By Raleigh Perry
BUFORD, Ga. | Recently I bought a copy of the 1986 graphic novel Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, by Art Spiegelman, and got the last available copy of both volume I and II, which comes in slip cover. I started reading it and for the life of me couldn’t ascertain why the book was banned.
Perry
Then came this email from one of my co-friends and the answer was in there: the book has “cuss words” in it. Wow! I don’t think that there is a child in the Fourth Grade that does not know most of the good, dyed-in-the-wool swear words. I doubt that there is a home with children in the country that does not use the same words on a frequent basis. There are precious few virgin ears today.
Maus is a graphic novel in which Spiegelman portrays Jews as mice and Nazis as cats to tell the story of his family’s experiences during and after the Holocaust. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992, but it had long since disappeared from any wide notice. Since the school board decision, Maus and its sequels have soared to the top of best-seller lists.
However, banning a book gets people into the book. Every bookstore in Tennessee is sold out of Maus. We must understand that the book, however, was not written for children. The book is written via comic strip drawings. There is not a paragraph in it. And, as I said about Tennessee bookstores being out, in three counties, they were all sold out except at one.
Swear words are the vernacular today, almost regardless of age. There is not one that I had not heard after the second grade.
My daughter is a perfectionist. I knew that she had overcome her problems with the piano when she missed a note and said “Damn” and started the piece over. That was when she was in the first grade.
Last week, after the McMinn County school board in Tennessee voted unanimously to remove Spiegelman’s Maus, a Knoxville comic-book store announced that it would give a copy of the book to every student in the county who asked for one.
This is exactly what happens when you go banning books, which should be a cautionary note to Georgia lawmakers who are considering one of the cookie-cutter bills. Legislators around the country maintain their aim is to give parents more control over the books in school libraries.
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