When I was a junior in high school, we read Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee in my English Literature class. The novel begins with an older, White, South African man who, a few years following the end of apartheid, has been ousted from his professorship due to allegations of an inappropriate relationship with a student. He moves in with his adult daughter who lives on a farm, and one night, the farm is attacked by young, Black, South African men, who light him on fire and collectively rape his daughter. The bulk of the text deals with the aftermath of these events. In 1999, Disgrace won the Booker Prize, and in 2003, Coetzee received the Nobel Prize in Literature for how his work "portrays the surprising involvement of the outsider."
Reading Disgrace really and truly blew my 17-year-old mind. We were having class discussions about sexual assault the intersections of race, class, and sexuality in gender-based violence. We would talk about the post-Rainbow Nation disillusionment in the book that was familiar to us as Southern African students in 2012 when racial inequalities remained deep and were growing. The class provided me with an opportunity to learn and understand about the world just as I was preparing to enter it for myself. And a decade later, I still cannot stop thinking about Disgrace.
In the eleven months from July 2021 to June 2022, the non-profit advocacy group PEN America counted 2,532 instances of individual books being banned in US schools. Though attempts at censorship are made by “BoTh sIdEs,” 41% of the banned content contains LGBTQ+ themes or characters and 40% of the texts also involve people of color as the protagonists or as prominent secondary characters. One might then conclude that it is the stories of LGBTQ+ folks and people of color that lead to the most offence, or at least, they are the easiest stories to censor.
I am from a part of the world where books, movies, and opposition parties are banned with often little discourse, and so it would be dishonest of me to feign disbelief towards the notion that those in power would prohibit whatever does not conform to their beliefs or agendas. Nevertheless, from what I hear, book bans are inconceivable. Part of the incredulity lies in an oversuspicion of a reactionary politics that views Antiracist Baby and Captain Underpants as dangerous materials. But I also believe that there is a dishonesty in viewing that reactionary response as completely unfounded.
Underlying the politics of book bans is the idea that books are powerful, which is a sentiment that I do believe in. As a child, books taught me about everything from eating disorders to teenage pregnancies to domestic violence, and those were just the works of Sarah Dessen. And so again, what book bans get right is the insistence that books are powerful because they shape how students see the world. But this world-building is not happening in isolation.
Schools are powerful too, providing the tools with which students can read and interpret texts, and by putting forth the texts that become the windows, mirrors and maps that students can look too. This leaves us with the question of what the role of literature is in an education? What can and should schools teach us about the world through the books that we read?
There existed on the internet in 2022 tweets, memes, and TikToks around the cult of the English teacher. Marginalized folks in particular, like people of color or those in the LGBTQIA+ community, reflected on the sanctuaries provided by and in the form of their English teachers. I was not exempt from this cult, with one of my favourite teachers of all time being my English teacher, Mr. Evans.
Mr. Evans was a young, blonde, British man just out of graduate school, who also coached the rugby team and started an initiative around male mentorship in local communities. In his class, we read Othello and Journey’s End, Edgar Allen Poe and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and when a classmate complained to him about only reading male authors, he responded immediately with an all-female poetry unit that included Sylvia Plath and Adrienne Rich. When we read Disgrace, it was part of a year-long unit on African literature, where we read Léopold Senghor and Wole Soyinka alongside other short stories and essays from the continent. I did my IB Extended Essay in Literature and Mr. Evans was my advisor for a paper that was almost as wordy as its title — “In the short story, “Flaca,” from his short story collection, This Is How You Lose Her, how does Junot Diaz challenge the traditional expectations of the love story narrative and romance genre, and what effect does this have on the reader’s interaction with the text?”
Mr. Evans’ class was a space where we talked about colonialism and suicide and marriage and what made him a good teacher was his ability to facilitate. If the role of literature in schools is to teach students about the world, effective teachers do so by providing the skills for them to do so on their own. Mr. Evans never placed a text in front of us and walked out, nor did he ever give them to us and purport his perspective as fact. We learned how to interpret for ourselves, how to look for context and additional information, and then arrive at our own conclusion. No persuasion or indoctrination necessary.
Book bans understand that books are powerful, and teachers are powerful too. But the effectiveness in book bans in recent years is a reflection of recent, growing pushback towards teachers. This distrust can partially be attributed by three major societal developments from this millennia.
First the post-Cold War opening of the global economy set up dynamics of economic competitions that trickled down to education systems where teachers were suddenly scapegoated for failing to make students “globally competitive.”
Furthermore, the neo-liberalist markets-over-everything approach ushered in by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair also spilled over into education. Private and public schools alike began to function like a marketplace, competing for students and treating their families as customers, applying an ethos where the customer/families are always right, over trained and experienced professionals.
Finally, from technological advances such as the internet and smart devices has emerged an infinite scroll feedback loop in which the stories most engaged with are the most alarming, including those of adults — including teachers — misusing their positions of power, and thus leading to our (valid) discomfort.
Book bans have been able to weaponise the power of teachers and the power of books by incorrectly arguing that their powers are inherently dangerous. But, one of the many things that book bans get wrong is the fact that for schools to function how we intend them too, we need books — all books — and we need teachers to be able to teach them too.
The role of literature in an education is to provide students with windows, mirrors, and maps, as theorised by Rudine Sims Bishop. Schools should use stories to teach students about worlds different to their own, in addition to reflecting the worlds they come from, and finally, they should be providing examples that students can follow into the worlds of their choice. I saw this in Mr. Evans’ class when we read Disgrace. I was forced to consider the perspective of White South Africans. I recognised the tense and complex racial dynamics of the nation reflected in the text. I was left with new ways in which to understand trauma and violence.
Censorship denies students all of this. And it does so with little consideration of the fact that whatever themes and topics are not deemed appropriate can and will be found on Elon Musk’s internet with the swipe of an iPhone. We need literature and the teachers to talk about these issues in a safe space that also leaves room for students to reach their own conclusions, using the same analytical skills they would learn from other classes. This leaves students not only equipped for the world at large, but with the skills to address whatever else comes their way.
What book bans get right is the power of stories. But they are wrong to think that the stories disappear with the texts. Books matter, like teachers and schools matter, and we need all three to prepare students for a world that they will be a part of one day. What stories do we want them to remember ten years from now? What stories have shaped you?
YESSS to all of this!