An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.(Oscar Wilde)
There are any number of topics one can address when one sits down to write about Banned Books Week. We can talk about who bans books, why they want those specific books banned, or how librarians, booksellers, and educators respond to those reasons. But for now, I want to take a slightly different tack, and focus on the books themselves. If banned books are so dangerous, so threatening, so incendiary…what is the good of them?
Butler University’s website has a pretty good breakdown of the most common reasons books are challenged or banned, including some interesting graphs about which parties are doing the challenging. Among the reasons provided are “racial issues”, “sexual situations or dialog”, and “violence”, all topics that are difficult sometimes even painful, to discuss. It is a natural human reaction to want to shield ourselves, and especially our children, from painful and difficult things, and protect them from the pull of the tide for as long as possible.
But the truth of the matter is that the tide can’t be stopped. And the truth of the matter is that banned books save lives.
For many people, reading books that were challenged or banned offered them their first opportunity to identify with someone like themselves. In a heart-breakingly honest article for the PEN American, Lidia Yuknavitch (author of The Small Backs of Children) talks about growing up in a troubled family, and silenced by a loneliness so profound that it nearly drove her to suicide. She also talks about how a novel called Blood and Guts in High School offered her hope:
The novel is about how being born a girl is always already a death sentence, because the body of a girl is colonized by culture the moment she arrives.
That likely sounds bleak.
What was the opposite of bleak, was this. The girl in this story had more agency and voice than any girl I’d ever read or would read in my entire life, and more than any girl I knew in real life. And this: I identified with her story.
This particular tale is a triumph, because Yuknavitch was able to break through her silence, and see the world around her differently with the help of this book (which, to date, has been banned in at least two countries). But how many people have been deprived of that chance?
A similar story can be found on the website of the Human Rights Campaign regarding the 1982 publication of Annie On My Mind by Nancy Garden. The book itself deals with two high school girls who fall in love, come out to their friends and families, and, ultimately, learn to accept who they are. The book was headline news when it came out, particularly because there were no YA books about homosexual relationships. in fact, Nancy Garden “repeatedly told reporters that her desire to write young adult books with LGBT characters stemmed from the lack of such books when she came out as a young lesbian in the 1950’s. She wanted to make it better for new generations of LGBT youth.” Garden also contributed to Awake, an anthology published by the Trevor Project, an organization dedicated to ending teen suicide among the LBGTQ community.
Annie On My Mind was sent as part of a package to 42 Kansas and Missouri schools by a homosexual activist group that wanted to ensure that accurate information about homosexuality was available to young people. In response, a fundamentalist minister led a ground of protestors to the Kansas Board of Education and publicly burned copies of the book on the front steps.
Thankfully, the publicity generated by this action actually produced a backlash of support for Garden’s book, and libraries across the country began stocking extra copies–in case students who weren’t comfortable checking out the book for fear of stigmatization just slipped it into their backpacks to take home. Since then, the book has been listed as one of the School Library Journal’s 100 Books That Shaped the Century, for offering younger readers honest answers and a real sense of hope.
But banned books aren’t just saving readers; sometimes they even save their authors. There is no doubt that Judy Blume, author of the seminal Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret, Deenie, and Superfudge has offered generations of readers guidance, companionship and hope–despite being one of the most challenged authors of the 21st century. Author and songwriter Amanda Palmer actually wrote a song for Blume that includes the lines: “You told me things that nobody around me would tell … I don’t remember my friends from gymnastics class, / But I remember when Deenie was at the school … Margaret, bored, counting hats in the synagogue … All of them lived in my head, quietly whispering: / “You are not so strange.”
Blume herself is very open about the fact that writing these beloved–and contentious–books also saved her, as well. In an interview with the Guardian, she recalled, “”I talked to my own private God the way Margaret does. I would plead, ‘Just let me be normal'”. During the writing of Iggie’s House, a story of a black family moving into an all-white neighborhood, Blume noted, “It was the most traumatic time of my life…and then I started to write. Writing saved my life. It saved me, it gave me everything…”
So when you think about banned books, don’t just think about those doing the banning. Think too, about the readers; about the people these books could save, people who feel alone and silenced. Think about the people who aren’t marginalized or lonely who can learn to empathize through these works, and become allies and supporters. Then think about coming to the library and checking out one of these, or any number of other banned books. Because, as Banned Book Week makes us realize, you never know which book will be the next to change–or save–a life.