Welcome to Forbidden Reads. I created this website today after having lunch with my buddy, who told me that The Diary of Anne Frank had been banned in Texas.
What!!!???
Having dreamed of having my own bookstore for years, I decided on the spot that I would finally move forward with my dream, and I would sell banned books. But I would do it in a forum in which we could have a rational discussion about intellectual freedom.
My plan is to roll out a new sale every week or so, based on the most recent banning. I am most interested in books that are censored by a political organization but, as I came to learn, many books are banned for other excuses, delegitimized as pornography.
The Diary of a Young Girl is one of the most widely read and celebrated books of the 20th century. It has been translated into more than 70 languages and has sold millions of copies worldwide. The diary is a first-hand account of the life of a young Jewish girl, Anne Frank, during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. It is a powerful testament to the human spirit and a reminder of the atrocities committed during World War II.
Censorship of this work would be unbelievable were it not for the current culture war climate. But there was obviously more to the story.
A delicious piece of clickbait is the astounding news that the book has been banned as pornography. As usual, that is a bit of an oversimplification. And the Texas thing is not actually true. However, the issues around Anne Frank's work are real--just a bit more complicated.
The story goes a bit deeper and surrounds the graphic adaptation of the original work. Some of claims about bans in Texas have been overblown. USA Today fact-checkers pointed out that the graphic adaptation was temporarily removed for review and then put back on the shelves—not actually banned, as claimed in a wave of social media outrage.
This type of new is actually not new, and the issue of censorship gets muddled by the hype. Several articles reference widespread opposition to the book by certain groups since it was published, in addition to attempts to delegitimize it as fiction or forgery.
Missing the forest for the trees, some minds focus on finding obscenity. In the original text, the passage in question is that of a pubescent 13 year-old girl puzzling over her own anatomy:
"Until I was 11 or 12, I didn't realize there was a second set of labia on the inside, since you couldn't see them. What's even funnier is that I thought urine came out of the clitoris," wrote Frank. "When you're standing up, all you see from the front is hair. Between your legs there are two soft, cushiony things, also covered with hair, which press together when you're standing, so you can't see what's inside. They separate when you sit down and they're very red and quite fleshy on the inside. In the upper part, between the outer labia, there's a fold of skin that, on second thought, looks like a kind of blister. That's the clitoris."
A large number of posts debate the existence of bans or challenges across multiple countries, each of which seemed to have some nuance, such as removing volumes in individual schools being portrayed as more widespread phenomena. The story of a ban of the original text in Lebanon in 2010 was clouded by confusion with the policy of the Hezbollah party and the removal of a textbook excerpt, but little evidence for outright ban.
As I find more information about this, I will add to the blog, and I invite you to add to the discussion. In the spirit of intellectual freedom, I am happy to hear the opinions of all.
While some may find some content objectionable, it is important to remember that literature has the power to challenge our beliefs and broaden our understanding of the world. This must be considered as we help our children navigate the universe of information available to us.