“It was a book I wanted to read and I couldn't find it anywhere,” said writer Toni Morrison in an interview. Morrison was talking about her first novel The Bluest Eye, which was about an African-American girl and set in the 1940s. "I would like to write the kind of book that I would want to read. I wanted to read about people like me. People who were black and young and lived in the midwest; people nobody wrote about," she added. Morrison died in 2019. This March, the Davis County School District in Utah, US, announced that The Bluest Eye would be removed from all school libraries; the decision had been taken by the district's Sensitive Review Committee. In January, a Florida school board banned The Bluest Eye following the complaint of a parent who objected to its “explicit descriptions of illegal activities”. Before that, it was banned by a South Jersey school board, a Wentzville school board in Missouri and so on and so forth. In his first public appearance since that day in August 2022 when he was stabbed multiple times at a public lecture in New York causing him to lose sight in one eye, Salamn Rushdie spoke about the threat to books in the US.
PENsive
The Bluest Eye is not the only book to be banned in schools across the US. William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner, John Irving’s The Cider House Rules, Alan Moore’s V For Vendetta and Malala Yousafzai’s biography are some of the other titles to have been banned. Between July 2021 and June 30, 2022, according to non-profit organisation PEN America, across US schools there have been 2,532 instances of book bans. According to PEN America’s updated list, in the first half of the 2022-2023 school year, there were another 1,477 instances of individual books banned. Parents have complained about racist epithets in To Kill a Mockingbird and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Margaret Atwood’s publishers even released a fire-proof edition of The Handmaid’s Tale by way of registering protest.
Whither Victory City?
Most of the cases are from Texas, Florida, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, Missouri and South Carolina, mostly Republican states. Politicians and advocacy groups are leading the attack. The titles under siege deal with issues of race and alternate sexual identities, but the routine reasons trotted out are “sexually explicit material” or “obscenity”. Experts say this is how politicians will prevent a generation of youth from growing up to be anti-racist citizens, pro-difference, tolerant and truly diverse. Rushdie said at the awards do: “… in the countries of the West, until recently, there was a fair measure of freedom in the area of publishing. Now I am sitting here in the United States, I have to look at the extraordinary attack on libraries, and books for children in schools. The attack on the idea of libraries themselves…” The man of the itinerant book ban has dodged different countries, contexts and threats only to witness all the world becoming the same place.
