Almost two months after banned books week, I was sorting out links and bits of articles I'd collected and came across two I have to share. This is not going to be a post on censorship, or how one parent doesn't have the right to dictate to all parents what literature should be available to their children, or on the right for a parent or child to decide whether or not they want to read a particular book (though I believe all those things). These two tidbits are about the people the books touch, for better or worse.
The first is an article about how Penguin Young Readers Group took out a full page ad in the New York Times defending Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson, a young adult novel about a rape victim that had been called "soft pornography" in an op-ed piece in the Missouri News-Leader. What most touched me was a comment by a reader at the end of the article:
The irony that this man chose to try and censor a book in which the main character responds to her rape and the way her high school peers treat her afterwards by not speaking was evidently lost on him. He tried to silence the silent and, I hope, much to his surprise, the roar was heard around the world. Silence is the enemy of the abused. Silence is what allows abusers and abusive situations to flourish. I know this to be absolutely true because, as a child, I was abused by my father. I tried to tell and was either told that I was a liar, that I was making things up or in one memorable case, that I must have deserved what I got. So I gave up trying. That was before I found books like SPEAK and CHINESE HANDCUFFS and authors like Laurie Halse Anderson, Chris Crutcher and every other writer who has had their works threatened or banned. Silence is not the answer and that is the message I want my granddaughter and every abused and traumatized person to know.
Silence isn't the answer, unless you have no idea what you're talking about. In Banned Books Week: 10 Banned Books You Might Not Expect, the Texas Board of Education banned the beloved classic Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? by Bill Martin, Jr. in January of this year because it (mistakenly) thought the book was written by the same Bill Martin who penned the nonchildren's book Ethical Marxism: The Categorical Imperative of Liberation.
Enough said.
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Banned Brown Bear, Brown Bear? How far will people go? As a mother of five kids, two of whom are teens, I support parental supervision of their kids' reading material. I read what my kids read, and when they want to read something "offensive" I read it first or at the very least find out what it's all about before "recommending" whether they should choose something else. I have only said "no" to a handful of books that ended up more adult that YA. But I allow quite a bit of freedom in my kids's reading because I understand the need to connect with other people, or characters, who know what they feel, what they think, and what they are experiencing in life. Prime example, Ellen Hopkins books. My daughter's read most of them. I have not. But I know exactly what they are and why they've been banned and criticized. They are not banned in my home because long before my daughter found Ellen Hopkins, she also found a lot of "bad" stuff through her friends and at school. She went through hell for three years clawing her way out, with the help of her family. Ellen Hopkins did not put those ideas in her head. Instead, she reassured my daughter that she was not alone in the world, that someone out there understood what she was going through. I don't have a problem with that at all. But I would not let those books fall into the hands of my nine year old or even my newest teenage son, whose experiences are very different. But it is not my place to tell any other kid or parent that they are not allowed to read them. Censorship is a paranoid's attempt to MAKE parents do their jobs. But in the end, it is still the parent's job – not everybody else's.
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