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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