Can Books Be Banned?

In May of 2023, I raised a glass of cheer as Penguin Random House, PEN America, and six brave authors, Sarah Brannen, Lindsay Durtschi, George M. Johnson, David Levithan, Kyle Lukoff, and Ann Novakowski filed a lawsuit against book bans in the Escambia County School District in North Florida. To courage, I toasted, to taking a stand against power. After researching the authors and their banned titles I immediately added Johnson’s memoir-manifesto, We Are Not Broken, to my “Memoirs to Study” list.

Today I am at work on a memoir about the abuse of power within American religion. To that end I have been reading memoirs and one in particular has caught my attention: The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between, written by Hisham Matar, an author whose novels were once banned in his home country of Libya. His memoir, like mine, explores power run amuck, power unchecked and destructive. While I experienced nothing as egregious as the narrator in The Return, all run-ins with damaged power share certain marks. The mark of particular interest to me is this: the silencing.

For me the silencing ultimately took the form of my 2017 firing — my removal from a communications professorship at Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. This came on the heels of silencing and shunning from faculty, secret peer reviews, and falsified negative performance evaluations.

Silencing comes in many and varied forms.

As I was in the thralls of being fired from Moody, female students and alumni continued to share their stories with me; stories of silencing and assault, exclusion and harassment, stories spanning the spectrum of gender-based violence (GBV). In 2018 I filed a Title IX retaliation and sex discrimination lawsuit against Moody. Many of my female students also began to speak out through public petitions and protests.

In The Return the author’s father, Jaballa Matar, as well as many of his relatives, were imprisoned for opposing Muammar Gadaffi’s regime in Libya at the turn of the twenty-first century. His father ultimately lost his life in Abu Salim prison. Silencing in this country is different. As book bans increase in Texas, Florida, Missouri, Utah, and South Carolina, PEN USA reports that the state-level policies and practices of these five states are being replicated across the country. Bans often reflect the politics of the day. Let’s not forget Judy Blume’s book bans in the 1970s (after the passage of Roe v. Wade) for her “frank discussion of . . . female sexuality in books like . . . Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret.” The bans today are not just coming from religious groups as one might think. They’re coming from school boards, local lawmakers, and at least fifty groups throughout the country such as Moms for Liberty, US Parents Involved in Education, and No Left Turn in Education.

I suppose this cause is every generation’s fight, but today it has been personally startling to see the United States of America take a harder turn toward the banning of books in the marketplace of ideas. As the Penguin Random House and PEN America lawsuit argues:

The right to speak means little without the ability to reach listeners. It is extraordinarily important to book authors and book publishers that their books continue to be fully accessible in public school libraries, particularly for books aimed at children and young adults.

Being personally disturbed by my own silencing by a religious institution as well as the continued march of Christian Nationalists against freedom of expression in America, I have turned to the literature of Matar and other writers whose work speaks truth to power, documents censorship and silencing — for answers and for comfort. These writers demonstrate that books cannot be truly banned, that silencing never works, because the books find a way to live on, thriving, multiplying, and rejecting their silencing in unexpected ways.

Literature Opens New Landscapes  

For the narrator in The Return, an author whose novels (In the Country of Men, Anatomy of a Disappearance) were banned in his home country, literature lives as a type of map, or a topography through which he navigates. In a chapter entitled “Poems” we learn “father’s literary memory was like a floating library”; we learn that in the nights when the prison fell silent, father would recite the “elegiac Bedouin poetry of the alam”— “a poetic form that privileges the past over the present.” When the narrator imagines his father reciting the alam, he recalls his voice:

a voice that seemed to open up a landscape as magically uncertain and borderless as still water welded to sky.

The voice and by implication, the literature — the words, the ideas being sounded — of the alam could not be confined for it belonged to a borderless realm beyond binaries, certitude, and control. Literature opens for the reader a new landscape for exploration, for possibility. This is the landscape to which literature transports the mind. It is not a landscape in which books or ideas can be banned.

Reading the memoirs of people putting their lives and livelihoods on the line — people in every context from journalist-poets in El Salvador to undergraduates at Stanford University to young women in the midst of civil war in Iran opened for me the landscape of battle What I mean is: these books opened a landscape in which I did not shrink back in fear; a landscape in which I owned my own aggression, directing it, as these writers had, in such a way that my life’s work might affect positive change in the world.

Literature Is A Balm And A Fire

In The Return as the present narrative of searching for his imprisoned father unfolds, we see that for the narrator, the literary canon (from Homer and Turgenev to Shakespeare) is a balm, a salve, a fire. It is a door opening onto deeper interiority and self-understanding. The narrator is a son taking after a father who “was both enlivened and encouraged by language.”

In fact, fictitious “sons” people the memoir. The narrator interacts with many literary sons throughout the pages from “fictitious man" Andrei Bersyenev in Turgenev’s On the Eve to Homer’s Telemachus in The Odyssey who functions as a type of foil, or an antagonist to the narrator. The narrator echoes the lament of Telemachus:

I wish at least I had some happy man
as father, growing old in his own house—
but unknown death and silence are the fate
of him . . .

By the end of the memoir, as the narrator plumbs the depths of his own despair, alongside the literature of fathers and sons, the words of Telemachus swell in meaning. In the literary canon the narrator finds a new freedom — a balm and a fire enlivening him to face the future. He writes:

For the first time those familiar words, which have been to me loyal companions for many years, moved and expanded in meaning. They were now . . . just as much about the father as they were about the son; just as much about the wish of the son to have his father spend the remainder of his days in the comfort and dignity of his own house, as they were about the son’s wish to finally be able to leave the father at home, to finally turn and face forward, and walk into the world. 

For months I read and re-read what I’d come to call Matar’s “Confrontation Scenes.” In one scene the narrator, after years of searching for his missing father, demanded of the Seif el-Islam, the dictator’s son: “We want to know when, where and how it happened,” to which he received a cloaked reply, a half-truth, a lie. Instead of a clear answer, Seif baited him to return to Libya for business opportunities. Matar, imagining Seif’s thoughts, writes: “Is he a spy? Why is he not tempted by money? How — the question power always asks — can we get him?” Immediately, I ingested this last line, and it’s been with me ever since. How — the question power always asks — can we get him? It sparked a recognition becoming at once a balm and a fire within me. For I had been sitting, for years, inside my own spin room with men (administrators, attorneys) seemingly bent on twisting words and facts for their own gain.

Literature Is A Refuge

Early in the narrator’s childhood, his father told him that “knowing a book by heart is like carrying a house inside your chest.” Books are a home, a shelter, a place of refuge and safety. A lighthouse. A nest. The narrator’s father, we would come to find out, could recite at least one poem from every modern Libyan poet. During the years of political imprisonment that ultimately ended his father’s life, “the pages of verse” that his father had committed to memory functioned as “his comfort and companion.”

During my six years since leaving Moody, like the narrator in The Return I have sought refuge in the literary canon, not in literary sons but in female figures unashamed of their own aggression: Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior and China Men; Rebecca Solnit’s Recollections of My Nonexistence; Chanel Miller’s Know My Name. These books, these woman-warriors have been my companions, my refuge — a house inside my chest.

Literature Is A Witness

Literature can become a witness when written by those seated outside the centers of power. In the years following my firing from Moody Bible Institute, I have turned to the literature of witness as “comfort and companion,” turning to memoirs such What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance by Carolyn Forché, graphic memoirs Peresepolis by Marjane Satrapi and Maus by Art Spiegelman, as well as more classic titles such as In Pharaoh’s Army by Tobias Wolff and The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. Each of these books, many of which are banned in various places throughout the United States, speak truth to power by propelling an alternative history, a deeply personal perspective in the form of memoir, autobiography, or autofiction. The earliest protest memoirs in the United States were written by former or currently enslaved peoples. Tracing the history of Black autobiography, Morrison writes in her powerful essay, “The Site of Memory,” that the mission of the earliest Black American autobiographers was twofold: 1) to show readers “this is my life, but I also represent my race,” and 2) to persuade readers that I am human and slavery must be abolished.

Likewise, for me, my purpose as a memoirist has also been twofold: to show readers my life, as I represent my gender within an ancient religious tradition, and to persuade readers that I am human and that spiritual abuse or the abuse of power within religion — wielding religion as a weapon — must be opposed.

Literature Is An Essential Organ

There’s this idea in The Return that books can’t truly be banned because literature lives in the mind. We witness the narrator’s father reciting poetry aloud from his prison cell; we witness the circulation of letters through the elaborate walls of the prison. Once received the letter would be read, ingested (or embodied) then destroyed for to be caught with a letter would result in torture. The letter might live only in the prisoner’s mind.

In Matar’s memoir, we see that for the political dissidents who were imprisoned in Abu Salim prison for speaking and acting against Muammar Gadaffi’s dictatorship, art and letters (literal letters) became a powerful way to connect with others and to endure torture, imprisonment, and ultimately, their silencing. For example, Mahmoud, Matar’s uncle, wrote poems on a scrap from a pillowcase. (Uncle Mahmoud who “loved Voltaire and Russian novels” was arrested by Libyan Secret Service the same week as the narrator’s father for he too opposed Gaddafi’s regime.) Since writing was forbidden in prison, in order to hide his poetry sheet from the guards, Mahmoud folded the pillow scrap into a tiny square and sewed it into the waistband of his underwear. In a final scene in the memoir, Uncle Mahmoud spreads the fabric before the narrator. He has been, after 21 years, released from prison. “These are the only jottings I managed to keep from all those years,” Uncle Mahmoud says. “They are possibly the only surviving literature from all the countless volumes that have been authored inside Abu Salim prison.”

The narrator describes the threadbare material with both sides covered in writing:

It looked like a membrane with intricate patterns . . . A thin line separated each cluster of text. It resembled a diagram of the human anatomy: one letter in the shape of a kidney, another filling up a lung.

What are words and literature if not essential organs in the body politic? Words occupy space, take up residence in our bodies. For the body does keep score, and literature is a salve. That a poem might fill up a lung is not an impossibility. That a book might enable a marginalized child to breathe, to take up space, to stop suffocating, to be seen, is not beyond reason. This is why books that give voice to the voiceless cannot be banned. It is not a mistake that the majority of authors whose books have been banned across the country are part of the L.G.B.T.Q. community and people of color.

I understand that a book must first be available to be read in order for it to live in the mind, or the lung, or the organ as Uncle Mahmoud’s anatomical drawing of poems seem to suggest. Let us, as Americans, continue to work toward and protect the freedom of speech and the freedom of expression embedded in the words of our Constitution. If, after reading a book, you choose to close it, or reject it, then, so be it — but, it is the freedom to make up one’s own mind in the face of opposing viewpoints and contradictory opinions which makes this nation a democracy, not a pre-Arab Spring dictatorship.