CHRISTELLE MARTIN-HOSTER

You know when there’s a fire. It warms your skin, stings your nose, crackling and hissing in your ears. It stokes your fear. Your body and all your other senses know, and you haven’t even seen flames yet. When you do, it’s hard to look away.

Why? Fire is a force of nature that sometimes we can wield. Our ancestors were learning to create, contain, and bend fire to our will through agriculture, pyrotechnics, and war. It’s a borrowed power that easily slips our control, but a power no less. So we want it, and not always for good. With all of that visibility, fear, and drama, no wonder fire is the tool used in some of humanity’s worst acts. Firepower is in the hands of governments, where it can be used to censor, oppress, and control (Bartling).

Fire is also a useful device in literature–one that is prominent in dystopian fiction. Dystopian literature creates a space for resistance and social commentary in the media we consume, offering images of a counterculture that has traits readers can relate to or embody. The genre often functions to speak out against political and social oppression, such as censorship. In these stories, book censorship frequently comes in the form of bans, and banning has often included book burning.

Slash-and-burn is an agricultural method where fire is used to clear land of vegetation. It’s used to displace what is growing (ban it) so something else can flourish in the fertile ashes. It’s how the nation’s pledge went from “I pledge allegiance to my flag and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all”  to one nation firmly under God (“Pledge of Allegiance”). Book banning is a cultural slash-and-burn in which knowledge is kindling.

Why are we so hot to burn? You can just pull the books from the shelves, but do you even mean it?  Book burning is a physical incarnation of banning. A violent purging of the thoughts within, in hopes that fire can spread faster than ideas. The powers that be in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 do exactly this to rid society of troublesome knowledge that makes people stop and think rather than chase the next bit of pleasure.

In the novel, the free flow of ideas and expressions are a major threat to the controlling government. As with any oppressive regime, tyrannical leaders fear that knowledge has the power to inspire resistance. Published in 1953, the dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 paints an America where the authoritarian government has outlawed books and thus free thought and expression. They’ve hit peak censorship. In place of knowledge is the intense, government issued pursuit of pleasure. Books are illegal. Intellectuals are social outcasts. The protagonist, Guy Montag, is a fireman, a “happiness boy,” says his boss, Captain Beatty (Bradbury 59). Montag’s job is to start fires, though, not put them out, burning books and the homes of dissidents who hide them. Willful ignorance and suicide are rampant. Early in the story Montag comes home from the job he loves to find his wife Mildred has overdosed on sleeping pills. It’s curable, though. Emergency services arrive to purge Mildred of the poisons–one of nearly a dozen similar calls the ‘handymen’ receive every night. No one particularly values life, nor can they escape it.

Fahrenheit 451 comes a decade after the end of World War II, with its threats of widespread communism, and is considered to be a response to McCarthy-era book bans (Robbins). In both the mid-20th century real world and Bradbury’s futuristic imagined one, censorship takes the form of government propaganda as well as controlling the flow of information. Knowledge is the danger Montag is fighting at first, enjoying the power of destruction and rendering social order. Even in the moment of burning down his own house, his turning point, Montag finds pleasure in burning. He is also embracing knowledge, making embers of his ignorance with the same tool used to enforce it. An informed and thinking public is nothing if not dangerous to an oppressive regime.

Embrace diversity. Unite or be divided, robbed, ruled, killed by those who see you as prey. Embrace diversity or be destroyed.

–Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

Fire has an outsized presence in Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, too. In her environmentally ravaged and lawless Los Angeles, everything is on the pyre. In 1992, a year before publication, real world LA was in the throes of riots in reaction to the acquittal of the white police officer who murdered black motorist Rodney King.

Parable of the Sower depicts another dystopia that has virtually abandoned knowledge as well as most of the population. The postapocalypse society has mostly deserted education because basic survival needs are hard to meet. Illiteracy and addiction plague the masses. Addicts who have lost all sense of humanity—hope, love, knowledge—only crave fire after their drug use. Protagonist Lauren Olamina’s life has been one of learning to survive.  Most of what she has lost has gone by fire: her father’s church building, her home. The neighborhoods that survive do so only until the walls they build for protection are torn down and everything within becomes kindling. The journal Olamina writes throughout the story is a history, a warning, and a remedy for the broken government’s tyranny. Books have been her salvation. The stark comparison Butler offers shows that survival is hopeless without knowledge. Hope is impossible without it.

Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.

–Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

Like Parable of the Sower, Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale also employs a journal, recording thoughts of handmaid Offred, someone whose thinking is forbidden and has no value in the all-white, patriarchal Gilead. In Gilead, thought is worthless when it belongs to women or strays from the puritanical doctrine underpinning society. Some men are hung from the wall for subversive behavior—religion, ‘gender treachery’, and independent thought (Stillman). It’s mostly women, though. They must all resign any commitment to knowledge outside of what is prescribed by the government. Women in Gilead are expected to be subservient to men: wives are the possessions of men and symbols of their piety, handmaids are brainwashed breeders whose main function is to supply married couples with children, and Marthas are domestics and sometimes former handmaids. Hope, in this dystopia, relies on solidarity among the oppressed women, who communicate through gossip, gestures, and secret words like those Offred finds carved into the cupboard in her room: “Nolite te bastardes carborundorum (don’t let the bastards grind you down)” (Atwood 173). Offred doesn’t. She has the courage to document her experience for her own well being and to preserve her knowledge for the future.

Is not the writer’s role, indeed, to speak for humanity as conscience and prophet and servant of the billions not able to speak for themselves?

–John Updike, “Why Write?,” Burn This Book

Books find their own way once published, but authors often have different views about their roles. Knowledge is protected by Parable of the Sower’s Lauren Olamina. She and her Earth Seed community preserve, scavenge for, and recreate what books they can to help their community survive. Both Parable of the Sower and The Handmaid’s Tale are journals preserving the histories of their protagonists. They are also very meta warnings of where destroying books, and thus knowledge, can lead; Gilead’s grotesque wall of corpses warning against free thought or its education for most women that only conditions them to be obedient, disposable surrogates.

Through similar resistance, Murtag begins saving books rather than destroying them in Fahrenheit 451. His escape leads him to other rebels from society—the outcast intellectuals—who preserve books by memorizing them, believing that one day sense will be restored. Ignorance is not bliss in Atwood’s, Bradbury’s, or Butler’s work. This literature acts as a warning, reflecting censorship and other fear based oppression in the real world.

In Burn This Book, edited by Toni Morrison, authors share their perspectives on literary censorship. The authors included in the collection are concerned with the ability of ideas in the written world to cross the paper boundaries of literature into reality. They’ve all also experienced censorship of their own works. David Grossman argues writing is powerful enough to build and change worlds in his essay “Writing in the Dark” (Morrison et al. 40). World building is a valuable quality of a book, one that authors are admired for. Similarly, in “Why We Write,” John Updike shares that writers can create a world that is restored (Morrison et al. 17). The writer is responsible to society as a witness and an orator for the voiceless. Books are the realm of imagination. They are where the oppressed can see a different world, take vicarious steps through a parallel universe, maybe a utopia, maybe a dystopian future to resist. “The nation either co-opts its greatest writers…or else seeks to destroy them,” Salman Rushdie writes (Morrison et al. 116). Defining authors as great confirms that they have had something evocative to say, whether the message is praised or condemned. It is usually an author who is willing to be openly critical of their government who faces condemnation. In this way, censoring writers forecasts future oppression. This is the warning Toni Morrison gives in her essay, “Peril.” The inevitable resistance will mean violence. Censor at your own risk. The implements to write—like fire—are cheap, but powerful. In the hands of writers they can form a shield for the masses and do for them what writing does for Grossman, “…restore me to myself, to the person I was before my selfhood was expropriated by the conflict, by the government and the armies, by the despair and the tragedy” (Morrison et al 44).

The stench of burning pages must have carried whiffs of agenda during some of history’s notorious book burnings. German students in 1933 engaged in book burning under Nazi totalitarian regime. Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Ernest Hemingway, Helen Keller among others’ were declared un-German, ‘Jewish intellectualism’ and were therefore verboten (Book Burning in Germany). This and worse atrocities succeeded alongside acceptance of violence as a means of control.

Some were lucky enough to smell the smoke before seeing the fire. The librarians who helped smuggle many ancient scrolls out of Timbuktu libraries (private and at the Ahmed Baba Institute) before Islamic rebel arsonists destroyed them in 2013. These insurgents burned the libraries–symbols of knowledge and thought that they are- and the cultural relics that were still within because they didn’t model their extremist ideology (Kottoor). Protesters organized in response to Nazi book burning, too. Keller, for example, rejected the long term impact of their actions saying that burning books doesn’t stop the ideas within once they are the possessions of people. In 2013, librarians and families with private collections smuggled their books and scrolls out of Timbuktu for safety. Through the ALA Freedom to Read movement, librarians fought to protect access to books that represent different views, not just what some saw as anti-communist or pro-American.

Banning can start with “flaming” on social media: disrespecting someone else’s point of view while centering your own. It can swell into one group’s moral objection to books that reflect ideas or people different from them. The goal is to censor these books, supporting a refusal to confront uncomfortable truths, or outright deny them.  If that group is loud enough and politically powerful enough, as is apparent today, ideology-based bans can ensue. You can’t rewrite history without adulterating the historical record. To ban, to burn, is to say let’s give this up. To mean it. Look today and it’s not hard to find instances of flaming online that feed unfounded prejudices at the heart of modern banning.

America is having a moment. Florida and Iowa are doing the most, removing books from school libraries by the thousands (“Banned in the USA”). Florida, Utah, Missouri, and Tennessee have all passed censorship laws, snatching books from public school and library shelves that mention gender identity, sexuality, and racial inequality: issues this country has yet to overcome.

Resistance, again, is not far behind censorship. Publishers got litigious over the 2023 Texas Reader Act (HB900) that removed ‘explicit’ materials from school libraries and enforces compliance audits on school districts. Librarians forge ahead via the American Library Association banned book week with engagement from the publishing industry. Organizations like Social Justice Books carry the torch when publishers quiet down after such marketable events have passed (AAP).

The problem with banning, as with slash-and-burn agricultural methods, is that what was burned away is not always completely destroyed. In the field of ashes and ignorance, the seeds of social control are planted. But ideas, like plants, have deep and far reaching roots that elude the surface. They will regrow. The unifying lesson here is that censorship will and should be met with resistance. Whether we carry their fragments in memory, keep them a secret or layered in subversion, books offer hope with the knowledge that even fire can not destroy all they contain.

Works Cited

Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale. HarperCollins, 2017.

“Banned in the USA: Beyond the Shelves.” PEN America, 1 Nov. 2024, pen.org/report/beyond-the-shelves/.

Bartling, Mary. “Book Banning and Burning throughout History.” This Book Is Banned, 6 Aug. 2024, thisbookisbanned.com/on-censorship/book-banning-burning-throughout-history/.

“Book Burnings in Germany, 1933.” PBS, Public Broadcasting Service, www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/goebbels-burnings/. Accessed 20 Nov. 2024.

Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451. Simon &  Schuster, 2012.

Butler, Octavia E. Parable of the Sower: Parable Series, Book 1. Open Road Media Sci-Fi & Fantasy, 2012.

“Coalition of Local and National Booksellers, Authors and Publishers File Suit to Challenge New Censorship Law and Defend the Right of Free Expression in Texas – AAP.” AAP – The Voice of American Publishing, 25 July 2023, publishers.org/news/coalition-of-local-and-national-booksellers-authors-and-publishers-file-suit-to-challenge-new-censorship-law-and-defend-the-right-of-free-expression-in-texas/.

“Indie Presses Donate Royalties to Fight Censorship.” PublishersWeekly.Com, 24 May 2013, www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/57361-indie-presses-donate-royalties-to-fight-censorship.html.

Kottoor, Naveena. “How Timbuktu’s Manuscripts Were Smuggled to Safety.” BBC News, BBC, 3 June 2013, www.bbc.com/news/magazine-22704960.

Lipka, Michael. “5 Facts about the Pledge of Allegiance.” Pew Research Center, Pew Research Center, 4 Sept. 2013, www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2013/09/04/5-facts-about-the-pledge-of-allegiance/.

Morrison, Toni, et al. Burn This Book: Pen Writers Speak out on the Power of the Word. HarperStudio, 2009.

“Publishers Support 35th Annual Banned Books Week with Events, Outreach and Activities – AAP.” AAP – The Voice of American Publishing, 26 Jan. 2023, publishers.org/news/publishers-support-35th-annual-banned-books-week-with-events-outreach-and-activities/.

Robbins, Louise S. “The Overseas Libraries Controversy and the Freedom to Read: U.S. Librarians and Publishers Confront Joseph McCarthy.” Libraries & Culture, vol. 36, no. 1, 2001, pp. 27–39. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25548889. Accessed 21 Nov. 2024.

Rothschild, Amy. “Banned Books and Publishing Industry Censorship.” Social Justice Books, 31 Oct. 2024, socialjusticebooks.org/banned-books-and-publishing-industry-censorship/.

Sinykin, Dan. Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature. Columbia University Press, 2023.

Stillman, Peter G., and S. Anne Johnson. “Identity, Complicity, and Resistance in The Handmaid’s Tale.” Utopian Studies, vol. 5, no. 2, 1994, pp. 70–86. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20719314. Accessed 21 Nov. 2024.

“Talking about Censorship and Publishing.” PublishersWeekly.Com, 28 May 2021, www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/columns-and-blogs/soapbox/article/86503-talking-about-censorship-and-publishing.html.