Fahrenheit 451, Censorship, and Writing Your Story (Patreon)

"Once your generation dies out, everyone will forget your words," uttered Captain Beatty in the HBO adaptation of Fahrenheit 451. The movie stars Michael B. Jordan, but I'm not here to discuss his acting, the absence of Mildred, or even the lackluster plot. Watching the film reminded me of reading the book when I was 12 or 13. There was a rush of nostalgia for all of the books I have ever read, and I felt a pang in my stomach to hug the few in my apartment. But also I tasted bitterness for all the pieces of literature I had written in my life, lost to me forever. I have been a writer since I first learned how to read at the age of three. It began with letters and words here and there. But by 5 I wrote poems and short stories with fractured grammar in a crude cursive. My mother collected these, and I remember one poem about Martin Luther King Jr. There were stories about baking cakes and visiting my Aunt Doris in New York, a place that I imagined extensively in my amateur sentences. 

By the time I was in the 4th grade I loved reading out loud. You remember those popcorn lessons where everyone had to read a passage in a book and pass the responsibility onward? I enjoyed being picked. I also loved reading my own writing exercises out loud, an activity only shared by a handful of other kids in my class. Once, I read a poem I wrote about fireflies. Shortly after the poem, my teacher called a meeting with the other teachers. They were concerned. My mom ended up being summoned to the school for a meeting in which they made sure that I wasn't suicidal or violent. I was 9 or 10, and a five-line poem had them thinking I was about to shoot up the class, a particularly potent thought just four years after Columbine. My mom laughs about it now, but back then she was heated. She proudly took the poem and added it to the collection of my growing work. She even kept the letter she got from the teacher, Mr Leardini, in which he pondered my motives behind such outrageous imagery. I'd love to tell you what that poem said, but sadly it is lost, likely forever. The storage unit my mom rented with all of my childhood work went unpaid, and someone bought it in an auction. 

I can't imagine the average person finding a box of childhood and teenage writings and perusing through them, unless they're nosy, anthropologists, or historians. If the person who bought the unit did, then they found a treasure trove of short stories and sagas, most unfinished or missing pages. There were several spiralled five subject notebooks with popping collages on the front from my high school years. But these weren't full of math notes. The pages, coordinated with tables of contents, held recipes, essays, poems, song lyrics, and story ideas. One from my senior year even contained an untitled list of the boys and girls I had sexually experimented with. Sometimes I talked in code, for a reason I'm about to explain. Towards the bottom of the box of Lexi Literature, there were diaries from as early as the second grade with pages and paragraphs blacked out, because my mom routinely went through my stuff during my early years and read things. If she saw me saying something about her, or something sexual, she'd erase it forever with a permanent marker. This went on until I was like 16, and by then I had traded diaries for those cryptic spiral notebooks. Mother was my first true censor. Thanks to her, some of those emotions I felt, and some of those experiences I encountered, never happened. I took special care back in those days to write everything down because I believed it was all important.  Even a history nerd back then, I secretly wanted someone to read the things I wrote one day, especially after finding out about Anne Frank around 8 or 9. In fact, Anne was my first step to realizing the importance of writing one's own story. I didn't know back then that her diary had been heavily censored by her father when he edited it for publishing.

The cynic in me believes whoever bought that storage unit tossed my literature in the trash. So watching flames enshroud books during Fahrenheit 451 reminded me of all the things that had ever come from my own pen.  I thought of a world where burning books-- not only people's stories but people's testimonies of life-- was a goal. I'd be furious if my words were purposefully destroyed and lost to future generations who wanted to be reassured they came from strength and power. It is with great pride that I can look back and thank black people like Anne Moody, Maya Angelou,  Richard Wright, and Harriet Ann Jacobs, and many others for writing their own stories in explicit detail. They wanted me to know they were here. They suffered, they fought, they laughed, they resisted, they lost, they won. What would black history be without the experiences of past black people? In a current socio-political atmosphere bent on censoring truth or lying when it comes to upholding the status quo, the storyline of Fahrenheit 451 gripped me by the throat... especially when Captain Beatty said nothing to a puzzled Montag about the racism of America's past.

There are a few notable campaigns of book burning that aren't fictional, all on the basis of political, religious, or cultural opposition. After the first Council of Nicea in 325AD, texts about Christ not approved by the bishop of Alexandria were burned. His list of acceptable texts made up the New Testament. During the Qin dynasty of China, the first emperor allegedly burned the texts of 460 Confucian scholars and had them buried alive. The House of Wisdom, based in Baghdad from the 9th to 13th centuries, had the largest selection of books in the world before being burnt to the ground in 1258 by the conquering Mongols. In Nazi Germany, the Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebells influenced the Nazi German student association and other university students to burn over 25,000 books considered "un-German". Then, of course, there was the extermination of Jews, which meant stamping out their oral histories of what happened in concentration camps and ghettos. But some still tried to write their story. In the fields of Auschwitz were a few hurriedly written notes from a prisoner named Marcel Nadjari, detailing how Jews were"packed like sardines" in the gas chambers.  This is a common theme throughout history- eliminating realities by eliminating people. For cultures without a written language, this has meant complete censorship. Think of black slaves, who were barred from reading and writing, their names and thoughts forgotten by everybody because they never had an option to write any of it down. We are fortunate to have the few slave narratives on record.

"Once your generation dies out, everyone will forget your words."

Every one of us will die, and yet every one of us each live robustly different lives. We all feel similar emotions or have lived in similar environments, but none of us have walked the exact same path. For some of us, those paths are paved with experiences that the rest of us could never imagine. But they still happened and those stories deserve to be told for both contemporary empathy and for the pride of future generations. We all won't be recalled after death as experts or leaders in our fields, but our words can be immortal. Seize the written language and tell your story.