
A Native American sends smoke signals in Montana, June 1909. Photo: OldPhotos.
Today as attempts to ban books with what is being called “sexually explicit content” from schools and libraries but is really an attack on LBGTQ rights and information, I’m wondering about the future of literature in our beleaguered country. Well-recognized writers of the 1930’s such as D.H. Lawrence and James Joyce went through years of book banning before achieving acceptance and even acclaim, but since few readers know these books or the opposition they encountered in supposedly less liberated times, their examples have no meaning.
What does apply, I think, is an ongoing but largely silent controversy about the value of writers who do not use accepted forms of English, beginning with Mark Twain, whose two masterpieces are now doomed to obscurity, banned from many public libraries and schools. His saucy use of the vernacular is surely a part of the opposition for to admit the legitimacy of writers outside the world of English departments may question the legitimacy of what those departments largely contributed.
As we attempt to navigate an age when cursive is no longer taught—leading to issues for me with my hand-addressed envelopes are marked “Return to Sender” because someone at the post office can’t read the addresses—and functional illiteracy is on the rise, with an increasingly diverse population that does not necessarily know the old canons of “good English,” we are faced with keeping out the words and stories of the many people who speak in what we call dialect—really simply plain, ungrammatical but powerful vernacular.
I’m thinking of Barbara Kingsolver’s magnificent Demon Copperhead, its connection to the Dickens novel probably without much meaning since that novel too is unread, and also of my own burgeoning collection of short stories, Cowboy Tales, written from the point of view of functionally illiterate Native Americans.
Are their stories not worth telling?
They are essential to the meaning of our history and to exclude them is again to enact violence on what has made us and continues to make us, burdened with many years of attempts to exclude and control. We’ve made some progress, due to Alice Walker and other talented African-American writers, in publishing, accepting and even applauding fiction written in what we call dialect, but since we are still caught in the hideous story of our centuries-long attempts to exterminate Native Americans and steal their land (and doesn’t this feed our willingness to exterminate the Palestinians with the help of the Israeli army we supply with vast sums of money and deadly weapons?) it may be a while before we recognize and accept fiction written with all the power and limitations of Native Americans’ use of written English.
Of course I’m not ignoring the fiction published in the past decade by talented Native-American writers, but it is nearly always justified by the fact that the writers are members of tribes. What about writing like mine in my unpublished collection Cowboy Tales, written by outsiders?
In my case I’m grateful for the seeds of these stories which were given to me by a tribal member, seeds sprung from an ancient and honorable oral tradition; but do I with my limited experience deserve to write them?
If not me, who? The stories of generations of African Americans have been lost because they themselves had no access to outsider writers or conventional publishing, and we are the poorer because of it.
I’m hoping for myself and other outsider writers to use the advantages—dubious, at times—of our education and our access to the “Great Writers” of the past, almost entirely white and male, to write without painful internal criticism the stories of those “Others” not deemed worthy before now of our understanding and our talent.
I have seen a lot of valid writing about banned books, but very little, generally speaking, about one of the most explosive and important news stories of our time involving massive censorship. I am speaking about The Twitter Files. Whatever one might think about Elon Musk, he did open the past files of Twitter to three center-leaning, experienced journalists. What they discovered was a shocking, prolonged, concentrated effort by government, including the FBI, to censor the voices of organizations and individuals that the government found disagreeable to its own narrative or policies. The fusion of government and corporate power has long been one defining feature of fascism. These records reveal frequent and persistent attempts to ban and deplatform, for instance, doctors and scientists who raised questions or disagreed with Covid “science” as cited by the CDC, the FDA etc. What resulted was not science but propaganda as real science must allow for disagreement and questioning. The public heard one side of a story and no other, emanating from financially captured government agencies and companies that made billions from their liability free products. Now reports of vaccine injury are systematically purged. As a story impacting Americans it outranks Watergate. Wake up everybody. Do you want your government deciding what information you can and cannot hear?