Speak Loudly, Laugh Loudly, Grieve Loudly

Two weeks ago, a school board in Missouri upheld a decision to ban ABSOLUTELY TRUE DIARY OF A PART-TIME INDIAN from a school curriculum and its library.




At the same time, a man was getting mountains of publicity for threatening to burn books that offend him.

A debate on whether people should be allowed to build a religious community center was at the center of the national media. And it was not dismissed out of hand, but debated.

That week was the anniversary of 9/11.

That day will always live with me, as it will for most of us. Trying to track down everyone I knew who worked there. Wondering how I'd get home. Wondering when I'd be able to work again (at The Strand, the sweaty, disorganized temple to books). Watching the signs go up, asking for help finding loves ones. Watching the signs stay up, because no one could bear to take them down, even when it became clear that no one else would be found.

We spent the next weeks glued to the television news networks. I don't know what information we were waiting for, but we were told over and over that we had been attacked by people who hated us for our freedom. That we ought to stand tall, proud of our country, because we would not back down in the face of terror. That we could best defy them and honor the dead by holding high our American values that they hated so much.

Nine years later, we are celebrating the anniversary by debating whether people have the right to worship where they choose, by taking books away from kids, threatening to burn those books if we disagree with what they contain. I woke up on 9/11 grieving in a way that I haven't the last few years. Because this year, we had forgotten how to honor them. We were spitting on the idea that they had died for our freedoms. I decided to hold a memorial of my own by rereading PART-TIME INDIAN.

I started it solemnly, planning to spend my day thinking deep thoughts about our rights and freedoms, grieving our dead. And then it happened....

I laughed my ass off.

I remembered why I loved this book in the first place, why the teens it is being kept from would love it... It is heartbreaking. It's about feeling hopeless, outcast and trapped due to poverty, racism, tragedy and alcoholism. It's also about feeling awkward in your own skin, fighting to find your own place only to alienate your best friend, and having a crush on the girl who won't look at you. And in the midst of all that honesty, it manages to be hopeful and hilarious.

There's a point in the book where Junior says, "When it comes to death, we know that laughter and tears are pretty much the same thing." It's the perfect sentence in a book that brought me to tears of grief a paragraph after I was crying with laughter, that made me snort coffee while tears were drying on my face.

Here's a great post from Veronica at the Maple Street Book Shops, sharing her experience teaching PART-TIME INDIAN.

So if we have this great book that is funny and smart about serious issues, but still engaging and relatable for students, why is it being banned?

1. Shit. Asshole. Dick. Boner. Such horrible dirty words that no 15 year old has ever heard before.

And if you couldn't hear the huge eyeroll that went with that sentence, this is for you:





2. Masturbation. Yep. It's in there. Want to hear the extent of it?

I was fourteen and it was my first day of high school. I was happy about that. And I was most especially excited about my first geometry class.

Yep, I have to admit that isosceles triangles make me feel hormonal.

Most guys, no matter what age, get excited about curves and circles, but not me. Don't get me wrong. I like girls and their curves. And I really like women and their curvier curves.

I spend hours in the bathroom with a magazine that has one thousand pictures of naked movie stars

Naked woman + right hand = happy happy joy joy

Yep, that's right, I admit that I masturbate.

I'm proud of it.

I'm good at it

I'm ambidextrous.

If there were a Professional Masturbators League, I'd get drafted number one and make millions of dollars.

And maybe you're thinking, "Well, you really shouldn't be talking about masturbation in public."

Well, tough, I'm going to talk about it because EVERYBODY does it. And EVERYBODY likes it.

And if God hadn't wanted us to masturbate, then he wouldn't have given us thumbs.

So I thank God for my thumbs.

But, the thing is, no matter how much time my thumbs and I are spending with the curves of imaginary women, I am much more in love with the right angles of buildings.

That's right. He calls out people who don't want to talk about masturbation in the midst of confessing to being a geometry geek. God bless Sherman Alexie. And for those who think that the 15 year old boys will not masturbate if we don't talk about it in books, let me repeat:



3. The boner talk. You can see the fabulous man himself read it here:



Book boners. How much do I love this man?

4. The last argument I've heard is because the book discusses racism and alcoholism. The same type of  reasons people continue to challenge TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD and HUCK FINN. The reasons I can't even formulate an argument against because they seem so ludicrous to me.

There you have it. That's why this book is being taken away from students (every teacher I know who has taught it has asked for parental permission and offered alternative books in case of objection) and taken out of libraries (so that even those with permission can't access it).

I try to continue laughing so that there won't be tears of outrage.

Then last week an article was published calling SPEAK soft core porn, calling for its removal from schools (with a sidenote that SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE has already been removed). There will be no laughter here. It leaves me so disgusted, so devastated, so angry that I cannot form the words. Isn't that ironic? (And not in the fun way. In the horrible Alanis Morissette way.)

So here are a few people who expressed themselves much more eloquently than I could:

Laurie Halse Anderson herself (make sure to watch the amazing Listen poem), April at Good Books & Good Wine, Stephanie Wooten, Cheryl Rainfield and Laurie Halse Anderson again, thanking people for the outpouring of support.  There are so many more out there, and you can find them by following #SpeakLoudly on twitter.

This coming week is Banned Books Week. How will I celebrate this one? I will buy another copy of ABSOLUTELY TRUE DIARY OF A PART-TIME INDIAN and SPEAK. I will then donate them to a library or pass them along to a teen.

And you know what? If I had the man-parts, I'd absolutely get a boner while I did it.