Putnam Publishing Group Author Rebecca Walker will be
discussing her book "Black White and Jewish" on Saturday at 1
p.m.
By Kelly Haigh
Daily Bruin Contributor
There has always been more to Rebecca Walker than meets the
eye.
At first glance, her personal history seems like some extended
metaphor. She was the only child of a white lawyer and a black
author ““ Alice Walker (“The Color Purple”)
““ who united during the Civil Rights Movement and divorced
shortly thereafter. She spent the remainder of her childhood
shuttling back and forth between two polar-opposite worlds and
finding it impossible to identify with either of them.
This personal crisis is the core of Walker’s memoir,
“Black White and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting
Self.”
In the memoir, Walker sets out to extinguish all of those
simplified, preconceived notions of her identity by examining her
past in detail. She makes it clear that she is more than the
symbolic “movement child,” more than a harmonious sum
of her parts.
She’s complicated.
Walker will be speaking about her book in her first appearance
at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books in a panel discussion,
“Inside Out: The Art of Memoir,” this Saturday at 1
p.m. in Dodd 147.
While “Black White and Jewish” is Walker’s
first full-length solo effort, she’s hardly a newcomer to the
literary scene. Her work has been published in numerous magazines
and anthologies, and in 1995 she edited “To Be Real,”
an anthology of her own about young people and feminism.
And of course she grew up in an environment which inherently
fostered a great deal of literary creativity.
“I think the greatest gift my mother has given me is just
the model of her life,” Walker said in a recent phone
interview. “It’s really hard, I think, for many people
to be artists without a model. You don’t know what it looks
like, how to do it. But (I) have grown up with a master artist,
(I’ve learned) how to live one’s life in that creative
way.”
“Black White and Jewish” is a natural extension of
those formative years, and the memoir has been ripening for quite
some time. Walker, who is now in her 30s, said that she’s
been actively working on the book since she graduated from
college.
“I was really trying to figure out how to become an
adult,” Walker said. “A part of me realized that I
would need to process and work through my childhood and adolescence
in order to really move into adulthood “¦ I feel like
I’ve been writing it my whole life.”
Walker tackles whole-life issues frequently in her book,
including the limitations of memory, the nature of personality, and
how it all evolves over time.
“If you’re awake and alive, you’re constantly
changing. And that’s really what the book is about, that
constant change and that kind of fluidity that we have inherent to
us as beings,” Walker said.
Accordingly, she feels as though she is no longer the same
person that resides in the pages of “Black White and
Jewish.” She has changed and appreciates the newfound
distance between her current self and the events described in the
book.
“In a way, writing them was like the final experience of
them,” Walker said. “They were etched into my psyche,
and onto my body, and then when I wrote about them, at that point,
I released them.”
These liberated moments include several highly personal
anecdotes, including explicit sexual reverie. But Walker says that
she doesn’t feel regrets about revealing the intimate truths
of her personal life in her memoir, because every detail serves a
purpose.
“It’s a very seriously crafted, or constructed,
piece of work. It’s not a confessional tell-all.
There’s a lot that’s held back. I really had certain
things that I wanted to say, that I wanted the book to say, and so
it’s constructed in order to have that message,” she
said.
She cites several female authors and their memoirs as important
inspiration for this commitment to unflinching truth. She includes
Jamaica Kinkaid (“A Small Place”), Kathryn Harrison
(“The Kiss”), Susanna Kaysen (“Girl,
Interrupted”) and Alice Kaplan (“French Lessons”)
on her list of literary role models.
Her mother was an important influence and resource, but
following in a parent’s high-profile footsteps is never an
easy feat.
“For most of my life I was afraid to even say that I was a
writer, because I didn’t want to compete with my mother in
any way,” Walker said. “And of course there are
expectations, and people who say mean things.”
But she has been able to overcome much of the negative pressure.
Now that she has put her past to rest, she can turn her attention
to her future, which is still shifting and settling and remains
largely unwritten.
“I feel like this book liberated me in a lot of ways
because it clearly has a place and it’s been very
well-received. I always felt that the more I did my own work, the
less I would feel self-conscious about the mother issue, and
that’s true,” Walker said.
She is currently penning a new book to add to that body.
“I think it’s a novel, but I’m not
sure,” she said. We’ll just have to wait and see.