Advocacy & Aid

In the fall of 1995, the Iranian writer and professor Azar Nafisi began offering clandestine lessons in literature. After quitting her job at the University of Allameh Tabatabai—where female students could be punished for something as trivial as laughing in the hallways—Nafisi invited seven of her best students into her home each Thursday to discuss prohibited writers including Jane Austen, Henry James, and Vladimir Nabokov.

The young women would gather in Nafisi’s living room and pore over their Xeroxed copies of Gatsby, Lolita, and other books that had long since vanished from the bookstores. “There, in that living room,” Nafisi recalls, “we rediscovered that we were also loving, breathing human beings; and no matter how repressive our state became, no matter how intimidated and frightened we were, like Lolita we tried to escape and create our own little pockets of freedom.” Nafisi titled her memoir of the experience Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books.

I thought of Nafisi recently, while perusing the latest list of books banned in Alberta’s schools. A new investigative report found that 170 books have been banned across 41 school divisions. Many of these are predictable targets: graphic novel adaptations of George Orwell’s 1984 and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale; award-winning books including Craig Thompson’s Blankets and Mike Curato’s Flamer. Out of an “abundance of caution,” one division removed a YA graphic novel by Danielle Brouillette because the cover depicted a cartoon banana wearing a condom as a hat.

The writer that really caught my eye, however, was Rupi Kaur. Born in Punjab, Kaur grew up in Brampton and attended the University of Waterloo before self-publishing her first poetry collection in 2014, which became one of the highest-selling poetry books of the century. Kaur is, in short, a great Canadian success story: a newcomer whose poetry (poetry!) books have been translated into 40 languages and sold more than 12 million copies, who was named “writer of the decade” by the New Republic, who reads her poems to Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show. Now, her collections Milk and Honey and The Sun and Her Flowers have now apparently been banned at the high school I attended in Lethbridge.

I don’t know why Kaur’s books have been banned. The ministerial order behind Alberta’s banning initiative calls for the removal of texts (including from high schools) that include “explicit visual depictions of sexual acts.” (“In a vast number of these cases, there were one or two images in the entire graphic novel / book that met the criteria outlined in the ministerial order,” Calgary Board of Education chief superintendent Joanne Pitman wrote.) If one were to guess which of Kaur’s poems caught the censor’s eye, it might be a poem like the following, accompanied by a simple line drawing of a woman touching herself:

if I am the longest relationship
of my life
isn’t it time to
nurture intimacy
and love
with the person
i lie in bed with each night

Kaur’s poems aren’t for everyone. The British poet Rebecca Watts has dismissed them as “artless,” arguing that Kaur’s simple language amounts to a “rejection of craft.” Yet it is precisely the simplicity and directness of Kaur’s language that has made her poems accessible to millions at a moment when much contemporary poetry struggles to find readers.

In any event—and here is a sentence I never expected to write—Rupi Kaur is not a pornographer. She is, however, the most popular young poet in the world, and for many young readers a gateway into the pleasures of reading. If the Alberta government had deliberately set out to discourage reading, it would be hard to design a better strategy than banning Kaur. Some students in the province will now be intellectually and emotionally poorer as a result of Alberta’s expanding culture of censorship.

One of the most salient features of contemporary book banning is that it begins in schools, but soon extends beyond them. Alberta’s recently tabled Bill 28 would, if approved, create new, provincially appointed library inspectors tasked with investigating “any matter relating to the management, administration or operation of a public library.”

The devaluation of literature is a necessary step in the direction of social coercion. “We lived in a culture that denied any merit to literary works, considering them important only when they were handmaidens to something seemingly more urgent—namely ideology,” Nafisi writes in Reading Lolita in Tehran. “This is a country where all gestures, even the most private, were interpreted in political terms.”

Alberta is not Iran, and the priorities of the Islamic Republic’s mullahs are not commensurate with those of Danielle Smith. But young Canadians increasingly live in a culture that denies inherent merit to literary works, one that considers them important only when they are handmaidens to ideology. Our school libraries have become battlegrounds in which to score political points, and our politicians and educators are teaching children that censorship is the way to deal with books found wanting by their preferred orthodoxies.

As restrictions expand, reading will inevitably gravitate to private spaces, such as Azar Nafisi’s living room, in which young women once gathered to read and speak freely. Perhaps a teacher in Lethbridge create a comparable space for their students today, reminding them that books can still be read, discussed, and cherished, even when politicians declare them beyond the pale.

About PEN Canada

PEN Canada is a nonpartisan organization that celebrates literature, defends freedom of expression, and assists writers in peril at home and abroad. Based in Toronto, the English-language Canadian centre was founded in 1983 and is proud to be one of over 140 centres of PEN International.