Students looking for a quiet place to study Feb. 23 may have been surprised to hear a passage about sodomy and the missionary position from Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses being read aloud on the main floor of MacOdrum Library.
The reading by John Osborne, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, was the first of 10 at Carleton’s second annual Freedom to Read Week.
The event featured readings from books that have been banned or challenged since their publication as part of the nationwide week that encourages intellectual freedom.
Readers included university president Roseann Runte, who read excerpts by Voltaire, and Carleton University Students’ Association’s president Folarin Odunayo, who read from John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men.
Emma Cross, a cataloguing librarian at MacOdrum who organized the event, said the issue of censorship “remains very relevant today.”
“I think librarians play a special role in trying to promote this issue so that people are aware that [censorship] is not something that went on in the past. It’s particularly an issue in public libraries,” she said.
In 2013, books were challenged 85 times in 21 Canadian libraries, according to a voluntary survey conducted by the Canadian Library Association. To be challenged means that a person or group has attempted to remove or restrict access to the text.
During his opening reading, Osborne pointed out that Rushdie remains on the same Al-Qaeda hit list that also included former Charlie Hebdo editor Stéphane Charbonneau. An attack on the satirical magazine Jan. 7 left Charbonneau and 11 other people dead.
According to Wayne Jones, the interim librarian at Carleton, university libraries should promote the exchange of ideas, and should make all texts available to students.
“We have copies of Lolita, we have copies of Mein Kampf, we have copies of lots of very offensive books here in the library and we proudly have them in our collection,” he said. “An academic library cannot be in the business of banning, censoring, or self-censoring on the basis of various groups being offended by one thing or another.”
Jones read from When Everything Feels Like the Movies, a 2014 young adult novel by Raziel Reid. The novel has been challenged for its portrayal of teenage sexuality and drug use.
However, the event was not all doom and gloom. At some moments, the small audience burst into giggles, such as when assessment librarian Laura Newton-Miller mimed the breast growing exercises described in Judy Blume’s young adult novel Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.
Newton-Miller said the book is important for young girls because it answers questions about puberty that some may not want to ask. When she read it, she said it opened up a conversation about puberty between her and her mother.
“I don’t think otherwise I would have said anything,” she said. “The public health nurse and stuff comes into the school, and you learn those things, but to really know about puberty, you read this book.”
Throughout the hour-long event, passing students often seemed caught off-guard by hearing stories read aloud in the quiet library. Muna Mohamed, a second-year public affairs and policy management student, came to the library to study but stayed for the readings.
“The whole concept seemed really interesting to me. I’m a total book nerd, so I thought I’d sit and listen to a few,” she said.
Overall, Cross said she was pleased with the support faculty members showed for Freedom to Read Week.
“It shows that Carleton is trying to promote a culture that celebrates freedom of expression,” she said.
