Banned books, revisited

It's the last day of Banned Books Week, and I have once again been thinking about censorship. I am against all kinds of censorship, in any form, yet cancelling an author's school visit because some stupid parent thinks one of her books is offensive is somewhat different from banning 90% of world literature on loose grounds.

In the country where I was born, the list of banned books would fill a library in itself. Just some examples:

The Bible was banned because "religion is the opium of the people" (Marx). All other religious books were banned for the same reason. All books by Western philosophers not featured in Lenin's article "Three sources and three constituents of Marxism" were banned. All books by Russian philosophers who did not subscribe to Marxism were banned.
 
All books by Russian emigrees were banned because they were enemies of the people. All books by relatives of the emigrees were banned. All books by Russian writers repressed by the regime were banned. The Russian literary martyrology - writers murdered, sent to labour camps, famished to death - carries at least 2,500 names, whose only crime was their words. All books by relatives of the repressed were banned. All books by people who protested against repressions were banned. All books that even vaguely alluded to the Great Terror were banned. All books that even vaguely expressed sympathy with characters representing the opponents of communism were banned. All books by the Nobel Prize winner Joseph Brodsky were banned because his country had sent him to exile. 

All foreign books that did not portray class struggle were banned. Ulysses and Remembrance of Things Past were banned bacause they did not portray the inhuman conditions of the working class under capitalism. For whom the Bell Tolls was banned because it portrayed the Spanish civil war that did not exist according to Soviet history books.  All books by foreign writers who had made the tiniest utterance questioning the country of the victorious communism were banned. All books that did not show life as it should be according to the communist worldview were banned.

All books that had the slightest allusion to human reproduction were banned. That doesn't leave much of world literature.

Still, I repeat: I am firmly against ALL forms of censorship. Including cancelling a school visit.

Banned books

Colleagues are talking a lot about Banned Books Week. Here are just two of many excellent articles on the subject. I used to be quite contemptuous about this form of censorship. In the late '90s I contributed to a special issue of the journal Paradoxa on censorship in children’s literature. With my background in a country with real censorship, where 2,500 writers paid with their lives for their written words during the Great Terror, I found the practice of removing children’s books from libraries or pasting underwear over Mickey’s private parts in In the Night Kitchen touchingly innocent. I now admit that I was wrong. No censorship is innocent.

I have written about silly examples of Swedish children's books published in the US, when a striptease dancer in a nonsense verse The Pirate Book turned into a “smashing lady” and got a proper black dress over her naked breasts. Or another nonsensical story, Else-Marie and Her Seven Daddies, where a girl takes a bath with her mother and her tiny imaginary daddies – in the US edition, the artist agreed to produce another picture with the girl reading in an armchair. Nobody objected to the seven daddies then. They probably would today.

I was upset when the mother was deleted from the image in the American version of The Wild Baby Goes to Sea, because it was an important part of the story that a parent is allowed to participate in imaginary adventures. Authors and artists agree to do such interventions because otherwise their books will not be translated, and the US market is powerful.

But it is still worse with original books. When I taught in California, my colleagues told me I was exceptionally brave because I had The Adventures of Tom Sawyer on my syllabus. I thought they were joking. The students explained how controversial this book was in the eyes of the school district authorities and how challenging, not to say reckless, it would be for them to choose it for classroom use.

My two other rather unexpected teaching experiences concerned Bridge to Terabithia and The Giver, two novels which I regard among the best works for children published in the US during the last 50 years. I was prepared for the discussion around the theme of death. In fact, I was very well prepared for this discussion of “sensitive issues”, with lots of good arguments I have been using in my courses in Sweden. But the students did not object to death as a subject in a children’s book. On the contrary, they thought that Bridge to Terabithia was a wonderful book to use in the classroom to talk to children about death (my intention had been to show, just as the author says herself, that this is not “a book about death”. Never mind). But they were concerned about the mention of religion. Jess’s family owns a Bible and goes to church on Easter Day. In the novel, this is an opportunity to discuss diversity, since Leslie’s parents are atheists, and she has never been to church. However, a student pointed out in her paper, as a teacher she was not allowed to discuss religion in the classroom without the parents’ consent; which means that a whole level of significance in the novel would have to be excluded from classroom discussion. Or maybe the novel can be censored? Let the family go to a market instead – this is what was done in translated children’s books in the Soviet Union whenever church visits were mentioned. Only how can a visit to a market inspire the underlying ideas of the novel about life and death, sin and reconciliation? Best not to use it at all then.

But the argument against The Giver – which by the way most of the students agreed was the best novel in the whole course – made me laugh and cry at the same time. The novel cannot be taught in schools, a student claimed in a paper, because it describes extrasensory perception, which parents may find offensive and inappropriate. The half of me that was laughing said: “Hey, this is a story, this is sort of science fiction!” But the other half sighed with resignation: “Poor kids! Not only are they denied the pleasures of the demonic Harry Potter, but also The Giver is dangerous, and not at all for the reasons I would think subversive”.

These are some of the aspects of censorship I brought home from my years in California and shared with my Swedish colleagues. Together, we laughed. Today I believe we are all in dismay. Alfie Atkins' father is not allowed to smoke his pipe any more. Critics, publishers and educators in Sweden, which I have always thought was an enlightened country, very seriously discuss whether nudity, sex, alcohol, smoking, politics, religion should be allowed in children's books. Whether death is an appropriate subject. Whether books should be removed form libraries because characters eat meat or drink coffee.

I am concerned. Censorship is spreading. How can we protect our children from overprotective adults?