Banned Books Week is an annual event celebrating the freedom to read. Typically held during the last week of September, it serves to highlight free and open access to information.Every day across the globe, writers are being censored in a hundred different ways. Some face persecution, others are imprisoned, some have their work banned and some are subject to more insidious means of censorship. For some, such restrictions may seem sensible, while for others, they appear arbitrary at best, oppressive and dangerous at worst.
The list of books suppressed in the English language features the sacred and profane, poetic and pornographic, famous and infamous. A history of the censorship of literary texts is also a history of the authorities that have attempted to prevent their circulation: sovereigns, politicians, judges, prison officers, slaveholders, school governors, librarians, teachers, parents, students, editors and publishers.
Each year a host of events are held across the United States such as author readings in bookshops, libraries, and schools, as well as panel discussions and webinars.Banned Books Week was launched in 1982 in response to a sudden surge in the number of challenges to books in schools, bookstores and libraries in the US and designed to bring awareness to the number of books that face bans and censorship in the United States.Since then according to the American Library Association more than 11,000 books have been challenged.
We might expect that book bannings are a particularly American thing, but this year Banned Books Week is a bigger thing in the UK than it ever has been before, largely due to the involvement of the non-profit campaign Index for Censorship.
https://www.indexoncensorship.org/
“Censorship isn’t something that happens far away,” says Jodie Ginsberg, the campaign’s CEO. “It has happened in the UK. In every library there are books that British citizens have been blocked from reading at various times. As citizens and literature lovers we must be constantly vigilant to guard against the erosion of our freedom to read.
“Index is excited to be joining the coalition as the first non-US member. We have been publishing work by censored writers from around the world for 45 years and – given all that is happening on the global political stage – it feels more important than ever to be highlighting censorship and demonstrating just what it means when books are banned.”
Charles Brownsein, chair of the Banned Books Week Coalition and executive director of the Comic Book Legal Defence Fund, which finances comic book creators and retailers court cases against censorship actions, is delighted that the primarily US event now has a foothold in the UK. He says, “We are very excited to have the Index on Censorship join the coalition. Their work not only aligns with our mission, but will bring an international perspective and awareness to our annual celebration of the freedom to read.”
Literature is usually banned because people with power do not approve. Words are dangerous because they can.inspire action. They can point to an injustice, breathe life into dormant issues, create a national feeling or hold people accountable. Call me a hypocrite and I make no apologies I've been known to throw Fascist propaganda in the bin, because I happen to think recycling is very important too. Banned Books week has certainly giving me some needed food for thought though.
In 1644, poet John Milton famously wrote, “Censors rake through the entrails of many an old good author, with a violation worse than any could be offered to his tomb.” The statement comes from
Aeropagitica: A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing to the Parliament of England, a spirited defense of free speech that he wrote in response to Parliament’s Licensing Order of 1643. Milton, who himself was the victim of censorship in his efforts to publish treatises defending divorce, published
Aeropagitica in defiance of the same censorship law it argued against.
While Milton’s treatise was a response to an immediate threat to freedom of speech, the practice of censoring and banning literature both predates and postdates Milton’s defense — particularly as it relates to poetry.
A few decades later, poet, novelist, and playwright Oscar Wilde said, “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” Even later, poet Joseph Brodsky said, “There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.”
While the history of censorship has become more visible in the last few years through campaigns like Banned Books Week, perhaps less noted or known within that history is how poets and poetry have been similarly challenged, censored, and banned.
In honor of Banned Books Week this year, here are some significant poetry collections, poems, that have been challenged, censored, banned, and even burned throughout history as controversial works and some poets that continue to be silenced even today:-
Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil) by Charles Baudelaire:
Banned in 1857 for eroticism, and, according to the judges, poems that “necessarily lead to the excitement of the senses
Mahmoud Darwish :
Though he was widely considered the Palestinian national poet, Mahmoud Darwish frequently faced controversy and censorship with his work. As a young man, Darwish faced house arrest and imprisonment for his activism. He later became increasingly involved in politics, openly criticizing Arab governments and Palestinian politicians. He lived in exile from Israel for twenty-six years, until he was able to return in 1996.
In 2000, Yossi Sarid, then the education minister of Israel, suggested including works by Darwish in the school curriculum. But right-wing members of President Ehud Barak’s government threatened to introduce a motion of no-confidence. Barak said Israel was “not ready” to teach Darwish in the schools. After Darwish had learned of the controversy, he said, “It is difficult to believe that the most militarily powerful country in the Middle East is threatened by a poem.”
The issue of Darwish’s censorship came up again in 2014, when his works were removed from a major book fair in Saudi Arabia for containing “blasphemous passages.”
https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.co.uk/2010/01/mahmoud-darwish-poet-of-resistance.html
Howl by Allen Ginsberg:
Challenged in a famous 1957 obscenity trial for its language and content about drug use and sexuality. On October 7, 1955, Ginsberg publicly read part of “Howl” for the first time at the Six Gallery in San Francisco, to the praise and acclaim of his fellow Beat writers. The following day, City Lights publisher and poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti sent Ginsberg a telegram
am asking for the manuscript of the poem. Anticipating a controversial release, before City Lights published the manuscript, Ferlinghetti asked the American Civil Liberties Union if it would defend the book in court if he were prosecuted.
Howl and Other Poems was then published on November 1, 1956, as part of the City Lights Pocket Poets Series. With its long, winding lines; profane language; and frank, racy content about drug use and sexuality,
Howl was deemed obscene and Ferlinghetti was arrested and taken to court. Obscenity charges were dismissed after trial.
Amores (Loves) & Ars amatoria (Art of Love) by Ovid:
The Roman poet Ovid not only had his book, Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love) banned, but he himself was banished from Rome for writing it in the year 8 CE. Banned, challenged, and burned for sexual content.In 1497, Girolamo Savonarola, a Dominican monk living in Florence, Italy, began burning all objects he found immoral and corruptive in what would be called the Burning of the Vanities. All of Ovid’s works were included in the pyre.
Ovid’s works were challenged again a century later in Elizabethan England as
Amores, elegiac poems in a set of three books that describe one of Ovid’s affairs, was proscribed in the 1599 Bishops’ Ban. Ordered by John Whitgift, the archbishop of Canterbury, and Richard Bancroft, the bishop of London, the Bishops’ Ban resulted into the cessation of the printing of questionable books and the destruction of existing copies of those texts. Christopher Marlowe’s translation of the
Amores was included in the ban. U.S. Customs banned it in 1930 - nearly two thousand years after it had been written. This makes it a candidate, if not the winner, of the dubious distinction of being the longest (in time) banned book.
A Light in the Attic by Shel Silverstein:
Banned for encouraging bad behavior and addressing topics some deemed inappropriate for children.
This is one of several poems that led to the collection being banned because it was said to cause messiness and disobedience.
How Not to Have to Dry the Dishes
If you have to dry the dishes
(Such an awful boring chore)
If you have to dry the dishes
(‘Stead of going to the store)
If you have to dry the dishes
And you drop one on the floor
Maybe they won’t let you
Dry the dishes anymore
(
Light in the Attic, Harper Collins, 1981)
First Folio by William Shakespeare:
Arguably the greatest writer in the English language, has been banned many times. His plays and his sonnets excite the greatest difficulty for teachers by alluding to sex in many ways; several plays banned for profane language, sexual content, violence, political implications, and more.
Dlatego żyjemy (That’s What We Live For) by Wislawa Szymborska:
Wislawa Szymborksa is considered one of the major modern Polish poets; she published several poetry collections and was awarded a Nobel Prize in literature in 1996. Szymborska spent much of her life in a Stalinist Poland, in which socialism was enforced upon Polish artists.In 1949 her first book,
Dlatego żyjemy, was set for publication but was banned for being too preoccupied with the war and not loyal enough to the socialist regime
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman:
Famously “banned in Boston” in 1882 for sexual content.Seminal to the history of American verse,
Leaves of Grass, a frank and sensual celebration of America and the human body, would later be considered a classic that established Whitman as one of the originators of a uniquely American poetic voice
.
https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/happy-birthday-walt-whitman-legendary.html
Ahmad Shamlu - Metals and Sense :
The Persian poet, also known by the surname Shamloo, or in his homeland as Ahmad Šāmlū, occasionally used the pen name A. Bamdad when writing poetry or working as a journalist. Many critics consider him to be amongst the most influential poets in modern-day Iran.
Shamlou’s first collection of poetry was called
Forgotten Songs and was published in 1947. It was a collection of modern and classical poetry and he followed this by making regular contributions to a literary periodical called
Sokhan-no. A second collection appeared four years later called
Manifesto and it was around this time that his socialist tendencies manifested themselves. He took on a job at the Hungarian embassy as cultural advisor.
Perhaps it was his growing notoriety in Persian society that caused his third collection of poetry –
Metals and Sense in 1952 – to be first banned and then all copies confiscated and destroyed by the police. Things got a little easier for him during the next twenty years as he continued to write and publish his work although, in 1966, he found his literary magazine subject to a banning order by the Ministry of Information.
Shamlu left Iran in the 1970s as he was not in favour with the Shah’s regime. He moved to the United States and then to Britain for a time. The 1980s saw him living a secluded life while still writing regularly but this was interrupted when he was invited to do a lecture tour throughout Europe, and this was repeated in the early 1990s. Further tours of the United States and Canada established his name as one of the greatest figures in Iranian literature.
Lenore Kandal - The Love Book:
Lenore Kandel hung out with Beat Poets and was and was immortalized by Jack Kerouac In "Big Sur," Kerouac's 1962 novel, Ms. Kandel is portrayed as Romana Swartz, a "big Rumanian monster beauty.
She believed in communal living, anarchic street theater, belly dancing, and all things beautiful. She was one of the shining lights of San Francisco's famous counterculture of the '60s. Her book of poetry "The Love Book," published in 1966, was deemed pornographic and the famed Psychedelic shop
on Haight Street where it was sold was raided by the police. Copies were confiscated on the grounds that their display and sale "excited lewd thoughts" and the store's owners were arrested.
'The Love Book' was extremely graphic sexually," said Gerald Nicosia a Kerouac biographer and Beat generation chronicler. "She showed this openness to sexuality, this freedom of lifestyle. With 'The Love Book,' she became a cause celebre. But Lenore was a true lyric poet. Her language was as beautiful as anything being written."
Ms. Kandel wrote another book of poetry, "Word Alchemy," published in 1967. The same year, she was the only woman to speak onstage at the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park. She went from the Beat community to the Diggers, to being a major player at the Human Be-In, a very deep poet, who was committed to radical values and transforming culture.
D.H. Lawrence :
D. H. Lawrence was no stranger to censorship; his novels
Lady Chatterley’s Lover and
The Rainbow were censored and banned. However, many of Lawrence’s poems came under fire as well. His poems—such as “All of Us," a sequence of thirty-one war poems—attacked politicians and criticized World War I and imperial policy, but due to censorship ultimately rendered the works unreadable to the extent that the full extent of his poetic talent has been overlooked.
Lawrence, who wrote poetry from 1905 until his death in 1930, struggled to get his poems into print, especially after the controversy surrounding his other published works of the time. It wasn’t until decades later that Lawrence’s works began to be published in their entirety.A new edition of Lawrence's poems, many rendered unreadable by the censor's pen, will reveal him as a brilliant war poet .
Federico García Lorca is one of the most important Spanish poets and dramatists of the twentieth century, the author of such celebrated works as
Romancero Gitano (
The Gypsy Ballads), which was reprinted seven times during his lifetime. But his work was still the object of censorship in Spain in the early 1900s. Lorca was openly homosexual and known for his outspoken socialist views, and his works were deemed dangerous for their sexual content, language, and political underpinnings.
In 1936, Lorca was shot to death by Spanish nationalists due to his support of the deposed Republican government. Lorca’s work was burned in Granada’s Plaza del Carmen and banned from Francisco Franco’s Spain. His books remained censored until Franco’s death in 1975
.
https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/frederico-garcia-lorca-561896-19836.html
Sappho :
The Greek poet Sappho lived on the island of Lesbos and is famously known for her poems of romantic longing and her affairs with other women. Though Plato referred to her as the “tenth muse,” her sexuality occasionally overshadowed her work, which was frequently viewed as obscene and objectionable. In 180 AD, the Assyrian ascetic Tatian decried Sappho as a “whorish woman, love-crazy, who sang about her own licentiousness.”
Before it was destroyed, the library of Alexandria housed nine collections of Sappho’s poems. But in 380 AD, Saint Gregory of Nazianzus, the bishop of Constantinople, ordered her work burned. Later, in 1073, Pope Gregory VII also ordered that her work be publicly burned. Most of her work was destroyed; only one complete poem survived—until the discovery of some more of her poem fragments by scholars in 1898.
Nazim Hikmet :
Considered Turkey’s greatest modern poet, acclaimed both nationally and internationally for his works, Nazim Hikmet was a Communist who was stripped of his citizenship for his political views. His work, which praised his country and the common man, was deemed “subversive” and banned in Turkey from 1938 to 1965.
Hikmet himself spent several years in Turkish prisons and in exile. He wrote many of his most popular poems during these times, such as his masterpiece
Human Landscapes from My Country, which he wrote while imprisoned from 1938 to 1950.
Despite the controversy surrounding his works, Hikmet’s poems won the praise and support of artists from all over the world. Now Hikmet’s work is available in more than fifty languages, and he is praised as a major figure in modern poetry.
Gwendolyn Brooks :
Gwendolyn Brooks was the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize in poetry, wrote the very brief but pointed poem,
We Real Cool, the Poem was banned for the line “We jazz June” which was taken to be a metaphor for sex. “We Real Cool” (The Pool Players) is so brilliant that you could read it in essentially any time period in American history and it would still ring true.
We real cool . We
Left school. We
Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We
Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We
Jazz soon. We
Die soon.
Alexander Vvedensky :
Alexander Ivanovich Vvedensky was a Russian poet and dramatist with formidable influence on "unofficial" and avant garde art during and after the times of the Soviet Union. Vvedensky is widely considered (among contemporary Russian writers and literary scholars) as one of the most original and important authors to write in Russian in the early Soviet period.
As members of OBERIU (a modified acronym for “Association of Real Art”), Alexander Vvedensky and his colleagues were hounded to their end for their “meaningless” and “irrational” literary work.
During the 1920s and 30s, the Soviet Union made it nearly impossible for OBERIU members to publish their poetry anywhere. As a result, most of Vvedensky’s writing vanished and the first edition of what did survive was not smuggled out of the U.S.S.R. until the early 1980s. Now, several decades Vvedensky’s death on a prison train in 1941, his story and the story of OBERIU has become a rallying cry of contemporary Russian dissidents like Pussy Riot.The writer, has garnered a new English-language audience since Pussy Riot's Nadezhda Tolokonnikova quoted Vvedensky at her trial in August 2012. Tolokonnikova compared Pussy Riot, arrested for an anti-Putin protest in a Moscow cathedral, with the dissident Soviet poets of the OBERIU group, whose deliberately incomprehensible work challenged and de-familiarized the death-dealing logic of the communist state. She quoted Vvedensky’s idea that “the inexplicable is our friend” and insisted: “Pussy Riot are the disciples and heirs of Vvedensky,” – like him, they pass judgement on the state, even as they are sentenced to imprisonment: “The dissidents and the poets of OBERIU are thought to be dead, but they are alive,” she asserted. “They are punished, but they do not die.”
Forugh Farrokhzad :
Iranian Farrokhzad, a controversial and modern poet who openly discussed her love life in her poems, was killed in a car accident in 1967 when she was 32 years old. She remains one of the most iFarrokhzad's poems were banned following the 1979 revolution. Later, some of her poems were republished. In her poems, Farrokhzad writes about the plight of women, her unease with the conventional style of life, and her relationships.
Some excerpts:
I am thinking that in a moment of neglect
I might fly from this silent prison,
laugh in the eyes of the man who is my jailer
and beside you begin life anew.
Life is perhaps lighting up a cigarette
in the narcotic repose between two love-makings
or the absent gaze of a passerby
who takes off his hat to another passerby
with a meaningless smile and a good morning.
Exiled Iranian poet Esmail Khoi has said that Farrokhzad, as a poet and as a woman, has "all the characteristics that the Iranian government hates."
"Farrokhzad is an intellectual woman, broad-minded, freedom loving, and brave, who expresses all her feelings as a woman. She can be and in my view has always been a model for other women. This is something that the Islamic republic cannot tolerate," Khoi said in an interview with the
BBC.
http://www.forughfarrokhzad.org/papers/papers2.htm
Mohammed al-Ajami :
Mohammed al-Ajami, is a Qatari poet who was imprisoned between 2011 and 2016 for reciting a poem critical of Qatar’s ruling family. Prior to his arrest, he was a literature student at Cairo University. On 29 November 2012, he was sentenced to life imprisonment, a sentence commuted in March 2016 through royal pardon because of international pressure.
Fatima Naoot :
Egyptian poet, author and former Parliamentarian candidate Fatima Naoot was chief editor of the literary magazine Qaws Qazah (The Rainbow) and a writer for The 7th Day newspaper. She has translated short stories by Virginia Woolf, a volume of American and English poetry and a volume of short stories by John Ravenscroft. From 2001 onwards she published four volumes of Arabic poetry. The manuscript of her fifth volume was rewarded with the first prize in the Arabic literature section of the Literary festival in Hong Kong in 2006. The translation of this volume in both Chinese and English appeared meanwhile with the title A Bottle of Glue.Naoot has attended many poetic festivals and committees in Middle East, Europe, and Latin America, and wrote weekly columns in newspapers in Egypt and the Middle East. Her poetry has been translated into languages including English, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Chinese and Kurdish. She was recently sentenced to three years in jail by an Egyptian court for the crime of insulting Islam. Ms. Naoot was arrested
for writing a Facebook post in which she criticized the mass slaughter of animals during the religious festival of Eid al-Adha. You can still see Ms. Naoot's Facebook page
here.
Amanuel Asrat :
Eritrean journalist and poet, Amanuel Asrat has been incarcerated since September 23, 2001 in an undisclosed, maximum security prisons along with other journalists and former government officials who demanded reform. Amanuel (b 1971), a graduate of soil science and water conservation of University of Asmara, is greatly credited for Eritrea’s poetry resurgence of 2000s. An award-winning poet and critic, Amanuel (with two colleagues) has established grassroots literary clubs across the country. Amid the political crackdown and banning of the private newspapers, Amanuel was taken into custody in the morning of September 23, 2001. Apart from unauthorized rumors mainly through former prison guards who have fled the country, their whereabouts is unknown and there has never been an official statement by Eritrean authorities.
Amanuel Asrat is one of the few Eritrean writers who are assuming their proper places and due recognitions internationally mainly through PEN Eritrea’s advocacy campaign. He was profiled in August 2015 issue of
The Guardian along other five Eritrean journalists; his poem was translated into 14 languages to mark
International Translation Day; he held one of the
empty chairs at the 81st PEN Congress in Quebec, Canada; and he was one of the five writers featured in 2015 on the
Day of the Imprisoned Writer, an international day that recognizes writers who have suffered persecution as a result of exercising their right to freedom of expression. For International Translation Day on 30 September 2015, PEN members from around the world translated ኣበሳ ኲናት (The Scourge of War) into many different languages.
‘ኣበሳ ኲናት (The Scourge of War)’
Where two brothers pass each other
Where two brothers meet each other
Where two brothers conjoin
In the piazza of life and death
In the gulf of calamity and cultivation
In the valley of fear and peace
Something resounded.
The ugliness of the thing of war
When its spring comes
When its ravaging echoes knock at your door
It is then that the scourge of war brews doom
But…
You serve it willy-nilly
Unwillingly you keep it company
Still, for it to mute how hard you pray!
– Translated by Tedros Abraham
Liu Xiaobo :
Poet Liu Xiaobo
https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.co.uk/2017/07/chinas-nobel-laureate-dissident-leader.html was detained in 2008 before he died of cancer while in custody at a hospital on July 13 aged 61. Beijing faced a global backlash for its treatment of Liu Xiaobo, who became the first Nobel Peace Prize winner to die in custody since German pacifist Carl von Ossietzky in 1938.A veteran of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, he was sentenced to 11 years in jail in 2009 for “subversion” after pushing for democratic reforms.Following his terminal cancer diagnosis, Liu had requested to receive treatment abroad a wish that friends believe was in reality for his wife’s sake. But the authorities refused to let him go.
His death in custody triggered rage and frustration among the dissident community and an outpouring of grief in semi-autonomous Hong Kong, where pro-democracy forces must also contend with an increasingly assertive Beijing. Concerns for his widow Liu Xia also a poet are currently ongoing.
Dareen Tatour :
Finally this Palestinian poet has spent over a year and half under house arrest for publishing a poem on her Facebook page. Since then, she has lost the ability to support herself. and cannot leave the house without a chaperone.
Tatour, 34, was arrested by Israeli police on October 11th, 2015 for a poem she had published on Facebook.The main clause of her indictment was based on a poem that she had allegedly posted on YouTube under the title: ” (Resist my people, resist them). She was charged with incitement to violence and identifying with a terrorist organization ,all because of her poem.
Since then, the state has been waging a legal battle, which has included bringing in a series of experts on both Arabic and Arabic poetry, in order to dissect the words of a young poet who was nearly anonymous until her arrest. Her trial, and the state’s attempts to turn a poem into an existential threat, has been nothing short of Kafkaesque.
‘Chains can imprison a poet physically, restrict his movements and impose house arrest, but they can’t restrict his thoughts, tongue, words and poems’.
These were her words when the Danish Carl Scharnberg Foundation, in June 2017, awarded her a prize of 2000 euros to support her fight for poetry, art and justice.
In the charges against Dareen for her poetry and expression, the indictment severely disregards her internationally recognized human right of expression. Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” Article 19(1) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights states that “Everyone shall have the right to hold opinions without interference.” Article 19 (2) also states that: “Everyone shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of his choice.” Although Freedom of Opinion and Expression is guaranteed under these international human rights conventions, the Israeli authorities continue to violate these internationally codified rights through the criminalization of Palestinian expression through social media outlets. The arrest and detention of Dareen and other Palestinians take place in the context of collective punishment, punitive measures and repression of Palestinians. Here is link to a previous post on the case and the poem concerned :
https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.co.uk/2016/07/support-palestinian-poet-dareen-tatour.html
The Turkish government’s hostility to poems that challenge its official ideology is a long-held tradition in Turkey.The Turkish Republic was founded in 1923 and governed by the Republican People’s Party (CHP) until the first free national elections were held in 1950, as a result of which the Democrat Party (DP) came into power. Although both parties were rivals, they had a lot in common, such as their intolerance of dissent and free exchange of ideas.
When the issue of jailed or exiled poets in Turkey is discussed, one of the first that comes to one’s mind is
Nazım Hikmet (born 1902, Salonika, Ottoman Empire [now Thessaloníki, Greece]—died 1963, Moscow), who was one of the most influential figures in 20
th century Turkish literature.
However, the history of Turkey is filled with many examples of banning poems, removing poetry books from the marketplace, and jailing poets, however, the history of Turkey is filled with many other examples of banning poems, removing poetry books from the marketplace, and jailing poets, prosecuted and persecuted for their literary work.
As you can see poetry for a long time has been considered dangerous and subversive.The names mentioned previously could have been joined by many many others.
Bertolt Brecht, who not only lived through some of the ‘darkest times' of the last century but was also one of its greatest lyric poets. His poem, ‘
To Those Born Later', written while Brecht was in exile from Nazi Germany in 1938, goes to the heart of the matter:
What kinds of times are they, when
A talk about trees is almost a crime
Because it implies silence about so many horrors?[4]
A year earlier Brecht wrote this poem, ‘
In Dark Times':
They won't say: when the walnut tree shook in the wind
But: when the house painter crushed the workers.
They won't say: when the child skimmed a flat stone across the rapids
But: when the great wars were being prepared for.
They won't say: when the woman came into the room
But: when the great powers joined forces against the workers.
However, they won't say: the times were dark
Rather: why were their poets silent?[5]
What Brecht seems to be saying is that poetry is impossible in ‘dark times' because poetry addresses itself to issues which the dark times crush into irrelevance. But he also reminds us that silence is no option. Here is a link to his poem
The Burning of the Books :
https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.co.uk/2010/10/bertolt-brecht-9translated-by-john.html
But censorship of poetry never truly lasts. Whether it takes days, months, years or decades eventually a banned poem will be brought to light and its message heard again. But the importance of the issues surrounding banning books today remains, and is one about fundamental freedoms and civil liberties.
Writers are still regularly jailed in many countries for speaking their minds or daring to question orthodoxy. Freedom of speech is a rare and precious thing in the world today but writers are still paying the price for speaking out and using their voice. While in America the First Amendment protects freedom of expression as a basic right, it is nevertheless not enough to prevent ideas being challenged, books banned on the grounds of difference in interpretation. In some countries freedom of expression is still completely absent from social culture, the ability to access forbidden information becomes a dangerous necessity, made only possible today because of advances in technology, giving banned writers a global outlet, and an invaluable resource to readers.
There will always be struggles over the proper limits to free speech, but banned books week might at least help draw attention to the issues involved and broaden peoples understanding and awareness.
And serve to remind us of the power of words and those that seek to silence them. Yet when this free speech becomes unlimited, especially in this current fractured world there will always be those who seek to provoke an extreme reaction, this is also the dark side of humanity, that can veer towards hate. The danger is that tolerance and respect for our differences - and for each other - could actually tear us all apart. Left unchecked, hate speech can lead to war and genocide. Although the right to free speech is a fundamental value, it should not be allowed to outweigh the basic human rights of other people, especially their right to life.
