Wednesday
I chanced upon Langston Hughes’s essay “My Adventures as a Social Poet” when I was writing Sunday’s essay and was so intrigued by it that I return to it for today’s post. It brings to mind the book bans that are beginning to crop up in various states, with many more sure to follow.
At issue, in the words of a Texas legislator, are books that make people uncomfortable. “Critical race theory” has now come to mean “uncomfortable discussions about race.” Also targeted are books on LBGTQ issues since those too make people uncomfortable.
Writing for the Texas Observer, activist Lupe Mendez recalls a time in March, 2012 when it was Arizona that was initiating books bans. At the time, Mendez was involved in an effort to get kids books that school authorities had removed from school libraries and school curricula:
The state’s lawmakers had recently passed a bill making the teaching of “Ethnic Studies” illegal, along with banning courses that “promote resentment toward a race or class of people” and “are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group.” The bill also created a list of banned books. Of the more than 80 books that were eventually added to the list, many of the authors were Black and Latinx.
At that time, Mendez and other Texans came to the rescue. Calling themselves librotraficantes, meaning “book smugglers,” they went to work:
We used all of our book nerd talents to create an old-school freedom ride, collecting 35 bus riders and caravanning to six cities: Houston, San Antonio, El Paso, Mesilla, Albuquerque, and Tucson. We collected more than 1,000 copies of Arizona’s banned books and disseminated them to community libraries through book bundles to Arizona high school students. The Librotraficante Movement has been crucial in giving a voice to students of color across the nation.
Recalling the Arizona trip, Mendez reports a powerful story:
As we arrived in Tucson, where the school district had shut down a Mexican American Studies course, a few of us were assigned the task of sorting the more than 1,000 books amassed during the caravan. It was early morning—7:30 or so—when we noticed that a tiny group of teens had come by. They quietly approached to see the books and grabbed some, retreating without a word. Later, a young lady grabbed a book and took it away to the corner to read it.
As the day went on, the young lady returned, saying, “Thank you for giving me this moment. I was just about to finish this book on the day the district personnel came to forcibly take the books away from us.” Wise beyond her years, she left us with some parting advice: “I want you to have this book back. Give it to somebody else. I hope somebody can learn from this book.”
Now the problem is in Mendez’s own state. The legislature’s lists, he observes,
seem to target non-white and LGBTQ authors. This much is clear: The Republican Party intends to deny children access to books, authors and an education that would spur their intellectual growth. And in an effort to satisfy their base, Republicans in Texas are pushing away the one population that needs their attention the most: youth—and more pointedly—youth of color.
Back to Hughes and his own encounters with repressive authorities. It all began, he reports, when he chose not to write lyric poems about the moon and flowers but rather about the problems of the African American community:
The moon belongs to everybody, but not this American earth of ours. That is perhaps why poems about the moon perturb no one, but poems about color and poverty do perturb many citizens. Social forces pull backwards of forwards, right or left, and social poems get caught in the pulling and hauling. Sometimes the poet himself gets pulled and hauled – even hauled off to jail.
I have never been in jail but I have been detained by the Japanese police in Tokyo and by the immigration authorities in Cuba – in custody, to put it politely – due, no doubt, to their interest in my written words. These authorities would hardly have detained me had I been a writer of the roses and moonlight school. I have never known the police of any country to show an interest in lyric poetry as such. But when poems stop talking about the moon and begin to mention poverty, trade unions, color lines, and colonies, somebody tells the police.
After recounting various incidents, Hughes concludes,
So goes the life of a social poet. I am sure none of these things would ever have happened to me had I limited the subject matter of my poems to roses and moonlight. But, unfortunately, I was born poor – and colored – and almost all the prettiest roses I have seen have been in rich white people’s yards – not in mine. That is why I cannot write exclusively about roses and moonlight – for sometimes in the moonlight my brothers see a fiery cross and a circle of Klansmen’s hoods. Sometimes in the moonlight a dark body swings from a lynching tree – but for his funeral there are no roses.
The Young Adult Writers whose books are under attack by school boards might be comforted to know that the proposed bans are a compliment: their books must be having an impact. In fact, they might be justified in seeing their omission from such lists as an insult. I think of Bertolt Brecht’s famous poem “The Burning of the Books,’ inspired by the Nazi book burnings:
When the Regime
commanded the unlawful books to be burned,
teams of dull oxen hauled huge cartloads to the bonfires.
Then a banished writer, one of the best,
scanning the list of excommunicated texts,
became enraged: he’d been excluded!
He rushed to his desk, full of contemptuous wrath,
to write fierce letters to the morons in power —
Burn me! he wrote with his blazing pen —
Haven’t I always reported the truth?
Now here you are, treating me like a liar!
Burn me!
Quoting the Book of John (8:32), Martin Luther King used to call out, “And ye shall know the truth,” to which his Biblically knowledgeable audience would respond, “and the truth shall make you free.” That’s why truth-telling books are essential for our lives. But as King also knew, the truth is dangerous and under constant assault.
Educators, be warned. There’s a lot more to come.