Viva the Book Traffickers

 Books, Censorship, Reading  No Responses »
Oct 092012
 

Banned Books Week is over, and we can all relax for another year. Our books are safe, or are they? If you live in Arizona, look over your shoulder.

In 2010, Arizona passed a law that says ethnic studies may be barred from Arizona’s public schools for fostering “resentment” of another race. “The law was created to prohibit courses that promote the overthrow of a government,” says author Tony Diaz. In other words, the Arizona law equates ethnic studies with promoting revolution.

In 2012, Diaz and friends started the Librotraficante (Book Traffickers) movement. They gathered together as many donated books as they could get their hands on; stuffed their cars, trucks, and vans with books in Texas; and smuggled them via caravan into Arizona, where they established four underground libraries. Diaz and his band of literature-loving freedom fighters hope to compile one full set of the 85 books confiscated from Tucson classrooms—books that included celebrated Latino writers such as Junot Diaz (Drown) and Laura Esquivel (Like Water for Chocolate).

So if we allow a state to censor Mexican-American studies. What’s next? Asian studies, African-American studies? What group will we next decide is dangerous? Vegetarians? Cat lovers?

One More Way to Handle Censorship

Here’s another look at censorship. This offers one solution to those aggravating books that you disagree with:

Don’t Tangle with Tango

 Censorship, Family, Love, Nature, Parenting  No Responses »
Mar 262012
 

A little penguin named Tango and a banned book have created an uproar in Rochester, MN.

Rochester is the home of the Mayo Clinic, the facility patients come to from all over the world to get answers to tough medical questions. Here is where you hope someone will bring information into the light, not hide it. And yet in a recent move, Rochester School Superintendent Michael Muñoz and two school board members decided to do just that: They went against school policy and pulled a book from the shelves of Gibbs Elementary School after a parent complained. The book was And Tango Makes Three, a tale of two male penguins that hatch and raise a baby chick together.

This is not Tango‘s first trip to the rodeo. It has been on the American Library Association’s banned books list since it came out in 2005, usually in the number one spot. Critics contend that it endorses a homosexual lifestyle. As the book says, “She [Tango] was the very first penguin to have two daddies.”

This is a true story. Authors Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell could have included Tango’s much-publicized life in a nonfiction book about animals. Instead, they chose to write a children’s book about a most unusual penguin family.

Tango’s real family lives in the Central Park Zoo in New York. Roy and Silo are a pair of boy chinstrap penguins who prefer each other’s company to that of the girl penguins. The zookeeper noticed how Roy and Silo bowed and sang to each other, made a nice nest, and even rolled an egg-shaped rock into the nest, sitting on it for hours in the hopes of  “hatching” it.

Roy and Silo wanted a family.

When another penguin couple at the zoo produced two fertile eggs, the zookeeper gave one of them to Roy and Silo. After all, twins take work, and the odds of having two fertile penguin eggs raised to adulthood by one couple are slim. Roy and Silo knew “just what to do,” the zookeeper said. They kept the egg warm, turning it over and over so all sides would benefit, until their daughter Tango arrived. Tango’s fathers fed her, sang to her, and snuggled her warm at night. They made sure she knew she was wanted.

If we allow books like Tango to be banned because they make one person uncomfortable, we are giving in to tyranny. We are permitting someone else to control where we get our ideas, and Tango presents some brilliant ones about loving parenting and creating strong families (no matter what their makeup). It has received several national awards for good reason.

I admit I grow impatient with parents who claim censorship is needed to protect our children. I say the solution to this is simple: you control your child’s reading list, and I’ll control mine. Censorship is for cowards. If you want to provide gutsy and meaningful parenting, read Tango with your children and talk about why you do or don’t agree with the worldview it presents.

In Rochester, Tango‘s story was indeed tangled. It was first challenged in the fall of 2011. According to school district policy, it was sent for review to the district’s Committee for Reconsideration of Resources, which voted on November 15 to keep the book in its media collection. When the parent appealed again, Superintendent Muñoz and cohorts decided to ignore that decision and ban the book anyway. On March 19, after a packed school board meeting, Muñoz apologized and said the book would be returned to the library. The next step, if the parent wants to continue, would be to appeal to the entire school board during a public hearing.

I hope Tango is safe and sound in Rochester. In the recent standing-room-only meeting where not one person spoke against the book, Mayor Ardell Brede held a sign proclaiming Rochester as an “inclusive community.”

Like poet Carl Sandburg, I believe “inclusive” to be one of my favorite words. It doesn’t leave much room for hiding; it drags censorship out of the dark where the real dance begins in a free society.  

___________

For another look at censorship and parenting, check out Book of Mercy.

To hear a reading of And Tango Makes Three:
 

 

“Mom, They’re Banning Books!”

 Book of Mercy, Books, Censorship, Parenting, Reading  2 Responses »
Sep 222011
 

I had been stumbling around in the plot of a book I was writing for some time. I knew the protagonist couldn’t read and that books were disappearing. I was going for some kind of Alice Hoffman magical realism thing. Perhaps with a little humor since my book’s working title was “Too Dark to Read,” after the Groucho Marx quote: “Outside a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside a dog, it’s too dark to read.” But then in 1996, my daughter came through the door, crying, “Mom, they’re banning books!”

My daughter was a junior and an IB student in a North Carolina high school. She had a mean forehand and a voracious love for books, including the book in question, The Old Gringo by Carlos Fuentes. Fuentes is recognized as one of the most influential writers in Latin America. In fact, in 2006, he received the Four Freedoms Award for Freedom of Speech and Expression. Ironic, I know.

My first response was to sit down, read the book, and discuss it with my daughter. It is the story of celebrated American writer and journalist Ambrose Bierce, who mysteriously disapeared in Mexico during its civil war. Fuentes imagines the fate of Bierce among Pancho Villa’s troops in a tale that examines “the borders between men and women, dreams and reality, Mexico and the U.S,” as Publishers Weekly put it.

What the censors in our town (parents of one of the students) objected to were explicit scenes between a young Mexican revolutionary and the American teacher, who falls in love with him. I had no problem with my 17-year-old daughter reading those scenes. But then I’ve never denied my daughter a book she wanted to read.

After an intense public meeting and a review by committee, The Old Gringo eventually was returned to the shelf and the IB curriculum. But in the process, my daughter’s English teacher, a favorite of many of the kids, decided to move on, perhaps to a place where teachers didn’t receive hate mail.

This incident had a huge impact on the direction of my book. Book banning in fictitious Mercy, North Carolina, became the conflict, and Antigone Brown, the woman who fights the censors, ponders the same questions I had as I wrote letters in protest of the removal of The Old Gringo.

All too often, censorship is a parental issue. As Antigone says in Book of Mercy, “I want to protect my child from the world. But I also want to protect the world for my child.”

What I learned in writing this book and in raising my daughter is that books can never be allowed to disappear from the shelves without a squeak. We must say something; explode the discussion in letters, e-mails, tweets, and public meetings. We must never let censorship dissolve into the dark.

According to the American Library Association, on average about five hundred books are challenged every year in the United States—and those are just the ones we know about. Some would say this is horrible. But I think if we didn’t have a way to challenge the actions of others, we wouldn’t be truly free.

So I accept that book challenges are necessary, but I also am happy when they fail.

Book of Mercy, a story about a woman who faces her greatest fear to save a town’s books, is available in paperback and on Kindle. Read more about Book of Mercy or check out an excerpt.