s history.

As my heart became wrapped in feelings of blue, a gust of tunnel wind flew through the half-opened window at the end of the London Underground carriage, flipped the pages back and encouraged the, until then undiscovered, pressed purple flowers to fly out of the book and onto the floor of the train.

The flowers felt like a sign, signalling me towards the tumbling, yet exciting, cadences of life – their preserved pale yellow stems mapping out a path for me to follow, taking me from this time of empty, unknowing instability to a space of life-aligning security. The billowing petals jumping from the pages restored a sense of tenderness for the beauty of life in my heart, and I thanked Alice Walker.

A few days later, however, I discovered that Alice Walker is anti-Semitic. I understand that she is (as am I) a supporter of Palestinian liberation and therefore against the theocratic settler-colony of Israel and that – having read her daughter’s autobiography Black, White, and Jewish – Walker had difficult relationships with her ex-husband’s Jewish family, but this does not excuse her anti-Semitism (which she denies).

Reading her poem ‘It Is Our (Frightful) Duty To Study They Talmud’ came close to breaking my heart. Breaking my faith in a humanity that never fails to disappoint. Here was an amazing writer, whose words helped spark a new (or perhaps helped rediscover an old) verve for living within me, made me realise the infinite beauty embedded in the layers of nature, who captured the visceral realities of racism, anti-Blackness, and misogyny that I related to in ways I had not felt before – and here she was inflicting hate in the same way as those she reprimanded.

Walker’s anti-Semitism is, I discovered, a rather debated topic. Some argue such a label has defined her simply because of her pro-Palestine activism – but one can, of course, support Palestine and protest against the Israeli government and not be an anti-Semite. As has been demonstrated with most religious texts, including The Bible and Quran, certain passages when taken literally can read violently, misogynistic, homophobic and archaic, but entire religious groups interpreting such texts cannot be brandished with the problematic pronouncements of their ancestors whose worldly visions were entrapped within a specific time.

I say this because Walker’s poem attempts to hijack passages of the Talmud to highlight that it is ‘evil’ and ‘poison[ous]’ and that Jewish people intend to enslave non-Jewish people. Having deconstructed historical and contemporaneous discourse that gave rise to, and maintained, racism and misogyny, I was deeply saddened by the reality that this eloquent writer, feminist and anti-racist activist was perpetuating such hateful ideas about Jewish people.

I finished reading Living by the Word – I only had one essay left – but each sentence no longer carried the same inspiring vitality; the words fell subdued, dampened and flat in my mind that ran with a cacophonous array of thoughts. The purple tones of the pressed flowers seemed to be more faded than they once were. I could, and would, never look at Alice Walker the same, read her work in the same way or perhaps even read her work at all.

Then, my Jewish partner argued that I could know the context of a writer and their opinions and still experience the feelings that their work created within me. Walker’s anti-Semitism did not have to take away from the life-affirming emotions I felt when reading her essays. That knowledge of Walker’s wider beliefs can alter how I see her as a writer and as a person, and affect the way in which I interpret her work, but that the feelings of anger, empowerment and tenderness her writing invoked in me alongside her anti-racist motivations can simultaneously be true.

I have very much been a person who would cease to engage with or read the work of someone I found held a system of beliefs starkly different to mine. But, while it has caused moments of friction between us, my partner has pointed out the merit in engaging with those we disagree with as it is often an ardent lack of communication and understanding that can cause individuals to hold such views.

We’re not arguing that as Black people we should read the philosophies of the KKK, or that Jewish people must read the work of Alice Walker, for example, but that by engaging with those we disagree with we can help them understand us and the deep pain inflicted from their misguided beliefs. Harper Lee’s fictional character, Atticus Finch, claimed that ‘you never really understand a person until you consider things from [their] point of view. Until you climb inside [their] skin and walk around in it’.

Perhaps we must climb inside the skin of those we disagree with most to truly comprehend their perspective, their standpoints, and ultimately use this understanding to progress towards a ‘better society’. On the other hand, perhaps this will never work because we’ll never agree on what a ‘better society’ looks like; maybe the worldviews we hold are made up of fragments crafted from entirely opposing cloth, never to be sewn together…

I’ve since been reading about radical imagination and the role of love in liberation – in particular, the work of bell hooks and Martin Luther King Jr, who argued that a ‘nonviolent struggle to be free may well offer to Western civilisation the kind of spiritual dynamic so desperately needed for survival.’

It is a person fuelled by hate who is anti-Semitic, who joins the KKK, who is racist, xenophobic, homophobic, transphobic. So perhaps it is only the strength of love that can fight such evil? I am still navigating my way through what I believe is the best approach and what I think freedom looks like, but what I do know is that as I look at the pressed purple flowers from Living by the Word (now pinned on the wall in front of my desk), I am reminded of the complicated nature of humanity, the importance of spirituality and aligning nature with ourselves, and of the deep pain and destruction we can spread when charged by hate instead of love.