Looking at Language

The issue of "Language" (The current euphemism for profanity) was brought home recently when I read and reviewed a phenomenal first novel by middle school counselor Peter Moore. Clearly aimed at older adolescents, Blind Sighted (Viking, 2002; Sept., p. 230) deals sensitively with a critical year in the life of a brilliant underachiever. Its beautifully metaphorical prose includes lots of wonderful wordplay and the book is one of the most memorable reads I've had in a long time. I grew to love the protagonist and at least one of the many sympathetic, well-rounded supporting characters. Despite my ardor, I was hesitant to recommend the book to any but advanced eighth grade students because of some fairly graphic first-time (very disappointing) sex. My editor, too, loved the book, but asked if I thought we should mention the potentially problematic language.

Language? I was momentarily taken aback. I was worried about the sex, but language? It was so intrinsic to the characters and how they thought that it never drew a ripple on my normally vigilant radar. Which gave me a second pause.

Library media teachers, especially those of us in middle schools, have particular challenges in selection. On a number of levels, our incoming students seem like primary cherubs and many of our 8th graders seem to be pushing 40. How can we supply books that challenge the sophisticated while neither horrifying nor jading the naive?

How much are we, as selection professionals, influenced by "profanity" in YA literature? Where is the line drawn, if there is one, and how do we go about defending such books? How, in other words, can we challenge without being challenged?

First, it is difficult (even for some librarians, I fear) to separate the issues of questionable language and/or content in books that circulate from books that are required reading. Certainly the latter situation is far more loaded and involves matters of teaching and administrative judgment that do not necessarily concern library media teachers. But books on the shelf? That's our bailiwick, and we need to be informed and prepared.

I think about adolescent books I've read as sitting on a continuum. At one extreme lie the salacious, poorly conceived and written, unredeemable books, which I'll call the "black" end. Pollyanna and others of that ilk lie at the other extreme, the "white" end. They are open-eyed period pieces with lots of positive elements, whose saccharine characters converse in simpering, stilted (but clean!) dialogue.

Moving toward the middle, the books fading in from the black become richer and deeper and the language, though still sometimes ripe, fits the plot, the characters, and the situations. Books shading in from the white become meatier, with more realistic characters facing subtler, more dissonant challenges.

There's a band in the middle where, I believe, the most interesting and best of our adolescent fiction lives. Normally, we probably think of these as the books whose significant literary and/or social content far "outweigh" questions of profanity. I prefer to think of this "gray area" as the band I'm aiming for in much of my selection. Life, unless one is very simplistic, is not a matter of black or white, but is lived in an unsettling, but exciting area of gray. The question, it seems to me, is not one of dealing with profanity, but with complexity.

The gray band, of course, blurs significantly at both ends, the margins indistinct and shifting all the time. Nevertheless, that's where I hope most of us aim much of our selection. I want very light, easy reading for my less-capable students and I want very challenging, even risky, material for my sophisticated kids. However, for the backbone of the fiction collection, I aim for meaningful stories with solid literary merit in which the characters seem real. Real people tend neither to be black, nor white in personality, but they struggle and muddle through life in the gray area. Their great insights and accomplishments are earned through complex negotiation and work that cannot and should not be measured in absolutes.

So we have excellent books with profound insights in danger of drawing the attention of censors: certainly Julius Lester's outstanding When Dad Killed Mom (Harcourt, 2001) is in imminent peril, as is Gary Paulsen's Harris and Me (Harcourt, 1993), in which one character's very problem is his inability NOT to swear. Almost anything by Robert Cormier qualifies, as do many of the "teen issues" books. These titles truly speak to upper middle schoolers, and I would fight to the death—well, at least to the job—to keep them.

Others still create a major dissonance in my gut. I inherited a few titles by Francesca Lia Block and, though I really don't care for her writing style and purposefully weird characters, I bow to the common wisdom of librarians and reviewers who love her. So her books stay, albeit uneasily.

Another keeper that worries me is A.M. Jenkins's Breaking Boxes (Delacorte, 1997), which won the California Young Reader Medal Award for YA in 1998. I loved the book, which dealt graphically with teen sex and homosexuality, and knew that many of my most mature eighth graders would as well. Two of my most trusted colleagues (my library assistant and an English teacher) read it after me, and they found it very disturbing. I've kept the book, but am acutely aware of its potential for controversy. A newly published Australian novel, Margaret Wild's Jinx (Walker, 2002), contains profanity (appropriate, I felt, as each page is a character's internal, often agonizing observations), a suicide, an accidental death, and some almost sex. It is also beautifully written and manages to draw the best character development with the fewest words of any book I've ever read.

The gray band is far from static. It shifts dramatically with the ages and sophistication levels of the reader. In the cases of Jinx and Blind Sighted (and Breaking Boxes), my preference would be to recommend them only to mature eighth graders, perhaps those in my Readers and Writers Club. But keeping them "under the counter" smacks too much of censorship so they stay on the shelf, and I worry.

These books, you see, are still in my gray area. If they weren't excellent literature, I simply wouldn't keep them. The language, sex, and situations are not gratuitously titillating. My worry is that they may not be appropriate for my younger kids, given their level of maturity. A couple of years from now, the content will have more immediacy for them, with issues that will require serious contemplation and struggle. However, to exclude books because sixth graders may giggle—or show their parents, who won't giggle—does a disservice to all kids. In these cases—simply because I am a middle-school librarian—I will continue to skate uneasily, trying to serve all of my students and hoping to avoid a parental confrontation.

So how, you ask, do I define the elusive gray area? I don't. I feel for it. I feel for it on the basis of multiple graduate degrees earned in research analysis and education and in library science. I work on the foundation of years of reading, contemplation, experience, and a continuous striving to learn to remain fresh and open, and to thrill at the development of others. I don't always hit the gray area in selection, but I try, and most of the time I succeed. The gray area is, I think, the crucible where good library media teachers emerge.

But, oh, California, some of you are thinking. Easy for me to be open-minded in the selection of books living in that infamous state to the far left (politically and geographically) of the rest of the country. Well, California is a huge sort of nation-state, each region with a distinct personality. L.A. and San Francisco may be hotbeds of liberal thinking, but Merced sits right in the center of the Great Central Valley, the Bible Belt Bastion of California, where religion leans far to the right, Planned Parenthood must be barred, and "ecumenical" means the thoughtful inclusion of all Christians.

Yes, we have parents—and students, lots of them—who rise in indignation at anything out of the ken of their own narrow perspective. And we have teachers (at my own school) who are organizing a Bible study group as I write. Do we have parents storming our doors on occasion wanting us to take books off the shelves? You bet we do. And I've met my share of them.

What protects me from the book banners? The first level is maintaining open and understanding relationships with kids and parents. Our books have to appeal to a wide range of ability, interest, and maturity levels. If parents object to their child reading a given book or a given genre, we have to respect that. We have refused to check out certain books or kinds of books to children upon parental request.

But what if a parent wants a book off the shelf entirely? Big difference. No more Mrs. Nice Guy. Polite, yes, but unyielding. At which time I would turn to the District Office and begin The Challenge Process.

Long ago, our surprisingly enlightened district put into place a rigorous challenge policy that has worked effectively for years. Our thorough, some might say protracted, process involves the parent(s) as well as an appointed committee reading and extensively discussing the merits of the book over a period of time and eventually reaching a consensus or, if necessary, a vote. To date, I don't know of a single instance wherein the process concluded in the removal of a book.

So I continue to aim for the gray area . . . in literature selection and in life. Black or white is just too easy, too simple, too artificial, too boring. I plan to keep on doing it for as long as they let me.