What You Can’t Ban

I’ve been thinking a lot about banned books in the past few days, since a pair of school districts rescinded invitations to Rainbow Rowell and Meg Medina. It’s not technically banning, but it’s censorship just the same.

Censorship in general flummoxes me. Like, I just don’t get it. You don’t like a book, don’t read it. You don’t think it’s right for your kids, tell them not to read it. But to ask for it to be removed from a library? It makes no sense to me. It’s like how I hate peas. Like really hate them. Hate how they get put in lots of dishes I like, polluting otherwise delicious foods. But I wouldn’t dream of asking grocery stores to take them off their shelves or restaurants to not cook with them. I just don’t buy peas. And if my meal comes with them, I dutifully fork them to the side.

But reading about the Rowell/Medina cases has caused me to think differently. Because Rainbow’s YA novels—the just-released FANGIRL and the earlier ELEANOR & PARK—are among my favorite YA books. Ever. (I haven’t read anything by Meg, but I will now.) One of the reasons that they are my favorite books, as Rainbow herself has noted about E&P in her Twitter feed, is that they’re about hope.

And yet, I think I understand why parents in Minnesota’s Anoka-Hennepin School District objected to the book, though I don’t think it’s the profanity they claim was at issue that really was the problem. I suspect they objected for the same reason that parents object, and challenge, Sherman Alexie’s THE ABSOLUTELY TRUE DIARY OF A PART-TIME INDIAN, or Jay Asher’s 13 REASONS WHY, or Laurie Halse-Anderson’s SPEAK, or the dozens of other wonderful children’s books that get banned.

What they are really objecting to is the ugliness. The ugliness of life so truthfully and marvelously and sometimes painfully depicted in these books. They’re objecting to suicide, and death, and abuse and rape and alienation because they are deflecting all those horrors onto their own children. Which, guess what? The authors are objecting to as well. Only they are objecting in a different—and more effective way— by talking about them through story.

I think parents think if they can ban ugliness in books, they can ban it in life, specifically in the life of their children. In a twisted way, it’s a noble impulse. But it’s completely misguided. And it also doesn’t work. Things like depression and abuse, they THRIVE in dark corners, in secrets and shame. Time and time and time and time again, we as humans have learned the the best way to dispel ugliness is not to ban it, but to put it into the light. This is what authors like Rainbow and Meg are doing.

I know this is true because I know how I feel when I finish a book like ELEANOR & PARK or PART-TIME INDIAN or SPEAK. Which is not full of ugliness but so full of hope and a kind of redemptive love that my chest feels like it’s going to crack wide open. It makes me want to connect with the world. It makes me a better person. I think kids feel this when they finish these books, as well. That’s why they read them. I imagine if the adults who objected to these books read them, they might feel this way as well.

Martin Luther King, Jr. said: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that.”

I think it’s worth remembering that in our discussion of these books, and in our discussion of the people who want them removed.

Peace out.