The graphic novel Maus fundamentally changed my daughter Chloë’s life. Her father had a copy of the book on his home office book shelf, and as a small child our daughter Chloë would sneak into his office and look at the pages of the comic book. She didn’t completely understand the subject nor the context –the horrors of the Holocaust – but she was drawn into the story and her life was changed forever once she began to read.
When Chloë was applying to colleges five years ago, she wrote her college entrance essay about Maus, and how Art Spiegelman’s provocative book about his parent’s Holocaust experience was the impetus for her wanting to be a comic book artist, illustrator, and writer of graphic novels. His depiction of Jews as mice and Nazis as cats was brilliant and profound in Chloë’s mind, and it helped her to understand her personal history and to understand the possibilities for illustrating emotions. Chloë’s grandparents escaped the annihilation that Spiegelman depicts on the pages of Maus.
This past week, Tennessee’s McMinn County Board of Education voted 10-1 to ban Maus, a book that won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992 – it is the only graphic novel to ever win the prize. As they banned the book, the board of education cited “instances of profanity” and a tiny “naked picture” as a violation of the board’s standards. They also found the violence depicted in the book objectionable. They deemed Maus not appropriate for teaching in the public schools.
Yes, Chloë noticed the occasional profanity, nudity, and violence in the book. The nudity that the school board found problematic is a picture of Spiegelman’s mother in a bathtub after she attempted suicide; her breasts are visible. In reality the Holocaust and all of the other human efforts to massacre people are vile, violent, and dehumanizing. To ignore this reality allows these atrocities to be repeated. We can’t ban books that make us uncomfortable, as the discomfort is what makes us grow, reflect, change, and act.
Depending on the hot button issue, the banning of books can come from the right or the left. According to the American Library Association’s most challenged book list, books such as Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Mark Twain’s Huck Finn, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian, and Ibram Kendi and Jason Reynold’s, Stamped: Racism, Anti-Racism, and You have been banned by those across the political spectrum. When asked about the banning of his book, Spiegelman noted that it is a “red alert” – connected to the current trend of banning the teaching of history or literature that makes people uncomfortable, even when that history is substantiated by myriad historians and the literature is life changing.
Regardless of its origin, book banning is dangerous and hurts all of us as it curtails critical thinking and free speech. Because she read Maus when she was only 10 years old, my daughter Chloë is emotionally engaged, a deep critical thinker, and is a practicing comic book artist, who depicts a beautiful diversity of characters and emotion in her own comic books. I wonder if she would be as happy and fulfilled in her profession today if she had not encountered Speigleman’s Maus in her youth.
