Everything I Need to Know I Learned From Reading Banned Books
By the time I read Roald Dahl’s Mathilda, a lot had happened in two years. My parents had divorced; my mom, older sister, and I moved to Atlanta, GA; mom had a mental breakdown; and my older sister ran away from home. I went from living in a small town with both of my parents, a doting older sister, and loving grandparents to living in a single-parent household with a mother who was fighting her demons, my sister with her dad a thousand miles away as she fought hers, and a father who I would now only see on summer vacations and holidays. I coped with those disruptions inwardly, as well as any 7-year-old can be expected to, and later that year, I picked up Mathilda.
I was already a bookish kid (obvi), but Mathilda gave me an experience that no other book had done before. It gave me a genuine human connection with its author. I felt as if Dahl was personally telling me, “I see you. I hear you, and you’re not alone.” That book threw me a lifeline at a time when I felt lonely and isolated. My family didn’t talk about the trauma we had just experienced, and it would be thirty years before I fully understood it.
With Mathilda, Dahl showed me another child who, while fictional, was bookish, didn’t fit in with her family, and was a little bit weird. Her courage gave me the courage to endure, overcome, and survive. Books gave me a world in which I could seek out other weirdos who shared my experience until I began creating worlds of my own.
Some children have to grow up way too soon. They have to take on their own physical, mental, and emotional well-being at an age when they shouldn’t have to worry about those things. In Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance writes about how his volatile home life impacted his performance in school. Turns out it’s hard to do homework when your mother and your 2nd or 3rd stepdad are arguing, yelling, and throwing shit at each other in the next room. Vance credits his grandmother for saving his life by giving him a safe and stable home in which to live. Vance also read several sociological books to understand the causes and conditions of his environment. He joined the Marines and later received his law degree from Yale. Most of his peers weren’t so lucky.
Still, other children live in homes of unimaginable abuse and neglect. Students in Shekema Silveri’s English class in Atlanta, GA approached Silveri while they were reading Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. One shared with her that she was the product of incest, and another shared that she was molested by her uncle. The Bluest Eye frequently makes the American Library Association’s list of Top 10 Most Challenged Books for its depiction of child sexual abuse. A story that threw those students a lifeline is a story that others attempt to ban from schools and libraries.
Of course, many children come from loving, stable, and healthy homes. For parents who don’t want their kids exposed to childhood sexual abuse in The Bluest Eye or rape in Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak or profanity and vulgarity in The Handmaid’s Tale, they can opt their children out of those assignments, and educators will provide those students with an alternative assignment. That is a decision that a parent or guardian can make for their own child, but they do not have the right to make that decision for other people’s children.
While banned books address some heavy topics, they do so in a way that allows students to learn and discuss them openly and with care. Melissa Harris-Perry on MSNBC shared, “Because so much of [The Bluest Eye] is in [9-year-old] Claudia’s voice, Morrison brings young readers, not through a gauntlet of pornographic horror, but into a deep, empathetic connection with trauma and suffering. This is precisely what teens ought to read to develop mind and heart.”
Empathy is the best take-away a student can have from any reading assignment, banned or not. The titles on the ALA Banned Books list cover these heavy topics so that the stories like those of Silveri’s students are told. Readers who have been spared those experiences get a glimpse into those lives and learn that people like these characters are worthy of dignity and compassion.
For readers who have lived these experiences, these books throw them a lifeline. These books will make them feel seen and heard. These books will give them a voice.
Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash
