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FARMINGTON – The decisions routinely made by a school board, librarian, bookseller or computer software filter are not just what to read but what not to read. A panel explored censorship decisions and the sometimes controversial results of those decisions at a forum held at the University of Maine at Farmington Wednesday night.
“These can be hard decisions sometimes,” said MSAD 58 Superintendent Quenten Clark. Clark related the 1995 controversial incident in which a new teacher assigned her sophomore English class at Mt. Abram to read Bastard out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison. The novel, about a southern girl’s struggle with physical and sexual abuse, was recommended by the previous English teacher, Clark said.
“It started with one student the teacher asked to read aloud a passage from the book,” Clark said. “The student refused.”
The student’s parents objected to the graphic violence depicted in the book. If a student’s parents object to a book for religious or other reasons, an alternate book can be recommended. But this time, Clark said, it became an issue of all the students reading this book. The MSAD 58 school board took up the question of whether high school students should be exposed to the graphic violence in Allison’s book.
“Hundreds of people attended the school board meeting,” Clark said, “it was evenly divided” between those who wanted the book banned altogether from the classroom and those who wanted students to be able to read it.
In the end the school board didn’t ban the book from the school’s curriculum, but placed restrictions on it that included it be used at the senior level English classes due to its mature themes and in conjunction with other books so that students have a choice to read it or another book.
The case went to Maine’s highest court in an appeal filed against the restrictions placed on the book. In the end, the court upheld the school board’s decision. Contrary to popular belief, including the national news stories that ran in Time and Newsweek, “the book was never banned,” Clark said.
Ironically, 14 years later, the five copies of Bastard Out of Carolina that sit on the school library’s shelf are never checked out and when the librarian occasionally asks to discard them because no one seems interested in reading them, Clark said it’s the only book that will always remain on the shelf no matter its lack of readership.
“If you want to propel a book, ban it,” said Melanie Coombs, the head librarian at the Farmington Public Library. “The publicity surrounding this book made it a bestseller.”
Panelist Al Diamon, a political columnist, noted there are times when censorship is needed and if people don’t like the decisions made by their local school board, for example, “don’t vote for them.” It was the subtext of the teacher insisting a book be read without offering an alternate reading choice that bothered him. “That’s scary at best.”
Coombs noted it’s not just fiction that gets banned. Non-fiction books including The American Heritage Dictionary has been banned because people objected to some of the book’s definitions.
The decision of which books to carry at the library can be ” a very grey area,” she said. “We make decisions day to day and try to create a balanced collection, but it’s not easy to be a caretaker of the First Amendment.”
Poet and Off The Grid Press publisher Henry Braun told of his involvement in an authors’ boycott of a bookstore in Philadelphia that refused to carry Salman Rushdie’s 1988 novel, The Satanic Verses. As Rushdie faced death threats issued by the former leader of Iran Ayatollah Khomeini, bookstores feared retaliation if they stocked the book.
“We should be free to read books,” Braun said. The boycott ended when the store stocked Rushdie’s book. “Let all the books be read,” he added waving a book.
David Olson, director of the Wilton Free Public Library, pointed to use of the Internet software filters that are required to be used with computers in libraries and schools may be the digital age’s answer to a massive censorship. The software automatically blocks Web sites thought to be unsuitable.
“With the Internet, someone is deciding what and how it’s used on the computer. Everyday a teacher has a valid reason to get into a site and needs access to a Web site but it’s locked,” Clark said. “The software has a tremendous amount of power.”
Kenny Brechner, owner and manager of Devaney, Doak & Garrett Booksellers said, “fear Amazon,” in referring to the copyright dispute with providing downloads of books. As an independent bookseller, “I will order anything but I won’t stock everything.”
Poet Lee Sharkey ended the program by reading from her work about the vital role libraries are to communities.
This forum will be available to view here soon thanks to Mt. Blue TV. The event is part of the National Endowment for the Arts “Big Read” program to highlight Banned Book Week. The program was sponsored by the Maine Writer’s and Publisher’s Alliance and The Daily Bulldog in an ongoing series of community forums.
