Tracking down the F word in fiction: Ahead of Banned Books Week,writers choose the books that make them think about free speech

BANNED BOOKS WEEK, the annual celebration of the freedom to read and have access to information, takes place this September. Since its launch in 1982 – a response to a sudden surge in attempts to restrict and remove books in the nation’s libraries, schools and bookshops – over 11,300 books have been challenged, according to the American Library Association. And many of these challenges have occurred in recent years, making the initiative just as relevant today as 35 years ago. To mark the week, we asked a series of writers about the works of fiction that inspired them to think about free expression.

Roots, Alex Haley

I first read Alex Haley’s Roots when I was 10 years old. The book seemed to stand tall where history books fell short, elucidating the horrors of slavery in a way that I had never seen. One passage had a particularly visceral impact on me: Kizzy, the daughter of the slave Kunta Kinte, is separated from her parents and sold by her owners when they discover that she has learned how to read and write, and has forged a travelling pass for another slave. I would repeatedly read the passage where her hands are prised away from her father’s leg as she is taken from the plantation. In the book, we are told that the name Kizzy derives from the Man-dinka expression “to stay put”, her parents’ prayer that she would remain with them.

The reputation of the book has suffered greatly since it won a Pulitzer Prize special citation in 1977. Haley settled a plagiarism lawsuit out of court and doubts have been cast on the accuracy of the book’s claims relating to Haley’s family history. I did wonder whether I should pick some other book. But I stuck to my choice, in spite of its controversial history, because the impact of that scene has remained undiminished. Whatever other truths the book may have distorted, with a dazzling clarity it showed me at a young age the power embodied in literacy and the written word. Kizzy could write and, as a result, she paid an unbearable price. That fact is as relevant now as it was then.

Mahesh Rao is author of the award-winning novel The Smoke is Rising, as well as the collection of short stories One Point Two Billion

1984

George Orwell

Almost 70 years after it was first published, I chose 1984 because it continues to speak to the degradation of freedom of expression. That 1984 was attacked from both sides of the ideological divide is perhaps not surprising. Arguably Orwell’s best-known work instils a deep scepticism of both consensual and coerced reality. Challenging information controllers never goes down easily.

Social media is today’s “speakright” as Orwell put it. It’s a vortex where truth and historic fact are smoothed away through relentless repetition, where Swedes are under attack from migrant hordes or the Holocaust never happened, just as Winston’s war hero was posthumously lauded by Big Brother. History is rewritten as self-portraits become selfies, language devolves and alienation from the illusory shared reality of nations explodes in anger-driven votes.

Orwell’s warnings against conditioning to accept more control are not being heeded as we greedily interact with the telescreens in our pockets. We are sharing our innermost secrets with server farms, without awareness of the consequences of the privatisation of our thoughts, which are becoming malleable through relentless consumption of information. It isn’t a government Big Brother that we’ve accepted into our heads and hearts. Like Winston we are consuming the seeds of our demise, but at least his was an act of rebellion. Like Winston, our affair with information will not end well.

Sean Gallagher is online editor at Index on Censorship

Riotous Assembly

Tom Sharpe

One of the most enduring, darkly funny things I’ve ever read was the opening chapter of Tom Sharpe’s 1971 novel Riotous Assembly, in which the police chief of the fictional South African town Piemburg argues with an old white woman who has killed her black chef. As two deputies collect pieces of the dead man’s corpse, Miss Hazelstone graphically describes her illicit love affair with the chef and demands to be arrested for murder, while a reluctant Kommandant van Heerden suggests she is simply guilty of improper “garbage disposal”. Meanwhile, the town’s entire police force is engaged in a fierce and bloody firefight against supposed left-wing insurgents nearby, unaware that they are actually shooting at each other from behind cover.

Sharpe revelled in skewering taboos. Indecent Exposure for example, the sequel to Riotous Assembly, is driven by a Piemburg deputy’s campaign to stamp out police rapes of black women using DIY aversion therapy. His biting, farcical, outrageous novels, handed down to me as a collection of dusty, dog-eared old paperbacks when I was arguably too young for their content, were my first introduction to the power of satire and mockery. They are the reason I believe there is truly no subject too serious or too dark to be made fun of. If you can laugh at something, you can talk about it.

Kieran Etoria-King is editorial assistant at Index on Censorship

Tales of the City

Armistead Maupin

I was living in Madrid, away from home for the first time, when a dear friend lent me the entire Tales of the City novels. I read them all in a fortnight.

They follow the tangled lives of bohemians in San Francisco as the dying days of 1970s disco recede into the AIDS panic of the mid-1980s. At the centre of it all is Mrs Madrigal, a big-hearted landlady with a secret, who opens her home and heart to a raggle-taggle bunch of gay, straight, bi-sexual (and even straight) waifs and strays.

Nobody in the novels is from what I then considered a “normal” family, yet all lead lives filled with love and belonging. Reading about other ways of being, described with honesty, pride and integrity, was an exhilarating experience. The novels introduced me, a girl from a small town in Ireland, to a new way of living that made me feel that, if by some magic, I found myself outside Mrs Madrigal’s home, I’d be welcomed in.

It showed me that expressing myself, living my truth and speaking my mind didn’t have to be a chore but could be a wonderful, liberating party.

Gráinne Maguire is a comedian and writer for British television comedy game 8 out of 10 Cats

Bread and Wine

Ignazio Silone

Italian author Ignazio Silone’s 1936 novel Bread and Wine is a denunciation of Mussolini’s Fascist Italy, and the readiness of the Catholic Church and the bourgeoisie to side with the regime. The main character, Pietro Spina, in the face of a decimated socialist opposition within a state that has dismantled freedom of expression and assembly, returns from exile to his native Abruzzi to politically mobilise the peasantry. In doing so, he adopts the identity of a Catholic priest.

The book depicts state violence and the untruths used to influence beliefs and behaviours. Many remain unconvinced by this propaganda, but lack the courage for action. Spina yearns for a political awakening where people speak the truth and “live and struggle for what seems to me to be just and right” without fear.

Silone understood authoritarianism. The offices of Lavoratore, the newspaper he worked for, were torched three times after Mussolini came to power. His brother died in the prison the Fascists threw him in. But it wasn’t just oppression from the right the author railed against. A founding member of the Italian Communist Party, he was expelled from the group over his condemnation of Stalinism and his works were subsequently banned behind the Iron Curtain.

Silone serves as a reminder of the importance of dissent and dangers of dogmatism.

Ryan McChrystal is online assistant editor at Index on Censorship