[Restless Press; 2024]
Tr. from the Arabic by Ranya Abdelrahman and Sawad Hussain
In Bothayna Al-Essa’s 2024 essay “Little Cash, Lots of Censorship,” she describes the difficulties of opening up a thoughtfully curated bookstore under censorship from Kuwait’s Ministry of Information in 2016. Amid the “megastores selling tablets, cell phones, cigarettes, water bottles, and candy,” hers would be a place for “literature, thought, and philosophy.” But the Ministry, which ceased censoring books in 2021, operated seemingly without logic, banning books that had been permitted the year before, or claiming that new editions warranted new review: “The system was arbitrary and irrational, a bureaucracy with neither head nor tail, like a poem by Baudelaire.”
In her 2023 novel, The Book Censor’s Library, newly translated from the Arabic by Ranya Abdelrahman and Sawad Hussain, this irrational bureaucracy is formalized into the capital-S System, a dystopian entity dedicated to the Movement for Positive Realism. Their hope is to extinguish human suffering by extinguishing imagination. In this world, the internet no longer exists, religion has been reconstituted into state-approved mush, the buildings are all gray slabs, and everyone wears khaki—for the good of the people, of course. The titular book censor is integral to this mission as he wades through new publications line by line, documenting infractions that merit banishment from the market. In true bureaucratic fashion, Al-Essa provides readers with reference material for a broader appreciation of Positive Realism. In one section, a censorship test tells us that Carl Jung’s The Psychology of Nazism should be banned for contradicting government lab results and The Future of Information Systems by Goran Gutshall for using the word “internet.” (A consequence of the “revolution against the information revolution.”) The book censor’s job should be straightforward with such clear, if ridiculous guidelines, but when he volunteers to read a new edition of Nikos Kazantzakis’s Zorba the Greek that is up for review, he learns—to his horror—that he loves books.
“All language is smooth,” the censor is told, “There are no ripples. Stay on the surface and you’ll be the best book censor.” This kind of absurdity is the hallmark of the Censorship Authority, where the book censor works. In a nod to Alice in Wonderland, the building is infested with white rabbits that the censors must constantly shoo away. The Department Head keeps a vast library in his office. Al-Essa materializes the contradictions of the government’s position with great humor, and in a novel about language, Abdelrahman and Hussain strike an impressive balance between the distant language of authority and the jargon of bureaucracy. Imaginative children, like the book censor’s daughter, are said to show “symptoms” of the Old World. “Does your child suffer from imagination?” one System-authored campaign reads, “Don’t hesitate to ask for help!” With these messages, Al-Essa reveals the inherent depth of language. Though metaphors are largely derided by the Censorship Authority, the medicalized analogies employed by the government pathologize imagination and curiosity. What the System wants is not the erasure of meaning, but sovereignty over it.
The few people in the censor’s life who are able to find meaning in their world are slowly rounded up by the state. A fellow worker and book-lover, who helps the censor join a band of rebels known as Cancers, is arrested for reading Pinocchio. Later, the censor’s quirky daughter, who does indeed “suffer from imagination,” is institutionalized for carrying a copy of the same book around. The very last, a bookseller whom the censor befriends, also pays the price for operating a Cancer cell. These characters have a trace of the otherworldly to them. The censor’s comrade seems eerily familiar and the bookseller oddly clairvoyant. Even his daughter is able to recall children’s stories from the Old World, ones he never read to her. Their strangeness is often marked by literary references that, while foreign to the book censor, are familiar to readers, adding to the fun of reading The Book Censor’s Library.
Yet there are many crucial moments where the book censor’s ignorance hinders the readers. When the censor is tasked with sneaking books from the regime, the censor is told it is to keep Old World knowledge safe for when the human race must start anew. But we never truly learn what the rebels are plotting—and for that matter, what they stand for, in part because their enemy is never clearly defined. The novel is unclear on who makes up the System or why they want to control what people read. There are vague references to the System’s “achievements in genetic evolution,” compulsory heterosexuality, and pronatalism—the shape of a fascist government, with none of the gory details. Of their aims, we only know that the System hopes to engineer the perfect human, someone “who, after a long day’s work, wanted nothing else but to go home.” The question of whom this benefits is left almost entirely unanswered. Without a clearly defined goal for its enemy, the stakes of the novel’s dystopian setting never reach the heights they could.
In this way, The Book Censor’s Library is a romantic book that chooses to celebrate literature and the individual. The book is full of allusions to classics—Alice in Wonderland, 1984, A Tale of Two Cities, Don Quixote—as well as children’s tales—Little Red Riding Hood, Aladdin, and Pinocchio—as a nod to fellow readers. And there are many pithy lines about the importance of books (“Novels, for the most part, were a celebration of strangeness.”) and the act of reading (a Cancer-affiliated bookstore hangs a “Keep Out” sign because readers “weren’t very good at following orders”). Yet, with the book’s coy treatment of power, these lines can sometimes read as navel-gazing.
If the vagueness of the book censor’s enemy frustrates at times, it also allows for it to be read as allegorical to a number of ongoing conversations about censorship across the globe. In the novel, one System document advises, “Books that incite violence must be banned, even if no crime has been committed.” As I read it, I thought of legislation around the world that seeks to criminalize protest chants, under the guise of public safety. At another point, the book censor bemoans the “books full of soppy declarations, books that tried to teach their readers the secrets to happiness and success” and I was reminded of the love and business advice vying for attention on social media at the expense of current affairs. Without an identifiable enemy, I was forced to name my own.
Much of El-Assa’s novel seems inspired by her experiences with Kuwait’s Ministry of Information, but as the world’s information is increasingly mediated through just a few companies, issues of censorship are relevant around the globe. It is ultimately a relief that El-Assa does not get bogged down in these details. Instead, she focuses her attention on undoing the logic of the System, and entering the frequently mocked realm of fancy. “Imagination is real. Reality is imagined,” the censor insists, breaking down a binary that the System has worked hard to erect. In these final moments, El-Assa dials up the strangeness, splitting the censor’s story into two conclusions. One is traditionally tragic, but the other much more oblique, breaking down the binary between author and creation, reader and character, as if to demonstrate that there are no limitations of the form. Or, as the censor concludes, “You can’t ban imagination, no matter what you do.”
Alana Mohamed is sometimes a writer and librarian from Queens, NY. Mostly she writes emails. Occasionally she posts on Twitter @alanamhmd.
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