Monday
Given my professional interest in reading, I’m finding one contrast between the two political parties particularly resonant. As Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg puts it, “We want to ban assault weapons, they want to ban books.” Oprah Winfrey echoed that contrast this past Wednesday when she pointed out,
There are people who want you to see our country as a nation of us against them. People who want to scare you. Who want to rule you. People who would have you believe that books are dangerous. And assault rifles are safe.
Comedian Wandy Sykes had her own take on the culture wars. “Until a drag queen walks into a school and beats eight kids to death with a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, I think you’re focusing on the wrong shit.”
There have been so many stories about book bans that, as with mass shootings, I’ve stopped blogging on them. In recent months there have been the MAGA president of New College throwing out books from the discontinued gender studies program; an Oklahoma school system revoking the teaching license of a teacher after she posted the QR code of the Brooklyn Public Library’s catalogue of banned books in her classroom; the entire Utah school system banning works by Sarah J. Maas, Judy Blume, Rupi Kaur, Margaret Atwood and other authors (the books include Blume’s Forever, Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, and Kaur’s poetry collection Milk and Honey); a South Dakota school district destroying copies of David Eggers’s The Circle, Allison Bechdel’s Fun Home and Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower (among others); a Florida school decreeing that Amanda Gorman’s “The Hill We Climb” (delivered at Joe Biden’s inauguration) is inappropriate for grade schoolers; and on and on. One frequent target of book banners is Toni Morrison, the only African American to have won the Nobel Prize for literature and one of America’s greatest novelists.
I mention Morrison because she has been particularly eloquent on the subject of book banning. It’s understandable, she writes in a short essay entitled “Peril,” why authoritarians ban unsettling writers. That’s because these authors “can disturb the social oppression that functions like a coma on the population, a coma despots call peace.”
Or as she asserts elsewhere, “Fear of unmonitored writing is justified—because truth is trouble.”
Truthful writers, Morrison goes on to say, spell trouble for “the ignorant bully, the sly racist, and the predators feeding off the world’s resources.” The suppression of writers, she contends, is
the earliest harbinger of the steady peeling away of additional rights and liberties that will follow. The history of persecuted writers is as long as the history of literature itself. And the efforts to censor, starve, regulate, and annihilate us are clear signs that something important has taken place. Cultural and political forces can sweep clean all but the “safe,” all but state-approved art.
I write about Morrison in my recently released book, Better Living through Literature: How Books Change Lives and (Sometimes) History, because of the way that Beloved became an issue in Virginia’s 2021 gubernatorial race. There we saw Republican Glenn Youngkin run, as his closing ad, an account of a mother (a Republican operative, it turned out) complaining how her high school senior had been traumatized by Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Youngkin went on to win the election and then set up a short-lived hotline to report teachers teaching supposedly nefarious content
As I note in my book, certain people have reason to fear Morrison’s novel, which touches on two of the most volatile issues in American politics, race and a woman’s autonomy over her body:
In the work, … the pregnant slave Sethe is first sexually assaulted (White men suck milk from her breasts), then beaten savagely, and then, after she escapes and they come to reclaim her and her children, driven to kill the baby to save it from slavery. The novel is meant to be unsettling, and it can indeed challenge the worldview of those parents who don’t want their children facing up to the ugly history of racism and sexism. For Morrison as for William Faulkner, one of the authors on which she models herself, the past is not dead nor even past, and we see it return in the form of the ghost baby that haunts Sethe.
[I note as an aside that Morrison is censured in a way that Faulkner seldom is. In Sanctuary, to cite one of his works, a woman is actually raped with a corncob, but one doesn’t see it appearing on many, if any, banned book lists. Race, I suspect, plays a role in the discrepancy.]
Morrison could be talking about her own fiction when she writes about how writers are sometimes our only defense against deep trauma. She may have the long-term effects of slavery in mind when she writes,
Certain kinds of trauma visited on peoples are so deep, so cruel, that unlike money, unlike vengeance, even unlike justice, or rights, or the goodwill of others, only writers can translate such trauma and turn sorrow into meaning, sharpening the moral imagination.
Morrison writes that if we deprive our students, and ultimately ourselves, of literature that addresses and names the chaos that we face, then we condemn ourselves to a “bleak, unlivable, insufferable existence.” Maybe MAGA parents and school administrators think that ideal students are comatose students—students who don’t grapple with issues they encounter in high school (Forever, Wallflower) or our corporate, climate-challenged society (Oryx and Crake)—but a price is paid for ignoring them. People become angry and resentful when the world defies all attempts to understand it, and those emotions can show up in socially dysfunctional ways. On the other hand, if you give them a narrative that helps them frame what they are experiencing, they feel empowered.
That’s why so many teachers teach Lord of the Flies, which gives high school kids a handle on bullying. And why Romeo and Juliet, which shows young teens negotiating and feeling buoyed by their powerful sexual urges is taught in first-year high school classes throughout the land. Just knowing that there’s a language to address what they’re going through—which after all is often unsettling—is comforting and enlightening.
For a while now we’ve been experiencing a golden age of Young Adult Fiction (YAL), and the fact that teachers and librarians are being forbidden to alert young people to these remarkable novels is an abomination. Teachers, professionally trained as to what their students need, are being targeted by MAGA politicos, some of whom (as Eggers observes) don’t even send their children to public schools.
Fortunately, communities are pushing back, with rightwing school board members being pushed out of their positions as people wake up and realize what is happening. But damage is still being done.
