At Brown, renowned authors discuss the consequences of banning books, suppressing expression

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] - When author Edwidge Danticat first learned that her 2015 children's storybook "Mama's Nightingale: A Story of Immigration and Separation" about a young Haitian girl whose mother is detained as an undocumented immigrant was banned by a local school district, part of her was proud.

"I'm a child of dictatorship - I knew people who buried their books… so they wouldn't be in danger," Danticat said. "My parents did not want me to be a writer, because writers were killed in my community, so I kind of knew the power of the word."

But she also felt a sense of alarm because she felt that her picture book was "innocuous."

Danticat, a Haitian-American novelist and short-story writer who earned a master of fine arts in creative writing from Brown in 1993, was joined by fellow acclaimed fiction writer Lauren Groff on Monday, March 30, at Brown University's Pembroke Hall for a conversation centered around writing, free expression and the power of art.

The talk, titled "Honest Conversations: Banned Books and Troublesome Texts," was part of the University's campus-wide Discovery Through Dialogue project, which brings leading scholars and innovators to campus to engage in deep and challenging conversations with students, faculty, staff and members of the public in the pursuit of academic excellence.

Matthew Guterl, Brown's vice president for diversity and inclusion and a professor of Africana studies and American studies who moderated the discussion, said that organizations such as PEN America have documented nearly 23,000 instances of book removals or restrictions in U.S. public schools since 2021.

"What began as a sharp spike in parental challenges in local school board meetings has increasingly evolved into a systematic, state-sanctioned prescription, resulting in disturbing normalizations of censorship, disinformation and a comprehensive rewriting of history," Guterl said.

Danticat, who is best known for her 1994 debut novel "Breath, Eyes, Memory," an Oprah's Book Club selection, spoke candidly about the risks associated with banning books, including those that might be considered by some to be "troublesome" or inappropriate - such as texts that include mentions of sexual violence.

She said that she's been alarmed by specific instances in Florida where it seemed like "anybody could ban a book" by submitting a complaint that might lead to investigation.

"I thought that really was the most vicious part of it, that all these people were given this power to, in cases, ban books that in most cases they … didn't even read the book, because they would misspell the authors' name," Danticat said. "They would misspell the titles."