A book worth banning is a book worth reading
If you’re like me, you bought the graphic novel “Maus” for your nephew’s birthday. For one thing, it’s a Pulitzer-Prize winning work and one of the most widely respected graphic novels there is. My nephew was also becoming a young adult and I felt he was ready for some of the heavier concepts dealt with in “Maus”.
In “Maus”, author Art Spiegelman tells the story of his parents’ experiences as Jews in Nazi concentration camps. The book goes into the atrocities of those events, the impacts on the individuals who experienced them, and the long-term impact on the families and communities that can trace their line back to that crime against humanity.
It’s a serious work, but because it is told through illustrations like a comic book, the material becomes easier to grapple with. It doesn’t sugarcoat or pander. It presents the hard realities of the holocaust in a more approachable way. Among other things, the illustrations depict the Jews as mice, hence the title. Over the years “Maus” has been credited as a supremely effective teaching tool to generations and cultures divorced from the original events.
It also features nudity and profanity, and obviously, violence. For Tennessee’s McMinn County School Board and the parents of that district, that’s all they needed to know. The board recently voted to remove “Maus” from the eighth-grade curriculum because of nudity, profanity, and violence. You may have seen something about this ban as it is one of the higher profile and recent bans of literature in schools.
First, given the serious, important, and world-changing content of the book, if you were distracted by a few naughty words and naked mice, you weren’t paying attention. I’d offer you are exactly the kind of person who should read this graphic novel. The argument is that the school shouldn’t be promoting this kind of language and violence.
The simple response is that content is vital to understanding that historical tragedy. The more nuanced response is that school doesn’t promote, it educates. Teaching about 9/11 isn’t the same thing as promoting terror attacks. Part of understanding the holocaust and other horrors, is confronting those horrors.
Second, and more importantly, I don’t think this ban is actually about naughty words and mice genitalia. That’s what it says on paper, but likely, this ban is because the book teaches about the holocaust. The school board has denied it in a statement, but Spiegelman and other observers don’t buy it. Certain subjects have been the subject of downplaying over the years. Just like there are generations who have been convinced that slavery wasn’t that bad or that the Civil War wasn’t about slavery, there is an effort to gloss over the holocaust.
There are world leaders and folks in our own community that think the holocaust didn’t happen. Barring that, they think concentration camps weren’t that bad and talk of gas chambers and torture was all made up. There are some dark corners of the internet, and they have this kind of garbage at their center. These are the kinds of ideas young minds need protection from. Not through censorship, but through compelling works of truth, like “Maus”.
Isaac Asimov said, “Any book worth banning is a book worth reading.” If an idea is powerful enough to scare people, it’s important enough to be dealt with. We don’t get rid of the boogeyman by locking the closet; we confront it. Ironically, one of the Nazi party’s favorite group activities was book burning. They thought they could control ideas. One of the worst things we could do is finish their work.
