Educators and literature defenders alike have the Edmonton Public School Board to thank for the Alberta government deciding to retool its ministerial order that bans sexually explicit books from school libraries.
After the province’s second-largest board came out with a removal list of some 200 books that included classics and best-selling authors ranging from Maya Angelou to Margaret Atwood, Brave New World to Game of Thrones, Premier Danielle Smith derided it as “vicious compliance” and said it was never the province’s intention to prohibit literature like that.
This week, Alberta’s education minister declared a pause on the two-months-old book restriction policy, to modify the order so boards’ bans are closer to what Smith and the government had in mind when it first waded into the school library culture wars.
To underline the sort of books Smith intended to capture, she had producers of her live-streamed news conference play a slide show of pages from graphic novels that visually depict acts like oral sex or a man fondling a female breast.
“We are trying to take sexually explicit content out of elementary schools that is inappropriate for me to show on the television news at night and so it is inappropriate for seven-year-olds to see,” Smith said last week.
Alberta premier slams school board’s banned book list: ‘Vicious compliance’
When she referred to those graphic novel scenes at her Alberta Next town hall in Fort McMurray last week, she said: “If our adult audience would be offended by that, a seven-your-old shouldn’t be watching that.”
This line got applause in that friendly northern Alberta crowd. This initiative is popular among Smith’s United Conservative base, which won’t want the government to overly water down the book ban policy.
Back in July, Smith told her call-in radio show audience her government wanted to ensure youth are “not exposed to pornographic images early.”
Consider her word choice in those remarks. See. Watching. Images.
She’s consistently focused her concern on visual representations of sex. Smith has not talked about what students should or shouldn’t read — though she did describe the notoriously steamy novel Fifty Shades of Grey as “pornography,” and said its absence from Edmonton’s ban list meant it likely wasn’t on their schools’ shelves.
And she’s reiterated this week on social media that her aim is to “get graphic pornographic images out of school libraries.”
However, the order by Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides targeted all depictions in a library: written, illustrated, photographed or otherwise. And it seemed to offer little leeway any time a book offered a “detailed and clear depiction of a sexual act.”
This is why a book like Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged may have gotten targeted by Edmonton schools, for a line on page 100:
“He held her, pressing the length of his body against hers with a tense, purposeful insistence, his hand moving over her breasts as if he were learning a proprietor’s intimacy with her body, a shocking intimacy that needed no consent from her, no permission.”
Or, six pages later:
“He shuddered suddenly, he threw off the blanket, he looked at her naked body, then he fell forward and buried his face between her breasts.”
Are these passages as explicit and clear as the picture of a hand on a breast on page 421 of Blankets by Craig Thompson, one of the graphic novels that Smith and Nicolaides flag as examples of inappropriate smut?
After having those passages from Ayn Rand read to him, John Hilton-O’Brien, a supporter of the government’s policy, remarked: “That doesn’t sound appropriate. However, you don’t want to accidentally ban Catcher in the Rye.“
Hilton-O’Brien, executive director of the group Parents for Choice, has also focused his advocacy on offensive pictures and graphics, like Smith did. However, he said that when his group brought a number of library books to Nicolaides’ attention, text-only books were among them.
“Now, because there isn’t an image, it may be that the government won’t restrict such a thing,” he told CBC News. “And it’s partly because they do want to have a delicate touch.”
The initial order didn’t distinguish between visual and written content, even if the revised order might.
That could chop a school board’s ban list significantly; only about one-quarter of the books Edmonton Public marked for removal were graphic novels or illustrated books.
Such a change would keep the likes of Angelou and Atwood on high school shelves, but will likely not quell all the protests and international attention Alberta’s ban has received.
“This is not particularly less concerning for us. It is still an explicit act of censorship,” said Laura Winton, a director of the Library Association of Alberta, on CBC Radio’s The Current this week.
While one may reason that a hand-on-breast passage or two from Ayn Rand’s 1,088-page novel is irrelevant when isolated from the greater context of a detailed narrative, librarians like Winton argue the same about single images from full graphic novels.
But in the United States, which has a much lengthier history of the sort of culture wars and book bans that have now reached Alberta, graphic novels have often become the flashpoint, says Trisha Tucker, a professor of writing at University of Southern California.
“There is a visceral reaction that parents can have to the visual depiction of sexual content as opposed to their description in text,” she said.
South of the border, book bans have run the gamut from visual-only to ones inclusive of text, sexual images and 2SLGBTQ+ content.
In 2022, Missouri’s state ban covered images only, but that certainly didn’t pre-empt public furor. As school districts tried to interpret it, one proposed to prohibit Art Spiegelman’s iconic Holocaust memoir Maus for one illustration of a dead naked woman in a bathtub, before later relenting.
Will school boards and teachers have to rifle through every graphic novel in their collections for cases of any bare genitals in action? (A task quicker than speed-reading for explicit content, no doubt.)
It could lead, as elsewhere, to widespread self-censorship by school librarians, removing broad categories of books in case they could get them in trouble, Tucker said.
Smith and Nicolaides may intend to be clearer with this move. But any new focus on images may not quell the frustrated words of ban opponents.
