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Wednesday
As this is National Library Week, I take the occasion to celebrate libraries and librarians as being critical in the fight to preserve democracy. Unfortunately, every day we see new attacks on libraries including, most recently, the Naval Academy Library. In advance of a visit from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, that library removed 381 titles, including Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. (Thanks to Katherine Zammit for the alert.)
According to the New York Times,
The list also includes Memorializing the Holocaust, Janet Jacobs’s examination of depictions of women in the Holocaust, and How to Be Anti-Racist by Ibram X. Kendi. Also listed are The Making of Black Lives Matter, by Christopher J. Lebron; How Racism Takes Place, by George Lipsitz; The Fire This Time, edited by Jesmyn Ward; The Myth of Equality, by Ken Wytsma; studies of the Ku Klux Klan, and the history of lynching in America.
The list also includes books about gender and sexuality, like Bodies in Doubt: An American History of Intersex by Elizabeth Reis, and Between XX and XY: Intersexuality and the Myth of Two Sexes by Gerald N. Callahan.
When librarians are kept from sharing books freely with the public, minds narrow and growth is stunted, although these outcomes appear of no concern to the Trump administration. In fact, it may regard them as desirable.
In my book Better Living through Literature, I note some of the gifts we receive from libraries. For instance, during War I librarians played an important healing role, distributing books to wounded veterans. In the process, they noted the various therapeutic effects that books had on patients, with Theodor Wesley Koch of the Library of Congress noting that “stories are sometimes better than doctors.” (Thanks to Oberlin librarian Valerie Hotchkiss for informing me of this.)
Koch also noticed that “a novel with a happy ending is not necessarily a stimulant to the depressed patient, who may be tempted to contrast his own wretched state with that of the happy hero. Nor is every tragedy a depressant.” Elaborating on the latter, he observed that “a serious book may prove to be better reading for a nervous patient than something in a lighter vein – he may get new courage and a firm resolve to be master of his fate and by reading of another’s struggle against adverse circumstances.”
Through his observations, Koch helped found the practice of bibliotherapy.
Unfortunately, librarians and teachers recommending books is coming under fire, including threats of imprisonment. According to Musk Watch, for instance, lawmakers in Texas
are seeking to impose harsh criminal penalties on school librarians and teachers who provide award-winning works of literature to students. Identical bills in the Texas Senate and House would make it a crime for librarians and teachers to provide books or learning materials that contain sexually explicit content, punishable by up to 10 years behind bars — whether or not a book has educational or literary merit.
If we are to go by books singled out by Texas legislators in recent years, teachers and librarians could be jailed for teaching or recommending Catcher in the Rye, Bluest Eye, Handmaid’s Tale, The Color Purple, not to mention dozens of young adult novels.
The article mentions other states threatening penalties:
Multiple states, including Indiana and Arkansas, have already passed laws that make educators or librarians vulnerable to harsh penalties, or even jail time, for providing “obscene” materials to minors, the Washington Post reported. In December, a federal judge struck down parts of an Arkansas law that would have “established a criminal misdemeanor, punishable by up to a year in prison, for librarians and booksellers who distribute ‘harmful’ material to a minor,” ruling that “elements of the law [were] unconstitutional.”
In my book, I talk about the conflicting agendas between such conservatives and young people when it comes to reading:
From the many essays I have received from students on instances of censorship, I have learned that some version of the following dynamic is usually at play: students turn to works like Perks of Being a Wallflower and Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret because they hunger for information. As they leave their family cocoons and enter a world that contains drugs, sexuality, race tension, suicide, gender and sexual identity confusion, and other major life issues, they want to know what is going on. Teachers and librarians, whose job it is to help them learn and mature, are generally sympathetic and will often assign such works, either during the school year or for summer reading. On the other hand, parents, who are programmed to keep their kids safe, sometimes fear losing their children to an uncertain world that is beyond their control. In too many cases they blame the books and sometimes the teachers themselves for prematurely plunging their sons and daughters into that world.
According to their accounts, students generally side with the teachers and librarians. After all, the world is an uncertain place—even more so with easy access to the internet—and young people are looking for resources that will help them negotiate uncomfortable realities.
Censorship perhaps works as an indirect compliment, testifying to the explosive power of literature. Perhaps Trumpists have reasons to be worried as literature has helped and is helping former colonized populations, women, African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, LBGTQ+ folk, those with disabilities, and others find their voice while, at the same time, challenging reigning power assumptions. As I observe in my book,
Perhaps literature teachers have been more successful than they realized in developing open-minded human beings resolved to think for themselves. Maybe that’s a big reason why anti-Enlightenment forces are increasing their attacks on school libraries and classroom curricula, not to mention public schools themselves. Several times in these pages I’ve compared reading literature to playing with dynamite or waving a loaded gun, and many rightwing extremists would agree. They fear that once young readers—or readers of any age—immerse themselves in books, powerful feelings, ideas, and even movements will be unleashed.
I conclude today’s blog with this excerpt from my book’s conclusion:
If literature can indeed sometimes change our lives and sometimes change our world, then a special responsibility is laid upon those of you who connect others with books, whether you be a parent, a librarian, a teacher, a critic, a therapist, a social worker, a member of the clergy, a book discussion group leader, or just a friend recommending a good read. Think of yourselves as literature coaches. You are handling a rare, precious and, yes, sometimes dangerous substance, but any risks involved are worth it because the potential payoff is so great.
The reflective conversations that occur after one has immersed oneself in a work are particularly important. You can talk with your child about how a particular character negotiates a challenging situation and with your students about a work’s insights into their own life situations. You can also talk about a work’s blindnesses: is it hampered by race, gender, class, and other biases that keep it from acknowledging the full humanity of its subject or does it manage to transcend the prejudices of the author or of the age? One can regard these very discussions as citizenship training exercises since often they will arise when the work touches on hot button social issues. The best literature, being as complex as life, will provide plenty of material for rich conversations….
In other words, we cannot know how readers will employ the social dynamite we put into their hands. Our job, then, is to develop thoughtful and independent-minded men and women who will take stories and poems that catch their fancy and run with them. Once we’ve linked people up to the power source and directed their attention to the on-off button, the next step is to get out of their way.
If the literature is good, they will be okay. As we have noted, thinkers from Aristotle to Sir Philip Sidney to Samuel Johnson to Percy Shelley to Friedrich Engels to W.E.B. Du Bois to Martha Nussbaum have noted that the best authors are those who are most true to experience and do most honor to humanity’s richness. In a 2018 essay, British-Indian author Salman Rushdie responded to the torrent of lies emanating from the Donald Trump White House by pointing out that the classics will always remain relevant because of their commitment to truth. Seeing literature as essentially a “no bullshit” zone, Rushdie wrote that the job of contemporary writers was “rebuilding our readers’ belief in reality.”
At some deep level, this is why people turn to literature. They intuitively recognize that masterworks, whether old classics or new arrivals, have the power to point us towards the individual and social transformation we crave. These works can turn us upside down and inside out as no other form of writing can. The culture wars forget this when they attempt to reduce literature to politics. When conservatives think that only older works are of value and that works by women or people of color have nothing to teach them, then they are circumscribing their vision of the world. The same is true for those radicals who think that writers and readers should stay within the bounds of their own communities. The thinkers we have surveyed in this book know literature is more powerful and challenging than any of these simplistic ways of thinking, as do good literature teachers, librarians and other of literature’s advocates. They know—and you do as well—that a rich life opens before us the moment we pick up a book and immerse ourselves in its words.
So, hurrah for libraries!
