Panelists at the annual Banned Books Reading included Hartford Councilman Luis Cotto, author Susan Schoenberger, Dr. Kerry Driscoll of Saint Joseph College, Capital Preparatory Magnet School students Haddiyyah Ali and Aleyah Seabrook, WFSB Anchor Dennis House and Enfield Public Library Director Henry Dutcher. The program at the Hartford Public Library, sponsored by the library and the ACLU of Connecticut, drew about 75 people.
Censorship and its targets, from Mark Twain to Michael Moore, sparked a vigorous discussion Monday at the annual Banned Books Reading at the Hartford Public Library.
Panelists read excerpts from banned and challenged books and then talked about the issues behind those books with each other and the audience. About 75 people attended the event, moderated by WNPR radio host Colin McEnroe and sponsored by the library and the American Civil Liberties Union of Connecticut.
Henry Dutcher, director of the Enfield Public Library, showed excerpts from Michael Moore’s documentary Sicko. Earlier this year Dutcher was told by the Enfield Town Council to cancel a showing of the film at the library. He was later able to reschedule it as part of a compromise that included showing a documentary with an opposing view on national health care.
Dutcher told the crowd Monday that when Sicko was finally shown, the audience included John Graham, a 9/11 first responder who was featured in the documentary and who came to support the library's right to show it. The movie describes how Graham’s decision to volunteer his help at Ground Zero left him sick, uninsured and destitute.
“I’m sorry but I feel that any public library in the United States should be able to show that to their patrons,” Dutcher said.
The panel also featured two sophomores from Capital Preparatory Magnet School in Hartford who read excerpts from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which they have been studying in a cooperative program with the Mark Twain House and Museum. They were accompanied by Kerry Driscoll, a professor at Saint Joseph College who is a faculty member on the Twain project.
Asked about their reactions to the racist language in Huckleberry Finn, the students said they had found perspective on it.
“It didn’t really offend me in any way because I know that’s our history,” Aleyah Seabrook said.
Haddiyyah Ali said she didn’t see it as racism. “I see it as Mark Twain working through his issues on race.” Yet when she read the excerpt, she found herself too uncomfortable to read the most offensive words.
Dennis House, a news anchor for WFSB Channel 3, said that when covering controversy over the book, his station also decided not to say the word nigger.
Even so, when McEnroe asked the panelists about a newly sanitized version of Huckleberry Finn that expunges the racist words, panelists agreed that they prefer the original version.
“I’d rather see the book read in its original form, or not read,” said Susan Schoenberger, author of A Watershed Year. She said that authors will hear from readers about the words they choose, including profanity, “but you have to be true to the message you’re trying to send.”
When it comes to teaching books with offensive language to children, the question is “how is this being contextualized,” added Luis Cotto, a panelist and member of the Hartford City Council.
Schools and public libraries use different criteria when choosing books, Dutcher said. At the library, it’s up to parents to decide what material their children check out, he said.
“The public library is for everyone," he concluded. "It’s not just for that 8-year-old child.”
