By Aleksandra Sidorova
Professor of English Tracie Guzzio has spent decades studying banned books, eventually teaching them at SUNY Plattsburgh. She is also a central part of the college’s annual Banned Book Week’s observances, taking place this year from Sept. 22 to 28.
This interview was conducted in-person Sept. 27, and has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Question: At the banned books read-out at Feinberg Library on Sept. 25, you read excerpts from Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye,” “Lawn Boy” by Jonathan Evison and “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood. Why did you choose those books?
Answer: I often choose something from “The Bluest Eye” just because it’s banned almost all the time. It may be the longest-running, consistently banned book. It’s also one of my favorite novels. “Favorite” seems like a bad word because it’s such a brutal book, but I think it’s beautifully written and really important for people to understand the impact of racism on someone so small and vulnerable like a child. I think we need to think about those ways — especially when someone’s talking about banning books for children — and children need to see themselves represented in the world. It works on so many levels for me.
“Lawn Boy” is a newer book. I taught it for the first time this past year in an Honors seminar called Banned Books, and it is now consistently being banned. I didn’t have a contemporary male author on the list, either, so I thought I should try this one out, and the students just loved it. They loved Evison’s voice. He’s funny, he survives things, so he’s a really good role model for people who have a lot of anxiety and feel like things are going badly. He just kind of keeps trucking, just keeps going on. All these beautiful changes in his life happen towards the end, so you really root for him. Again, it’s really distressing that that book is pulled from high schools, that it’s not available in middle schools, but I think a lot of high school students would really benefit from that story.
Then the other one was “The Handmaid’s Tale” — that one just seemed so pertinent. I think my students were shocked at how contemporary and current the book sounded as they were reading it. I think we have to consider some of the real-world impacts of some of the decisions that we’re making, and that book does that.
Q: What is the spirit like in your Banned Books class?
A: I think that a lot of students are shocked when they begin to see which books have been challenged, censored or banned. We live in the state of New York, where there’s not a lot of that going on, and most of them are from New York, and so they’ll be like, “I love that book. How did it get on the list? I can’t believe it,” especially at a children’s literature level. But then they get really protective of books: “This is a book I love. This is a great book. People should not be keeping this from others.”
That’s the spirit that you want to encourage in that class — let’s look at the history of why this happens, look at the context of what’s behind these challenges and then think about what it means to be a teacher or a student, a parent and an American, because we talk a lot about free speech and access to other voices, and that gets trimmed in cases like this.
Q: How long have you been studying banned books?
A: I had attended a banned book festival at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in 1983, and then when I became a graduate student, I designed my English 101 class around banned books. Students had to choose a book and read it and argue for why it should not be banned. So, one of the first lessons I ever planned was on banned books, and one of the first teaching articles that I wrote was on banned books. I didn’t realize it was that long ago.
It’s been a part of my entire career, really, because my area is African American literature, and predominantly the books that are banned or challenged are either about race or ethnicity or sexual identification. Those areas get hit a lot in my field, so a lot of books that I love and I want students to read are challenged.
Q: How have you seen the conversations around banned books change in that time?
A: We’ve always had book challenges. It’s just part of who we are, to have people who want to challenge books. It used to be books that were kind of classics, like “1984,” that challenged authority, that could be seen as ideologically un-American.
Since groups like Moms for Liberty came into being, the reasons for banning and the volume of banning have just exploded. It’s almost like a domino effect. It’s becoming a much more political event, whereas it used to be a little bit more local. A local school would have a problem, or local public library would have a problem, and it may be the same few books that kept getting on those lists, but now there are pictures of libraries in Florida where there’s just a big curtain over a whole section of the library because those none of those books are allowed, or you’re seeing books being thrown out. We’ve never seen anything like that before. It’s almost “Fahrenheit 451”-level, and we shouldn’t be involved in that sort of thing. So it is very, very concerning.
Q: What are college students able to do about the issue of banned books?
A: The most basic and easiest thing to do is just to read. Don’t let anyone tell you what to read. Don’t keep from reading something just because you’ve heard it’s a difficult read or it has troubling stuff in it. That’s why writers write — to share their stories with you.
Talk about it on social media: what you’re reading, why it’s a great book and why everyone should read it. At the local levels, resist as much as you can. Some high schools have started banned book clubs and just meet in the library and read books they’re not supposed to read.
There are little things like that that don’t require the power of the vote, but are just ways to keep books going, and you have to keep standing up against it.
