Titles that have appeared on Canada's list of challenged books and magazines.
“To choose a good book, look in an inquisitor’s prohibited list.” – John Aiken
To Canadians, censorship may seem like a thing of the past, associated with book burnings and fascist regimes, but the truth is that freedom of expression is an ongoing battle. Books as recent as The Golden Compass, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mocking Bird, and Of Mice and Men have appeared on Canada’s list of challenged books and magazines. Considering that these titles have become celebrated classics in the modern canon, John Aiken’s pithy epigram appears more true than ever.
According to Franklin Carter, editor and researcher with the Freedom of Expression Committee of the Book and Periodical Council (BPC), the trouble with intellectual and creative censorship revolves around its loose governance:
“…unlike formal acts of censorship passed by Parliament, such as laws governing hate literature or child pornography, the censorship [Carter's] organization tracks happens at the local level, most often without public scrutiny or open discussion about the merits of the work or the reasons behind the challenge. Books which are successfully challenged simply disappear off the shelves.” [VueWeekly]
To bring awareness to censorship and to encourage Canadians to reaffirm their commitment to intellectual and creative freedom, the annual Freedom to Read Week was organized by BPC. The week is chock full of events at libraries across the nation. On February 28 at Toronto’s Gladstone Hotel, the BPC will host its own event, “Censored Then & Now,” featuring a conversation between Mark Bourrie, author of The Fog of War: Censorship of Canada’s Media in World War Two, and censored author and activist Susan Swan, author of The Wives of Bath, The Biggest Modern Woman of the World.
Visit The Canadian Encyclopedia for more on Censorship in Canada.
2 Comments
Great article! I just checked out the Challenged Books and Magazines List and sigh to see, right up there at the top of the list, a 2011 challenge of Timothy Findley’s The Wars (1977):
http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/articles/the-wars
A winner of the Governor-General’s award, the book that made Findley a respected household name in Canada presents a young man’s horror as he experiences the reality of life in the trenches of the First World War. This brutality is echoed in the sexual violence the protagonist experiences, in a haunting but short and non-explicit scene. This scene remains a focus for objections to the novel. I find this remarkable, since the text’s raison d’etre is to object to the chilling cruelty and dehumanization of institutional and interpersonal violence: it’s a beautiful, deeply humane book.
I too read “The Wars.” It was poweful and okay, yah, disturbing, but what kind of great literature ISN’T disruptive and makes you think? I’m glad my class was assigned this book. We had good discussion about it.