When PEN America emailed me, I was excited. The organization, whose mission is to protect the freedom of writing, is looking for volunteers to code banned books. The goal is clear: Identify what types of information and representation are targeted by the censors. With this knowledge, PEN can send supporters for free expression and diversity to talk to parents’ groups, school councils and city councils, to fight against keeping books on the shelves of schools and libraries.
I am a writer. I believe no book should be banned. There are many that will not be recommended but rarely because of the content.
Not every book is suitable for all ages, but this is no reason to keep readers away from good books and good authors, and even classic works and good authors. The purpose of reading is to discover new things, to meet characters you will never know, to discover cultures and worlds you cannot imagine. Sometimes that’s annoying, intense or difficult. Sometimes it makes you think. Thinking is a good thing.
I entered the PEN coding project. In our training session it broke my heart to find out how many bans the book has recorded. In 2023, a new record was set: 4,349 suspensions from July to December, in 23 states and 52 public school districts, more suspensions than PEN documented in the entire 2022-23 school year. The list of titles and authors goes on for pages and pages. Some will be helped in one school district, only to be targeted again in another school.
My job was to fill out a long questionnaire for each of the 30 books I was assigned. When reading texts and reading secondary sources, I keep track of whether the book is fiction or nonfiction, the grade level or age it is aimed at, and the setting and genre. Next I look at whether there are LGBTQ+, BIPOC, disabled or neurodivergent characters – as protagonists or supporting characters – and if they explore themes or metaphors related to these identities. There is a problem race in the book; does it represent racism? Is it about social activism, immigration or incarceration?
I answered questions intended to measure the violence in the book, how sexuality and sexual behavior are portrayed, whether the sex is consensual or not, and if religion, self-esteem or self-empowerment is central to the plot.
You know where this is going. Books with queer characters, even minor players, who question their gender appear on the banned list.
In Florida, several versions of “The Diary of Anne Frank,” including a graphic-novel adaptation, were banned or challenged for not editing out the sections in which Anne wrote about her experiments with kissing girls and her own exploration of pubescence. body. A lot of time, it’s kind, but anodyne, it sets off the flag of the book.
Censors constantly challenge award-winning and bestselling YA titles “The Hate U Give,” which features a white police officer wrongly shooting a young black man, as anti-police and racist against white people. Should young witnesses remain silent? Should the parents praise the police?
One book on my list really didn’t make sense to me: “Separate Peace” by John Knowles. This is a great classic World War II story about friendship and loss and patriotism. It has been challenged repeatedly. In 1980, the Vernon-Verona-Sherrill school district in New York was called “filthy, trashy, sex novels.” There is no sex. It has been challenged because of its language (less vulgar than anything heard on TV these days) and the negative attitude of teenagers (!!), and because the friendship between Gene and Finny, the main characters, has a homosexual tone. You can read it that way, but at your own risk, because the author is sure that his characters are not gay.
“Charlotte’s Web” has been banned, considered sacrilegious because spiders are smarter than humans. And this classic for older viewers is also often dismissed or challenged: “The Kite Runner,” for portraying homosexuality and promoting Islam; “Bless Me, Ultima,” for profanity, sex and “anti-Catholic” ideas; “Heart of Darkness,” For racism; and “Brave New World,” for all that: “the language and moral content of the book.”
I read my grandson one of the most forbidden picture books of all time, “And Tango Makes Three,” the true story of two male penguins at the Central Park Zoo who hatched abandoned eggs and together raised new chicks. No matter how many times I read to him, it won’t make him gay any more than it will turn him into a penguin. It might lead him to a factual and hardly incendiary idea: There are all kinds of families.
All the best writers, from Chaucer to Shakespeare, George Orwell to JRR Tolkien, Harper Lee to Toni Morrison, have been banned. As Angie Thomas, author of “The Hate U Give,” said“It’s an honor to be banned because every book on the list has changed my perspective, … changed my life.”
After I finished coding the books in the PEN list, my main thought was not good: envy. My novels are not well-known enough to be banned – not even “Spontaneous,” about spontaneous human immolation, a sister who likes incest and sex with small men. I deserve to be banned. I live in hope to get enough readership to rate banishment. I will be proud to be on the banner of the book ‘Enemy List.
Diana Wagman, a contributing writer for Opinion, is the author of six novels.
