Thread by @ashleyhopeperez

yeah, right? Tons of bawdy humor and penis jokes and rape-y vibes and downright rape. I mean, I believe we can teach it all without harming kids, but I'm really sick of that stuff being held up as "educational". WTF, man.

https://twitter.com/r_bittner/status/1446593939130048518

Today, this week... in conversations about why books that are compelling to teens belong in libraries, there has been so much basic misunderstanding of what the hell literature is, what the hell education is. And the level of mistrust of teachers & librarians is staggering.

And then we're defending, again and again, the importance of rich, relevant, diverse youth literatures--the world-opening it offers to ALL young people--against the charge that this reading is unnecessary, profane, or low-quality.

We try to explain the significance of literature to build empathy & disrupt prejudice to folks who have no intention of engaging with nuance & will take every effort to reckon with our collective history as an unjust "assault" on their right to feel good about whiteness.

Meanwhile, black children are being arrested, at their elementary school, for a non-existent crime.

https://twitter.com/bykenarmstrong/status/1446505198516535297?s=20

(the whole thread)

I'm looking back on the day, on the week, and thinking about the amount of energy I have spent repeatedly making a case that I never could have imagined I would need to make: that, no, my historical novel OUT OF DARKNESS does not "teach children about anal sex."

I could tell myself there's merit in showing these ludicrous stunts & distractions for what they are. That making a video response got more eyes on the situation than all my Tweets and essays. I could link it again--and I probably will (bc dammit I worked hard to find an angle).

But my heart isn't really in it. I'm tired of pretending to care if anyone believes my book is one long anal sex scene or if they know that it's an open wound of a story with my heart still beating inside it.

I think that I should be doing something else. I think I should be writing the next book they will want to ban. I think I should be writing a letter to a teacher or librarian whose fed up and heartsick. There are plenty.

I think the week and the stupidity of it all is catching up with me. And goddamn it, little girls are getting arrested & the systemic racism is so blatant--right there in scrupulous propublica reporting.

And meanwhile in 48 states there is legislation passed or in the works to restrict our already too-feeble efforts to name these realities.

I don't think I want to have any more conversations with people who think THE VERY IDEA of a scene with anal sex in it is more harmful than the racism that shelters a system where elementary children are regularly arrested.

I think I want to take a break for a while and just not do it. Because I don't think I can without crying. Not just for the kids trying to grow up in this mess. Or the teachers trying to help them.

It's my fiercest wish to save all my empathy for the kids & the educators & the nurses & doctors (bc, oh yeah, there's a pandemic that has also turned into a cultural battleground, as if the libraries weren't enough).

But against that wish to save my sadness for "worthy" causes and undeserved pain, I still feel a deep ache at the thought that so many somebodies--who are parents & aunties, too--think the most important thing they can do is rail against a hypothetical threat to white innocence.

I don't hate these people. But I wonder what we've made of our country that it can shelter this much confusion and delusion and treat it as if it were "another side" of an issue.

I wonder at what folks are fleeing from, internally, that makes this line of action seem like a good one. That has folks talking about teachers and librarians and school board members and authors as if they were traitors.

I don't want to be responsible for the pain in the hearts of those who have let these distortions take such a deep hold, but I can't help but imagine it. The narrowness and loneliness and grayness of a heart that has been kept from knowing and loving across deep differences.

I can't help imagining how these folks were once children--not innocent, but open, at least for a time. What got plucked out or flattened or strangled along the way? What did this country--or some other country--do to them?

What forces did we allow to shape them toward such a deep fear of other experiences, of other ways of loving or being in a body, of other ways of feeling or expressing delight in the world?

Because all week I have been engaging in conversations to persuade folks who want to cull all but what they deem "educational" and "appropriate" books. I've told them true things:

I've told them that literature is complex and that grappling with complexity is important for critical thinking and college readiness. I've leaned on my credentials as a literature professor and former high school English teacher.

I've pointed out similarities in theme and content between the books they want to ban or have banned (largely by or about non-dominant experiences) and the books that they view as "the classics" or "appropriate."

That's all true. But it's not the truest thing. And I haven't even bothered trying to tell them the truest thing, which is this:

I want kids to find books that will break their hearts and heal them again, that will stretch them to the very reach of what's possible in their spirits. I want them to enjoy wicked laughter and to copy down a quotation to hand off to a friend or screenshot a page to remember.

I want the human work of tangling and untangling possibility in words to be a mystery and a marvel to them. I want them to imagine what their parents cannot. I want them to love in ways that their parents will not. I want them to tear down this world and build a better one.

That's the radical core of literacy rooted in varied encounters with other worlds, lived and imagined. It's a visionary capacity. And I think, layers and layers beneath the pretense to piety and decency, there is fear.

And disavowed fear, fear that has to be guarded and fiercely NOT KNOWN, not examined, will fling a being outward in rage and ferocious determination. The most important thing becomes not knowing that the fear is there. There must always be a target outside the self.

I am tired of feeling deeply for the very grown-ups who seem so invested in ensuring that their children--and other people's children--will have fewer opportunities to feel deeply or know safety. I'm tired of trying to understand what is beneath ugly action.

But I think that we will have to keep trying if we are going to find a way around or through that ugliness, that naked refusal of the mattering of other people's children. I think we are going to have to do the work of seeing into folks who do not want to see into themselves.

I'm not sure what that would look like out here in the real world. Can we just stop the school board meeting and say, "You don't need to be afraid? You won't be alone learning to belong in a country or world that has turned loose of what you're holding onto?" Probably not.

But I do know something about what it is like to strive for that fuller seeing and naming of harm in literature, at least for me. It means entering and enduring a space of horror and possibility, where you know, from inside, the humanity of someone whose choices cause suffering.

I can't say where the darkness in other people's work comes from. But for me, traversing painful, bleak territory is ultimately a commitment to the power of imagination to invent a far side, another land, a space of possibility.

I suspect that those of us who have not imagined that far side, that space of possibility, do not trust that our children can move safely through the depths of feelings and wild darknesses. Better to insist on stark illumination and all the feet on a single, sure path.

...the paved path is not about wanting the young people to make their way forward safely but about wanting to ensure they can be called back. Because what if they venture out and we, the fearful grownups, lack the capacity to follow them?

So, against my wishes, I imagine fear clenched tight as a fist in the hearts of these grownups exhausting us in these debates. Fear of being left behind. Fear of alienation from their kids. Fear of not knowing enough to have something to offer.

Which is to say, deeply human fears. And when I follow the paths of feeling and connecting that I open up for myself through literature, there is always some miraculous welling up of a little more compassion. A little more humor. A little more curiosity.

Just a little. Mostly, I'm tired and I don't care where I lie down so long as it's soon. But I think tomorrow I'll be okay to start again. And that's one thing that literature does, that following language can do. It can renew us in spite of ourselves.

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