Kelly Webster, the Director of The Writing Center, discusses Native Son, by Richard Wright.
Transcript
In honor of Banned Books Week’s 30th Anniversary, I want to talk about a book that I think has been banned in many different contexts since it was published in 1945, a book that’s still debated today, and a book that I read when I was probably sixteen or seventeen years old and it had a pretty big impact on me at that time.
So the book is Richard Wright’s Native Son, which has been banned in different places for a variety of reasons but it seems like some of the major patterns in why it has been banned is because of what people perceive as violence, profanity, and sexually explicit content. The book is about an African American man, the main character is Bigger Thomas, who lives in inner city Chicago in the 1930s and he, in moment of, I think, great fear and panic, winds up suffocating a white woman, and he murders her. Bigger, the character, suffers from all kinds of dysfunction as a result of racism, poverty, his life growing up in inner city Chicago. And so the book, as a result the book explores not only Bigger’s guilt, because he winds up confessing to his crime and suffering all kinds of guilt but I think the book also explores society’s guilt for why his life turned out the way it did.
So I read this, like I said, when I was in high school. I was only sixteen and sort of right at the cusp of adulthood, I guess. Pretty lacking in experiences, probably thinking I knew far more about the world than I actually did. And I think that’s the thing about many of the books that have been banned, I think many of us have read these books when we were right on the edge of becoming an adult. So books like To Kill a Mockingbird, The Great Gatsby, 1984 and even I think younger generations, more recently, books like Harry Potter or The Hunger Games – so books that we read when we were lacking in experience but probably forming our opinions about the world.
So this book, I think the value of this book, and probably the value of – one of the values of literature in general – is that when you are lacking in experience, and all of us are, to a certain degree, I think literature can give you access to experiences that you wouldn’t otherwise have, to other realities or other possibilities that you wouldn’t otherwise encounter, and that was certainly the case when I read this book. It sort of forced me to stretch beyond what was familiar to me.
So, when I read this book I was in high school. It was on the assigned reading list for my, my – it must have been my sophomore or junior year English class, and we had a number of parents who objected to this book. And so my teacher, my high school teacher, who was a big supporter of banned books, of – not – of having us read banned books, my teacher was forced to give the class an alternative. So, they didn’t take the book off the reading list, but the students were allowed to choose a book to read instead. So, I would say that probably half of my class did not read this book – they read a different book. And for me that was problematic, even then I remember as a sixteen year old thinking: I couldn’t talk to half of my class about this book and about what I was experiencing reading it, and I think that the other book, the other option, probably had far less at stake. This book made me a lot more uncomfortable than the other book made my classmates.
So there’s a lot more, I think, to face in a book like this. I couldn’t, as a student, I couldn’t escape this book. I had dreams about it. I couldn’t stop thinking about Bigger, the character, or about the social issues that it brought up that I had never thought about before. So I think, for me, Native Son, really represents – and probably all banned books represent – really the freedom to be able to read something that could potentially change you, and the freedom to read things that take us sort of beyond our small worlds. And my world was pretty small at that time, and I would probably say that my world is pretty small still, so I think reading things that are outside the scope of what we would otherwise experience is pretty important. So this is my book!
I’m Kelly Webster, I’m the Director of the Writing Center, and I read banned books.