Speak and Shout: Why Librarians Fight for Banned Books
Reviews of Laurie Halse Anderson’s books on sexual assault and book ban resources
Hi Friends,
Since Banned Books Week is coming up in two weeks, I want to continue looking at books that have been banned for years and to show why librarians continue to fight to have them in the collection. Over decades, Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak (1999) is one of the most popular of these books. Twenty years after its publication, Halse Anderson published Shout (2019) to call attention to the the ongoing problem of sexual assault. This gives us plenty of time to judge whether these books—and others about sexual assault—help or harm teen library users.
Speak and Shout spoilers
I wrote a few reviews of Speak in 2008 and 2011, the short kind without spoilers. This series of the last several weeks is full of spoilers because I need to talk about the things censors object to.
Speak quick overview
The summer before she starts high school, Melinda goes to a party where she calls the police. Because of her action, she is ostracized when school starts. Without a single friend, she pairs up with a new girl who desperately wants to be popular, but who is entirely self-serving. Why Melinda called the police isn’t revealed until late in the book. However, something is clearly wrong with Melinda.
The book is broken down into the four grading periods of the school year. As Melinda’s grades plummet–she cuts class and skips a lot of her homework–she speaks less and less often. The only place she is connecting at school is in art class, where her eccentric teacher, Mr. Freeman, seems to understand that she needs a way to express her grief and fear. Melinda eventually reveals that she was raped at that party where she called the police. She finds her voice.
Objections and answers to objections to Speak
Censors object to the novel largely because it deals with sexual assault, which they feel that isn’t an age-appropriate topic, and it makes boys feel bad.1 Here’s Halse Anderson’s response to that:
Every parent I’ve ever met has taught their children how to safely cross a road, right? Would anybody ever say, “Well, I don’t know. I’m not going to teach my kid about crossing the road safely, because I don’t want them to be afraid that they could be hurt?” No, that’s ridiculous. That’s ridiculous. One out of every three people who identify as female in the United States have been victims of some form of sexual violence. One out of six people who identify as male in the United States have been victim of some forms of sexual violence. And our siblings, our community members who identify outside of those traditional binaries, they have much higher rates of sexual violence as well. It’s part of life – 93% of the children, people who are aged younger than 18, 93% of them were harmed by somebody that they knew.
Nearly a year ago, Halse Anderson was quoted in School Library Journal discussing how book bans have become something different and how the topic of Speak is still important to discuss.
Like so many other titles under fire that are being challenged, adults say the books make students uncomfortable and claim that is reason enough to remove them.
“So absurd,” Anderson says. “What's really uncomfortable is being the victim of a rape, what’s really uncomfortable is being an unequipped child who's younger than 18, who has limited experience, but no one ever talked to them about this.”
Is your son uncomfortable reading about rape? That’s good news, says Anderson. Use it as an opportunity to talk to him.
“They should be in their feelings,” she says. “It's a terrible thing to be the victim of a crime, to have your body touched and hurt and broken sometimes. So, good on you that your son is so empathetic, that your son can grow. Being a parent is hard, but sometimes you got to put on your big-girl pants and do it.”
Speak ten years in
On the tenth anniversary of the publication of Speak, Halse Anderson wrote a poem, “Listen,” using words from letters she’d received about it. It is VERY powerful and can be viewed on TeacherTube. It would be a GREAT addition to a banned books display.
This is such a good book. I haven’t met one student who read it and didn’t love it. In addition to confronting rape, it is one of the best books about school harassment that I’ve read. The reader feels such compassion for Melinda—a goal of all good books—as she tries to make her way back to normalcy.
Recently I mentioned the book Dear Author: Letters of Hope, which I reviewed here. Laurie Halse Anderson also has a letter there. I believe the book is out of print, but is available in ebook form. Check for it in your library. When you know readers are writing letters like this, why in the world would you take this book out of the library?
Shout
I haven’t reviewed Shout in the past, so I’m going into some detail.
Shout is an extension of the novel Speak, but also much more. While it looks at how Speak has affected its readers over decades, it also looks back through Halse Anderson’s life (so it’s a bit of a memoir in poems) including her own sexual assault as a teen.
Halse Anderson begins with her parents’ trauma. As a teen, her father saw a buddy’s head sliced in two pieces just above the eyebrows by an exploding brake drum. Later was in military service and repaired planes on an airbase in England. He was sent to Dachau just after the war and saw the victims of that death camp. He had nightmares about it, apparently for the rest of his life. He then became a preacher, but the trauma that haunted him took over his life for decades. At one point, he beat his wife so hard that it knocked out several of her teeth. He eventually became an alcoholic. Though he never hit his wife again, she was traumatized and afraid of speaking up.
Halse Anderson’s father’s alcoholism drove the family into poverty for quite a long time. In “cardboard boxes,” Halse Anderson writes: “Poor kids get snatched up by the real world/at seven, eight, nine years old, dragged/onto the front porch of adulthood, forced/to figure it out on their own.” (86)
In “unclean,” Halse Anderson writes about having her mouth washed out with soap when she’s a child because she says the word shit. She heard that from her mother, the same person who washes her mouth out with soap:
shoving a bar soap into the mouth of a child.
was then a common practice, church lady approved,
for scrubbing, dirty words from the minds
of the young, the violence
of generational silence
brutally handed down. (15)
She also includes poems on the way girls and women are sexually assaulted in everyday situations.
Chum
underwater, city
swimming pool.
a shiver of slippery boys
11, 12 years old.
with shark-toothed fingers
and gap-toothed smiles they
isolate
the openhearted girls
eight, nine years old
tossed in like bloody buckets of chum.
The boys circle, then frenzy-feed
crotch-grabbing, chest-pinching,
hate-spitting
the water afroth
with glee and destruction.
Girls stay in the shallows
after their baptism as bait,
that first painful lesson
in how lifeguards
look the other way. (24-25)
One poem looks at the year 1972: women could be legally raped by their husbands, be fired from jobs for getting pregnant, be groped by their bosses. Other poems look back on her own lack of sex education—she didn’t know what a menstrual period was when it arrived—the filmstrip she saw in class mentioned hygiene and sanitary napkins, but not blood.
All of this is before we come to Halse Anderson’s rape. Afterward, she becomes a stoner (“dirtbag”) and hangs out with the kids who are often high.
Fortunately, she has a few teachers who are interested in her and encourage her into clubs. One, a gym teacher, encourages her to join the swimming team; another asked her to be in the international students club. These are things that really help her to move away from substance abuse as a form of self-medicating. She also credits Tolkien in a poem about The Lord of the Rings that begins:
when I wasn’t stoned
the only thing that helped
me breathe
was opening a book
mist enveloping, welcoming
me into the gray space
between ink black and page white
leading me along to the Shire
to start the long trek to Mordor
again … (76)
Halse Anderson includes a poem about “Lovebrarians” in which she honors those that opened the world of reading to her. She calls out ignorance in a poem that could be used in banned book displays everywhere.
Ignorance
We didn’t get our textbooks in health
in tenth grade until the cold stripped
the trees in late November
cuz the school board ordered the books
to be gutted, they demanded that the sex
chapters be surgically removed
so explanations of the menstrual cycle
and pics of diseased penises
wouldn't send us into frenzied orgies
in the halls or cause us to drop out
so we could do the sex all day.
The school board barred
as much practical education
as they could. Maybe they
just really liked babies and wanted us
to start breeding as soon as possible. (83)
Transformation
Halse Anderson succeeds in spite of numerous obstacles. When she’s a senior in high school she decides to go as a foreign exchange student to Denmark. Her parents don’t have the money and tell her no, but she’s been saving her own money for a while (she does a lot of crappy jobs to make money) and also borrows from her grandmother. She goes and lives with a family on a pig farm for a year, learning to speak Danish.
This is an important transition for her. in the poem “How it Started” she says “I unscrewed the top of my head/and rinsed out my brainpan/with salt water from the North Sea/and so began my next life.” (99) In the poem that ends the section of her stay in Denmark, she concludes: “My home in Denmark taught me how to speak/again, how to reinterpret darkness and light,/strength and softness/it offered me the chance to reorient my compass/redefine my true north/ and start over.” (114)
After she comes home, she lives in a rural community and has a job milking cows around the local farms. It is a very tough life in many ways.
Sexual harassment doesn’t end in high school
Halse Anderson writes about her rape just prior to starting high school. Readers of Speak know this as the IRL attack that is the root of the inciting incident in Speak. But Shout shows how harassment doesn’t stop. Two stanzas of “offending professors” include incidents from community college and then Georgetown University:
One: at community college, my health professor
invited me to celebrate the A+ he gave
me for a paper I wrote about LSD
he said we could drink wine at a motel, his treat
he said we would have some awesome sex at the motel
he said his wife was totally cool
with him fucking students at motels …
Two: at Georgetown University,
my department head
invited me to his office to discuss my need
for a special scholarship to study in Peru.
To be able to translate Spanish, I’d need to live
in a country where it was spoken
I brought notes to the meeting, all my pla—
he lifted his hand to interrupt me
the department head said that we had been lovers
centuries earlier
we’d been Aztecs, had sex in the jungle
he said that we were cosmic soulmates
and needed to have sex again, unite our bodies— …(144-5)
Writing is the key to overcoming
Writing saves Halse Anderson. She started when a teacher introduced her to haiku. It becomes the ultimate weapon against her trauma as she “demystif[ies] a process/that consisted of untwisting the trysting words/in my brainpan and convincing them/to behave/inspiration and craft slowly melding/into this, the consistent beat of my words/against the drum.” (152)
High school housekeeping
Shout is a pretty quick read since it’s verse. Yet every poem is a concise, powerful truth about trauma and agency. Since many are about people confiding in Halse Anderson, it’s a sort of #youtoo story that gives voice to victims of all genders. I know there are people who still ban Speak at libraries and have now added Shout to their no-read list.
Why do librarians fight for these books? They are powerful medicine! What Halse Anderson says is true: “the false innocence/you render for them/by censoring truth/protects only you.” (193)
Shout, while labeled YA, is a great book for adults as well because it discusses how dealing with trauma can take years. It shows an adult getting through it. I think the teachers at your high school will connect with Shout and it may be a balm to them as well.
Why Shout belongs in the library
We want this book in the library for the same reasons we want Speak. To grant knowledge about sexual assault, knowledge about the long-tail of trauma, and to create empathy for trauma sufferers.
P.S.—Halse Anderson has written so many great books. I have a few reviews of Wintergirls (about eating disorders) here and here and about Twisted (about a boy unjustly accused of sexual assault) here.
Alrighty! Thanks for going on this banned book journey with me. If you’d like a few resources for Banned Books Week or the highlights of this week’s book challenge news, continue to Part 2. ❤️
Part 2
Banned Books Week is coming
Here are a few resources for Banned Books Week.
3 Professional Reading Resources to Help Librarians Understand Book Bans from School Library Journal
Censorship Throughout the Centuries
A timeline of US book bans and the fight for intellectual freedom from American Libraries Magazine
Little Free Library Partners with ALA, PEN America on Banned Books Map From Publishers Weekly
How One Librarian Battled the Book Bans: Read an Excerpt of THAT LIBRARIAN By Amanda Jones From Book Riot
I’ve posted links to reviews of this book, but this has an excerpt from the book, so I wanted to add it.
This week’s banned and challenged books
After a meeting with Florida's Book Review Committee, which recommended to keep Sasaki and Miyano in school libraries, the Brevard County School Board voted 3-2 to remove the manga, in addition to People Kill People by Ellen Hopkins and Damsel by Elana K. Arnold. In the ban proposal, members objected to the fact that Sasaki and Miyano depicts a relationship between two male adolescents. Brevard County School Board member Jennifer Jenkins, who voted against the ban, also stated on X (formerly Twitter) that their chair "couldn't understand why a Japanese translation was being read from right to left," showcasing submitted arguments from the hearing via their X (formerly Twitter) page.
Maryland's Freedom to Read Act protects librarians from book ban retaliation
I encourage you to read the entire article, which goes into conversations Halse Anderson has had with boys about why rape creates lasting trauma.
Thank you for writing about banned books! They are usually the most important ones, the ones that teach us, open our eyes to issues governments or whoever bans them wish to sweep under the rug, issues they want us to ignore, bury our head in the sand and pretend they don't exist. Banning books never worked and it never will, it only makes their voices stronger, thanks to librarians and people like you, who talk about them, who bring them into focus, and don't let them go into oblivion. What you do is so important! These two books, specifically, sound so important! You put them on my reading list. Also, from someone who grew up in a society with lots of banned books - our grandparents (in our case) and those who still had them before them getting banned- found ways to hide them when they first realized they would become banned, so we had them available - even if not in the libraries. Banned books need us to protect them - and you are doing a great job with that! Thank you!
It makes no sense Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak should be banned. There are few subjects more important for teens. I googled the crap out of this and could find no reporting connecting Moms for Liberty with this book, let alone saying it "makes boys feel bad". I need more. This is so daffy as to be unbelievable.