You Can’t Read That! is a periodic post featuring banned book reviews and news roundups.
YCRT! Mini-Rant
From a long editorial titled The Erosion of Free Speech on a conservative think tank’s website, I learn that more than 300 students and professors at Valdosta State University in Georgia signed a petition demanding the withdrawal of the American Library Association’s 2015 Banned Books Week poster. They claim it’s Islamophobic.
A significant number of Americans, many of them in academe, reacted to the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack in Paris and the more recent attempted attack on a “draw Muhammed” event in Texas by condemning anti-Islamic speech as “hate speech.” Some are even calling for laws banning such speech.
PEN International, an organization that tries to defend authors from threats of imprisonment, torture, and other restrictions on their freedom to write, has announced it will grant its 2015 Freedom of Expression Award to Charlie Hebdo. Six prominent PEN members have protested the award. Not that many years ago, some Western writers and publishers went along with the Iranian fatwa against author Salman Rushdie, supporting the suppression of his satiric novel The Satanic Verses.
No one wants to sleep with bedfellows like Pamela Geller, but if anti-Islamic speech is banned, what else might be? Anything that might upset anyone?
Here’s something I wrote two weeks ago that wasn’t, but in hindsight should have been, part of a YCRT! column:
From the Columbia Daily Spectator:
“During the week spent on Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses,’ the class was instructed to read the myths of Persephone and Daphne, both of which include vivid depictions of rape and sexual assault. As a survivor of sexual assault, the student described being triggered while reading such detailed accounts of rape throughout the work. However, the student said her professor focused on the beauty of the language and the splendor of the imagery when lecturing on the text. As a result, the student completely disengaged from the class discussion as a means of self-preservation. She did not feel safe in the class. When she approached her professor after class, the student said she was essentially dismissed, and her concerns were ignored.
“Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’ is a fixture of Lit Hum [Literature Humanities], but like so many texts in the Western canon, it contains triggering and offensive material that marginalizes student identities in the classroom. These texts, wrought with histories and narratives of exclusion and oppression, can be difficult to read and discuss as a survivor, a person of color, or a student from a low-income background.”
The article, written by members of Columbia University’s Multicultural Affairs Advisory Board, proposes educating professors and graduate teaching assistants about “potential trigger warnings and suggestions for how to support triggered students.”
As an older person educated in the literature of the Western canon, back in the day when we didn’t shy away from learning about mankind’s dismal history of rape, slavery, and genocide, I’m starting to feel a bit like the Jeff Bridges character in The Giver, the old man responsible for knowing the dirty and upsetting secrets that must be hidden from the population at large.
Oh, I know it’s a silly thought. Right now there are millions of real-life Givers; pretty much anyone with a decent education and an AARP card. But the way things are going on today’s college and university campuses, never mind the emerging practice of purging library shelves of older books with racial superiority themes, once we die off who will become the Givers? Who will preserve the memories no one wants to acknowledge? Who will write or speak the things no one wants to hear?
YCRT News Roundup
Hmm … who could have guessed the first item in this news roundup would be about University of Minnesota administrators telling professors to take down posters for an academic panel on the Charlie Hebdo attack and the censorship of anti-Islamic speech? The poster features a famous Charlie Hebdo Muhammad cartoon, semi-covered with a red “censored” stamp.
The second item too, it seems: the New York Theatre Workshop asked a playwright to withdraw a one-act play from a ensemble production of one-act plays protesting censorship. That sentence really needs an exclamation point, doesn’t it? The other plays are okay, but this play is about an actor with a censorship dilemma … whether to take a role playing Muhammad.
People keep telling me to calm down, insisting Kansas’ proposed law banning exposing children to “harmful material” in public, parochial, and private K-12 schools will not be used to prosecute teachers. How can they be so naive? Of course it will, if GOP legislators have their way.
In Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, busy parents counted more than 100 “profanities” (such as “bastard” and “God damn”) in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men and challenged its inclusion on a local high school reading list.
Like-minded parents in Asheville, North Carolina challenged the teaching of The Kite Runner in a high school AP English class. The novel has been replaced with All Quiet on the Western Front until a school board committee rules on the challenge.
Oh. My. God. The 1965 classic, Perversion for Profit (NSFW):
[youtube]https://youtu.be/pciD9gd3my0[/youtube]
YCRT Banned Book Review
Maus, I: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History
Art Spiegelman
I’m still a newbie when it comes to graphic novels and memoirs. I’ll confess that I looked down on them in the past, equating them with comic books, which I consider a lesser form of literature. But I’m trying, and I must say I thought Maus was powerful, perhaps even more powerful than if it had been written as a traditional memoir.
The outline should be familiar to everyone by now: Art Spiegelman, who has a touchy relationship with his father, coaxes him into telling the story of his life in Poland after the Nazi invasion, right up to the point where he and Spiegelman’s mother are captured and shipped off to Auschwitz. Sequels to this first volume follow the family’s experiences in the camps, but I have not yet read those.
Famously, Spiegelman depicts Jews as mice, Germans as cats, and Poles as pigs. The technique seems simplistic, but it is effective.
I knew very little of the lives of Polish Jews before they were rounded up and sent to the camps. The inexorable process whereby the Nazis, aided by sympathetic and anti-Semitic Poles, first imposed travel and commerce restrictions on the Jews, then took over their businesses, then moved them into ghettos, then began to starve them, then began to round up those over 70 years of age, etc, is as horrifying as anything I’ve read in more traditional accounts of the Holocaust. Spiegelman’s families of mice, struggling to get along and feed their families while trying to believe the latest outrage will be the last one, that things can’t possibly get any worse, are far more sympathetic in graphic form than they would be as mere words on paper.
Yes, I will read the sequels. I have come around to seeing the worth of graphic novels and memoirs.
Maus has been the target of would-be censors and book banners. Even though Maus won a Pulitzer and universal praise, some Holocaust survivors objected to the depiction of Jews as mice (or rats, as some claim) as degrading and dehumanizing. Some Polish readers took their representation as pigs as an ethnic slur, especially since pork and pigs are considered unclean in the Jewish faith. Maus was unsuccessfully challenged in Oregon in 2009 as being “too dark” for younger readers and too insulting to various ethnic groups. More recently, in 2012, a Polish-American library patron, upset over the depiction of Poles as pigs, tried to have the book pulled from public libraries in Pasadena, California. And just today I read, via Bookriot, that Maus has been removed from Russian bookstores … not because of mice and pigs, not because it’s “too dark,” but because it has swastikas in it, and swastikas are banned in Russia.
Adult graphic novels make some adults uncomfortable. As simple-minded as it may sound, I think the cause of their unease is the thought that children will be attracted to what look like comic books, then exposed to dark and sexual adult themes and subjects. It doesn’t take much to push those who think this way to the next step, the idea of eliminating these graphic novels from libraries, schools, and even bookstores.
To date I’ve read three graphic novels that have been the subject of challenges and bannings: Fun Home, Persepolis, and now Maus. In all three cases it struck me that without the drawings, none of these books would have been targeted. You can write about a young girl realizing she’s gay, but if you draw a picture of her and another girl in bed together (Fun Home), you’ve crossed the line. You can write about life in Tehran under the Shah and then the Ayatollah, but if you draw a dissident being whipped (Persepolis), you’ve gone too far. You can write about the Holocaust, but if you draw Jews as mice and Poles as pigs (Maus), you’ve dehumanized your subjects and no one should be allowed to read your book.
Here are some source links on attempts to ban Maus:
This kind of bullshit is right up there with avoiding “trigger” words. For fuck sake when did just being offended become the equivalent of “hate”. You can fucking offend me all you want I know the difference between being offended and someone advocating harming me. Ya can offend me all you want but you fucking better not talk advocate harming me.
Fuckin’ A, brother Burt!