Book Ban or Legitimate Political Discourse?

Review by Bill Doughty––

When some parents and politicians moved to ban Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” from school curricula and libraries, it moved me to read her award-winning novel about an escaped slave family and the nearly unimaginable horrors they endured.

“Beloved” contains references to explicit sex, violent rape, child murder, and bestiality. It’s definitely not a book for very young and immature readers. Some call it a “dirty” book. Others consider it a masterpiece of American literature by a Nobel Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winning author. 

The book is based loosely on a true story. According to essayist Walter Johnson, it is set in “the moment when the Indians were removed, the woodlands stripped of trees, and the Lower South put under the dominion of a single plant –– king cotton.” 

Johnson adds, “Morrison presents her readers with the terrifying excesses of violence imposed upon enslaved people.”

Essayist Tiya Miles writes, “‘Beloved’ is a spiritual and psychological drama about the lasting wounds of cruelty and the wrenching difficulty of holding together damaged selves and human relationships in the aftermath of unspeakable tragedy.”

The book depicts the depravity of slavery: “White wardens treated these black men worse than chattel, locking them up nights in wooden pens dug into a trench, forcing them to perform unwanted sex acts, humiliating them with caustic words of defilement, and working them in an unrelenting grind,” according to Miles.

In “Beloved,” Morrison describes how one chained man, Paul D, felt locked in one of those pens in a trench, along with 45 other slaves:

“A flutter of a kind, in the chest, then the shoulder blades. It felt like rippling –– gentle at first and then wild. As though the further south they led him the more his blood, frozen like an ice-on for twenty years, began thawing, breaking into pieces that, once melted, had no choice but to swirl and eddy.”

“All forty-six men woke to rifle shot. All forty-six. Three whitemen walked along the trench unlocking the doors one by one. No one stepped through. When the last lock was opened, the three returned and lifted the bars, one by one. And one by one the blackmen emerged –– promptly and without the poke of a rifle butt if they had been there more than a day; promptly with the butt if, like Paul D, they had just arrived. When all forty-six were standing in a line in the trench, another rifle shot signaled the climb out and up to the ground above, where one thousand feet of the best hand-forged chain in Georgia stretched. Each man bent and waited.  The first man picked up the end and threaded it through the loop on his leg iron. He stood up then, and, shuffling a little, brought the chain tip to the next prisoner, who did likewise. As the chain was passed on and each man stood in the other’s place, the line of men turned around, facing the boxes the had come out of. Not one spoke to the other. At least not with words.”

Morrison further paints the scene, within nature but unnatural: “Chain-up completed, they knelt down. The dew, more likely than not, was mist by then. Heavy sometimes and if the dogs were quiet and just breathing you could hear doves.”

Those who seek to ban Morrison’s book(s) and other works of art base their opinions on alleged "sexually explicit language,” "LGBTQIA+ content," "anti-police messages,” "divisive language,” and themes of race, according to the American Library Association. 

Another of Morrison’s books, “The Bluest Eye” is on the ALA’s top ten list of challenged books. So are Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” and John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men.” Mark Twain’s works have long been “canceled” before “cancel culture” was part of the vernacular.

Last month Art Spiegelman’s “Maus,” a graphic novel about the Holocaust, came under attack. And last week, a Christian pastor led a book burning in Tennessee. Books thrown into a bonfire included young adult fantasy fiction including from J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter” series.

Book burnings: Germany 1933 and Tennessee 2022.

‘Beloved’ Found Haiku

On my Navy Reads blog I've featured unintentional "found" haiku from Senator John McCain, President Abraham Lincoln, Coach Mike Krzyzewski, and others. I found this Toni Morrison haiku from “Beloved”:

Who would have thought that

a little old baby could

harbor so much rage

That quote is used as an epigraph to a chapter about Morrison’s novel in the funny and rewarding “25 Great Sentences: And How They Got That Way” by Geraldine Woods (Norton, 2020): Woods picks apart the words and focuses understandably on the phrase “little old baby.” The baby and its spirit is at the heart of Morrison’s magical and “impossible” realism.

After reading “Beloved,” I turned to a relatively recent book of essays edited by Davîd Carrasco, Stephanie Paulsell, and Mara Willard titled “Toni Morrison: Goodness and the Literary Imagination” (University of Virginia Press, 2019). The collection contains the Walter Johnson and Tiya Miles quotes at the beginning of this review.

Another “found haiku” by Toni Morrison comes from the "Goodness" collection. It is from Morrison herself, captured in her Ingersoll address of 2012, and it happens to be a pivotal point arguing against book banning and for teaching about slavery, racism, and other evils of America’s past:

Thinking about good-

ness implies, indeed requires, a view

of its opposite

The argument for studying the past while not wearing rose-colored glasses is this: confront what was wrong in order to do what is right. Reject racism, misogyny, and imperialism; embrace equality, respect, and freedom. Repel hate; stick with love.

A slave cabin in Barbour County, Alabama (LOC)

On Feeling Uncomfortable

Book-banning groups want to protect children’s self-esteem and not make them uncomfortable: White children should not be made to feel bad that their ancestors may have been oppressors, and children of color should not be made to feel like victims. Children (even, apparently college advanced-placement literature students) should be protected from what they consider obscene “dirty” books.

But, isn’t it necessary to know where the real dirt is in order to become clean?

Jonathan L. Walton explores the Morrison concept of "dirty" in his essay “Luminous Darkness.”

“…Morrison refers to the dirtying process of slavery in her novel 'Beloved.' Black Folk are dirtied, first by the racial imagination of white supremacy. Racial visions are then transformed into laws, statues, and cultural practices that dehumanize and dirty their targets. These are the conditions from which those on the underside of freedom and autonomy, and power seek to break free. These are the conditions from which Morrison seeks to reconsider goodness by reframing who and what we deem as inherently evil.”

The institution of slavery, itself, was a dirty shame. Some could argue that we didn’t start to live up to the ideals in the Constitution until the mid-1960s with the passing of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, which were brought about by President John F. Kennedy and President Lyndon B. Johnson (both U.S. Navy veterans).

      From Civil War to Civil Rights (NPS)

Parents and politicians who want to ban books say teaching about slavery will divide people along racial lines. But studying the truth of the past can show how much progress we’ve made in the past hundred years –– which can be a uniting force.

Tenured Professor of Women and Gender Studies Brittney Cooper appeared on Ari Melber’s “The Beat” on MSNBC on January 28 and spoke about slavery, book banning, and what makes people uncomfortable. She notes that black people were kidnapped and brought to America to make white  people “more comfortable.”

Brittney Cooper

Cooper says, “Sure, racism –– learning about racism –– is perhaps uncomfortable. But you know what`s more uncomfortable? Racism. Learning about slavery might be a bit uncomfortable. But you know what was more uncomfortable? Slavery.”

Fighting the Civil War to end slavery was more than uncomfortable. Marching for civil rights and voting rights was uncomfortable.

Cooper adds, “Learning that one is ignorant might be a bit uncomfortable. But you know what`s more uncomfortable, ultimately? Remaining ignorant, even as these problems continue to encroach upon our lives.” Legislating against books and learning, she says, “is nothing but a return to the very history we fought to get out of.”

Shouldn’t the freedom to read and discuss literature be protected as truly “legitimate political discourse?” Choosing to learn more about Toni Morrison and her books is especially legitimate during Black History Month.