| I stopped in the Lakeview Branch to pass along a flyer. The librarian pointed behind me, and I turned around to see a display of books including the book named on my flyer. The librarian said that these were "challenged or banned" books. "Challenged or banned?" Walking closer to the display, I found John Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath," class struggles, I said to myself. Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass," Alex Sanchez's "Rainbow Boys," Linda de Haan and Stern Nijland's "King & King," Julia Alvaez's "How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents," Maya Angelou's "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings," Alice Walker's "The Color Purple," Toni Morrison's "Bluest Eyes," "Song of Solomon," and "Beloved" ; yes, it made sense in the world we live in. This is Banned Books Week 2007, September 29 to October 6, 2007, sponsored a number of associations, including the American Booksellers Association and the American Library Association. This is the 26th annual celebration "of the freedom to read." It is a celebration to jar our cultural memories and remind us that we have"this freedom," write the sponsors, "not only to choose what we read, but also to select from a full array of possibilities, is firmly rooted in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees freedom of speech and freedom of the press." While these challenges are motivated by a desire to protect children, this method of protection [challenging and banning texts] contains hazards far greater than exposure to the "evil" against which the protection is leveled. It is not an accident that these challenges, often by parents, are often complicit with efforts to limit not only the "freedom" of certain perspectives but also limit the exposure of cultural productions that would speak to their heritage, racial, gender, or class identity, and community. /I have written elsewhere about the concern shared by many progressive educators of literature that focuses on race, gender, and class representations. In "Sittin' on Top of the World," Clyde Woods argues that "while hegemonic disciplines search for a new mission, a new social order, and a new social-spatial fix," the development of "marginalized intellectual traditions" is interrupted. Critical race studies, gender studies, African American studies, ethnic studies, indigenous studies, environmental studies, labour studies, regional studies, and queer studies are being devalued exactly at the moment in which they are poised to produce new multidisciplinary forms of geographic thought and action, while also imagining a new world./Freedom of the hegemony to fear difference trumps the freedom of all to be and thrive. How would we ever imagine a new world if we and our children are ignorant of the current world of war and greed but they learn everything about challenges and banning -- exclusion of the many for the benefit of the few? The American Library Associations website lists books written by authors of color that have been challenged or banned, some repeatedly year after year. This list includes some of the books listed above and "Kaffir Boy" by Mark Mathabane, "The House of Spirits" by Isabel Allende, "Bless Me, Ultima" by Rudolfo A. Anaya, and "Native Son" by Richard Wright. Gordon Park's "The Learning Tree" and Ernest J. Gaines' "The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pitman"are also listed. These books, according to the censors, employ "offensive" language or contain "sexual content." Throughout this nation, every day, children engage video games or blogs with offensive language and sexually graphic images -- gratuitous violence as a matter of normalcy! I wonder if the White children of Jena Central had read some of the texts listed above and had come to an understand about the origins of "innocence," would they have hung those three nooses on that tree in an effort to taunt those Black children? The flyer I handed the librarian was an announcement for an upcoming reading and discussion of Toni Morrison';s "Beloved," at A Room of One's Own, October 18, 6 p.m. So there's a text, dear to me and my people among the challenged and banned books displayed at the library. Individuals hard at work to continue the "subjugation" of certain knowledge from the libraries and schools display, themselves, the naivete of "thought" that supposes that the authors and their representations (the people and their lived experiences) would disappear, would, in fact, be removed from cultural memory. I am sure this is the "thinking" behind the nation's collective effort to limit the freedom and right to be enlightened and empowered to envision a new world. So much for "we want diversity" slogans. As Baby Suggs says in "Beloved," they don't know when enough is enough. They had taken her milk, Sethe said. Afterward she saw "boys hanging from the most beautiful sycamores in the world." And after that, they came in the yard, came looking for her and the children, property all. And the "crawling" baby was no more. |
| Voices/Dr. Jean Daniels Banned books, banned freedoms! |
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