Posts Tagged ‘banned books’
“Censorship reflects a society’s lack of confidence in itself”*…
Jodi Picoult‘s books are being pulled off of Florida school library shelves; she explains why we should care…
In the past six months, my books have been banned dozens of times in dozens of school districts. As sad as it seems, I was getting used to the emails from PEN America’s Jonathan Friedman telling me that yet again, my novel was under attack. But this week, something truly egregious happened. In Martin Country School District, 92 books were pulled from the school library shelves. Twenty of them were mine.
The 92 books fell into three categories: those with mature content, those written by BIPOC authors, and those written by LGBTQ authors. My books were removed because they were, according to the sole parent who made the challenge, “adult romance that should not be on school shelves.” It is worth noting I do not write adult romance. The majority of the books that were targeted do not even have a kiss in them. What they do have, however, are issues like racism, abortion rights, gun control, gay rights, and other topics that encourage kids to think for themselves.
When I read through the list of the 20 novels of mine that were pulled from the Martin County School District bookshelves, one surprised me the most. The Storyteller is a novel about the Holocaust. It chronicles the growth of anti-Semitism and fascism in Nazi Germany. There was a strange irony that a parent wanted this particular book removed, because it felt a bit like history repeating itself…
Florida has passed very broadly worded laws that limit what books can and cannot be in schools. Teachers who do not obey face penalties. Every book in a school must be reviewed by a media specialist and schools are told to “err on the side of caution.”
Some activists and parents have taken these laws as free reign to remove whatever books they personally do not deem acceptable. Some districts take the books off shelves “pending review”— but months and years go by without a review, and the books remain locked away. The outcome has been empty shelves in Florida classrooms and school libraries, where teachers and media specialists don’t only ban books that have been challenged but, in fear of future retribution, also remove other books that might result in punitive measures. The result? Students don’t have access to certain titles.
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Many of my writer friends whose books have been challenged hear the same refrain: “Kids can just get those books somewhere else!” Unfortunately, not every kid has access to a public library or transportation to get there; for many, a school or classroom library is their only resource. We also hear: “Oh, that’s just gonna drive up sales!” Trust me, none of us want that. What we want is for kids to be able to read what they want to read, instead of being told what they should read. We want the great majority of folks in communities who support the freedom to read to be just as loud as those select few who are making so much noise against it.
In the brilliant words of Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop, books create windows through which kids can escape and mirrors in which they can find themselves. We want you to stand in solidarity with us, the writers who create these books. Because we’ve seen, historically, what the next chapter looks like when we don’t speak out against book challenges… and that story does not end well…
Eminently worth reading in full: “What Florida Doesn’t Want You to Know About Its Book Bans,” from @jodipicoult in @thedailybeast.
* Potter Stewart (Supreme Court Justice, 1958-81)
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As we encourage curiosity, we might spare a thought for a man with some personal experience of censorship, Jan Němec; he died on this date in 2016. A filmmaker, he was the the “enfant terrible of the Czech New Wave.”
His best known work is A Report on the Party and the Guests (1966), about a group of friends on a picnic who are invited to a bizarre banquet by a charismatic sadist, who eventually bullies most of them into blind conformity and brutality while those who resist are hunted down. It was not a hit with Czech authorities, who had it banned. (Antonín Novotný, the president, was said to “climb the walls” on viewing it and Němec’s arrest for subversion was considered.)
He was in the middle of shooting a documentary about the Prague Spring for a US producer when the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia occurred. He smuggled his footage of invasion to Vienna, where it was broadcast on Austrian television. He re-edited the footage released the documentary Oratorio for Prague. It received standing ovations at the New York Film Festival in the fall of 1968. Němec’s footage would eventually be used by countless international news organizations as stock footage of the invasion; and Philip Kaufman’s film adaptation of The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988) also used footage from the film (on which Němec served as an advisor).
Němec was given a warning by the government that “… if he came back, they would find some legal excuse to throw him in jail.” From 1974 to 1989, he lived in Germany, Paris, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United States. He stayed in the U.S. for twelve years. Unable to work in traditional cinema, he was a pioneer in using video cameras to record weddings (documenting, for example, the nuptials of the Swedish royal family).
After the fall of communism in Czechoslovakia in 1989, he returned to his native country, where he made several films, including Code Name Ruby (1997) and Late Night Talks with Mother (2000), which won the Golden Leopard at Locarno.
“Don’t raise your voice, improve your argument”*…
Through reading, champion debater Bo Sen learned that disagreement can be a source of good, not ill, even in our polarized age.
Nowadays, disagreement is out of fashion. It is seen as the root of our personal and political troubles. Debate, in making a sport out of argument, seems at once a trivial pursuit and a serious impediment to the kinds of conversation we want to cultivate. But in my first book, Good Arguments, I propose that the opposite is true. Students may train to win every disagreement, but they soon learn that this is impossible. Even the best lose most of the competitions they attend. What one can do is disagree better—be more convincing and tenacious, and argue in a manner that keeps others willing to come back for another round. In the end, the prize for all that training and effort is a good conversation…
He shares several recommendations, e.g…
Thinking in an Emergency, by Elaine Scarry
Scarry, one of my English professors at Harvard, is the rare scholar who can change how you move through the world. She has made a career of bringing language to the ineffable ends of human experience: pain and beauty. In Thinking in an Emergency, she places deliberation at the core of a democratic response to emergencies including natural disasters and nuclear war. Scarry argues that debate, both real-time and prospective, need not hinder action and can instead secure the resolve and coordination needed for rapid response. She warns against leaders who invoke catastrophes to demand that their populations stop thinking. In this era of calamities, natural and man-made, Scarry’s wisdom is essential: “Whatever happens, keep talking.”
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The Autobiography of Malcolm X, by Malcolm X and Alex Haley
Malcolm X learned to debate as a 20-something in what was then called Norfolk Prison Colony, a state prison founded on reformist ideals that fielded debate teams against local colleges such as Boston University. In his memoir, X describes the experience of finding one’s voice and communing with an audience as a revelation: “I will tell you that, right there, in the prison, debating, speaking to a crowd, was as exhilarating to me as the discovery of knowledge through reading had been … once my feet got wet, I was gone on debating.” For most people, debate is a pastime of school and university years. This memoir shows that one can make a career and a life from its lessons in fierce, courageous, and resolute disagreement.
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When Should Law Forgive?, by Martha Minow
One question I struggle with in Good Arguments is when we should stop debating. Minow, a former dean of Harvard Law School, provides here a model of humane consideration on the limits of the adversarial ethic. Hers is an argument for accommodating forgiveness—the “letting go of justified grievances”—in the legal system. She builds the book as one would a spacious house, each area of the law—juvenile justice, debt, amnesties and pardons—a separate chapter in which readers are invited to stay and reflect awhile. Martha Nussbaum is illuminating on related topics in her critique of anger in Anger and Forgiveness, which elicited rebuttal from Myisha Cherry in The Case for Rage, an argument for the emotion’s usefulness in conditions of resistance. The need to balance dispute and conciliation, accountability and grace, cannot be transcended, only better managed.
Seven more recommendations at “The Books That Taught a Debate Champion How to Argue,” from @helloboseo in @TheAtlantic.
* Desmond Tutu
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As we put the civil back into civil discourse, we might recall that it was on this date in 1966 that the Roman Catholic Church announced, via a notification from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the abolition of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (“index of prohibited books”), which was originally instituted in 1557. The communique stated that, while the Index maintained its moral force, in that it taught Christians to beware, as required by the natural law itself, of those writings that could endanger faith and morality, it no longer had the force of ecclesiastical positive law with the associated penalties. So… read on.
“Those who are easily shocked should be shocked more often”*…
Interior of the Bodleian Library in Oxford, by David Loggan, 1675. Rijksmuseum.
In the nineteenth century some librarians became preoccupied with the morality or lack thereof displayed in some of their texts. Consequently a number of libraries created special shelf marks or locations for restricted books to ensure that only readers with a proper academic purpose might access them…
Take a tour of the restricted collections in remarkable libraries: “Do Not Read.”
* Mae West
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As we cover our eyes, we might consider censorship’s close cousin, misinformation: it was on this date in 1964 that Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. A response to a reported attack by the North Vietnamese Navy on the destroyer USS Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin, the Resolution gave President Lyndon B. Johnson authorization, without a formal declaration of war by Congress, for the use of conventional military force in Southeast Asia– a right that Johnson exercised vigorously.
In 1967, A senate Foreign Relations Committee investigation determined that the incident had not unfolded as earlier reported, and repealed the Resolution. An NSA study of the incident, declassified in 2005, put it bluntly: “It is not simply that there is a different story as to what happened; it is that no attack happened that night.”
“Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us”*…
On the occasion of Banned Books Week– which begins today– a short film from the American Library Association on the Top Ten Challenged Books of 2016:
Read ’em or weep…
* Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas
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As we get out our library cards, we might spare a thought for Theodor Seuss Geisel, AKA “Dr. Seuss”; he died on this date in 1991. After a fascinating series of early-career explorations, Geisel settled on a style that created what turned out to be the perfect “gateway drug” to book addiction for generations of young readers.
The more that you read,
The more things you will know.
The more that you learn,
The more places you’ll go.
– I Can Read With My Eyes Shut! (1978)
“Don’t join the book burners… Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book”*…
The American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF) receives reports from libraries, schools, and the media on attempts to ban books in communities across the country, from which they compile lists of challenged books in order to inform the public about censorship efforts that affect libraries and schools.
From Persepolis and The Kite Runner to The Bluest Eye and The Perks of Being a Wallflower— the top ten most frequently challenged books of 2014.
* Dwight D. Eisenhower
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As we celebrate Banned Book Week by taking the General’s advice, we might recall that it was on this date last year that thousands of students in Jefferson County, Colorado stayed home to protest School Board action that “edited” the District’s AP History curriculum to “promote patriotism” and not to “encourage or condone civil disorder, social strife or disregard of the law.” Two days later, the School Board backed down.
Student protestors (who will, one hopes, be catching up in spelling class on their return to school)
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