By Charlotte Stevenson
This week is Banned Books Week, 23-29 September. To mark the occasion, regular writer Charlotte Stevenson asks: Is it ever appropriate to decide what another person should or shouldn’t read?
As an avid reader, I agree with Stephen Fry’s claim that no one can ‘decide’ for other people which books are and aren’t appropriate. Whether they want to read Harry Potter or Anne Frank’s diary, whatever texts get others reading, young and old alike, are texts that matter. We all have different genres and titles within them that attract our attention, with none of us becoming book worms in our adult lives without the help of those stories that set our minds aglow in earliest childhood. Because of this reading spark being found in the most unlikely of places, there is absolutely nothing more astonishing than the fact that books across the world have been routinely barred and banned since before the dawn of the printing press. Why on earth would anyone want to quash one of the greatest parts of self education in such a way? How many miss out on being made aware in a myriad of ways of their own lives and surroundings in a wider context because of the limitations placed upon their libraries?
Every banned book represents the power that literature and the arts hold. In one of my first lectures at York St. John as an undergraduate student, a teacher shared with us:
Writing is a powerful act, it is an act of self-government. The arts have never been more important than they are now.
This concept has never been more true than it is in our current moment. In the wake of increased right wing politics and the popularity of ideas that take us back several decades in terms of progress, nothing speaks more poignantly about the power of great writing than the fact that it is one of the first things to be locked away. It is a constant ongoing battle to protect and pursue women’s rights, but The Handmaid’s Tale and Swastika Night are some the first texts to be vetoed by the reading lists of conservative areas in the USA. Harry Potter has been proven to make young people more open minded and empathetic to others, yet it is often missed out of the schools of religious institutions because it ‘promotes witchcraft’. Anne Frank’s diary, one of the most important texts we have to comprehend the Jewish experience of the Holocaust and to prevent such a thing ever happening again, is frequently kept from readers because of ‘sexually explicit content’. All of these bans claim to protect minds and to nourish ‘what is right’, when the reality couldn’t be more different. What these bans really reveal is that when we read, our minds open to possibilities that can be threatening to principles founded on partial ignorance to how things could be. Reading inspires invention, composition and creativity in every form. But most notably, and to some the word would be dangerously, writing and reading inspire the desire for change.
Equally so, every banned book is an opportunity. It is both a missed opportunity in what it takes away from others and an opportunity to challenge what has been taken away. When The Wizard of Oz, Go Tell It On The Mountain, Animal Farm and To Kill a Mockingbird go missing from our shelves, we must unite to promote liberte, egalite and fraternite for all who love and recognise the importance of books. We owe it to ourselves and all claims of working for peace and progress to unite in a revolution of reading, one in which no book is burned because it calls out a member of government for being a Tyrant or because it promotes racial equality. We owe it to every child born into the Twenty-First Century to pick up pages and share them, to tell stories that will inspire them to question and to think for themselves. We owe it to our individual existence to prove that there is more to sharing the human experience than there being a hierarchy in which some have access to linguistic tools with which to construct walls, whilst others do not have the words to break it down. More than anything, we owe it to everything we are and everything we are not to ensure that no book is ever banned again. So this week alongside all weeks, I encourage you to pick up a ‘banned book’ and to read it aloud to those you love, to share your favourite quotes online and to write your own reading manifesto. There is a world that is waiting for change after all, and it’s only a page away.
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