THOUGHT POLICE ON THE PROWL!

By SHAGORIKA EASWAR

Books, many of them, have the power to change the way a society thinks and acts.

To Kill a Mockingbird is one such. Once banned for being immoral and improper, and cause for debate at the Peel school board a few years ago, it was, paradoxically, voted America’s best-loved novel around the same time.

 It is one of my all-time favourites, and my husband and I caught a performance of the play based on the novel at Stratford a few years ago. In the lobby were copies of the book and books on Harper Lee, the author, along with other seemingly unrelated ones. Les Miserables, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and... The Jungle Book. All had been or are banned.

Of course, Kipling has come under fire for his racist writings, but then why ban only The Jungle Book?

Banned Books presents ‘The world’s most controversial books, past and present”.

It also presents a grim picture of the state of things. “Books have been banned for as long as people have been writing things down...Outright bans in which authorities forbid a book to be published or sold, are not the only form of censorship. Rather, books can be made difficult to access, perhaps by being removed from schools and libraries. Just as insidiously, authors and publishers sometimes censor themselves by not creating or publishing work that might give offence.”

John Ralston Saul echoed that thought at an event co-hosted by TIFA and PEN Canada last year, that when books are banned, not only is the author silenced, we effectively silence editors, publishers, translators, illustrators, books sellers, librarians. And readers. People who might have read those books and come to their own conclusions.

Banned Books is divided into sections, with prominent books that were banned in different periods of time.

Pre-1900, it was The Decameron (Giovanni Boccaccio) and Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, among others.

Grimm’s Fairy Tales (The Brothers Grimm) and Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in the 19th century.

In the Between the Wars section, one finds All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque (now a new movie on the brutal reality of war), Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.

Post-war, Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl received the same treatment, along with Dr Zhivago (Boris Pasternak), Catch 22 (Joseph Heller), and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Ken Kesey).

The late 20th century saw many books by Black writers banned. These included Maya Angelou’s I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings and The Colour Purple by Alice Walker. And then there were Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and the Harry Potter series.

Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi and Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner are prominent among books banned in the 21st century.

Many of the books listed won prestigious literary awards and were made into award-winning movies. We adopted the titles of the books or phrases from them into our terminology. Expressions like “Catch 22” for instance.

Books are banned for any number of reasons – some of them seemingly valid. Because they upset or insult a segment of society or they “promote” choices that go against the grain of the majority, be that an ethnicity or a religion.

But it’s a dangerously slippery slope. Who is setting the parameters of what is acceptable? Who gets to decide what is objectionable? Who appointed these watchdogs of moral and cultural standards? And who is watching over them?

Banning books shuts the windows to new thoughts and ideas. It silences a whole ecosystem.

For books are not banned only in autocratic regimes, in places you would assume such practices might be common, but also in the so-called free world.

From July 2021 to June 2022, PEN America’s Index of School Book Bans lists 2,532 instances of individual books being banned, affecting 1,648 unique book titles.

It’s interesting to note that Canadian poet Rupi Kaur’s Milk and Honey is both a best-seller and on the list of the most banned books in the US.

George Orwell, whose Animal Farm was banned in many places in the world, wrote, “If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear”.

Perhaps this nugget of information from Banned Books will help put things in perspective:

Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems by Galilieo Galilei, banned by the Roman Inquisition the year after its publication in 1632, remained on the Catholic Church’s list of prohibited books for three centuries.

Galilieo had dared to posit that the earth was not the centre of the universe.

How radical is that?