Last week tweeted American poet Amanda Gorman that is a copy of her book The Hill We Climb had been removed from a Florida school library. The poem, which Gorman had recited at Joe Biden’s inauguration, had prompted a mother’s complaint; it would be hate speech. A hilarious detail in my opinion is that the mother noted in the complaint form that the author of the poem was Oprah Winfrey. Someone who cannot see the difference between one black woman and another, I thought to myself, certainly has no talent for the subtleties of a poetic work.
But the complaint itself, and also the decision to remove a book from a school library, is of course yet another expression of a society that is not sure how to deal with the countless gray areas of art, and with the stratification and interpretation sensitivities of literature. And that goes for both the right and left sides of the debate. After all, in February everyone was still concerned with how Roald Dahl’s original lyrics were being changed, so to speak, to make them fit better in the present day. Words such as ‘fat’ and ‘ugly’ were deleted.
In the Netherlands there has been a lot of discussion about Dahl’s censorship, but we forget that Dahl’s Dutch publisher does not change any texts at all. And I don’t see the day coming when we ban books from school libraries here. There is apparently still enough room in our country to disagree with each other about what is good for our children. Sex or bad language is still allowed, and if you try hard, you will probably find enough racist or at least stereotyping language in children’s books. Not that I’m in favor of that, per se. But I know from my own experience that the gray area can be very gray, and also very large.
I think of the time my son had to give a book review in seventh grade. I didn’t find the title suggestions the school gave him interesting enough, so I told him to ask his teacher if he Mr. Ibrahim and the flowers of the Koran could read. A beautiful gem by the French writer Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt, which reflects on themes such as love and tolerance. The teacher found the book and called my son to the class a few days later. Did he even know what the book was about? Love, he replied obediently. And some tolerance. Yes, it will, the teacher said. But the beginning of the book is in any case – eh – special. And he read aloud the very first sentence of the book to the group. That sentence (which I had long forgotten) reads: “When I was eleven I broke my pig and went to the harlots.”
You understand, my son was quite angry with me. I had embarrassed him with the choice of that crazy book in front of his classmates. But it is a beautiful book!, I exclaimed. Art can be dirty and uncomfortable and incomprehensible, as long as it does something to you! He sighed deeply, read the book, gave a great review about it. And that was the end of it.
It is good to talk and even argue about what literature can do, as long as the books remain intact and available. If anything, following the literary riots abroad, I’m grateful to live in a country that isn’t afraid of a little friction. Not in the least because otherwise I would have been canceled as a mother long ago.
Karin Amatmukrim is a writer and man of letters. She writes a column here every other week.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper on May 30, 2023.