Shaping the Narrative of History
By Victoria Fortune
When I saw the video of a pastor in Tennessee last week, holding a book burning, the chants of “Burn it, Burn it, Burn it,” sent chills up my spine. I thought of the scene in The Book Thief, where Liesel pulls a charred book from the Nazi bonfire. There is something particularly sinister about burning books. In a 2010 article in the Guardian Jon Henly quotes German author, Heinrich Heine, whose books were burned by the Nazis: "Where they burn books, they will, in the end, also burn people." Is that the road we’re heading down?
Henly traces the history of book burning, which is invariably an effort by tyrants to suppress anything that interferes with the narrative that keeps them in power:
• The ancient Greeks and Romans burned Jewish and Christian texts
• During the Inquisition, the Spanish burned thousands of Arabic texts
• Spanish conquistadors burned all the sacred Mayan texts
• The Soviet Union burned “decadent western books and writings”
• The Nazis burned any books that were thought to be un-German
• McCarthy’s followers burned books that were deemed pro-communist
Henly points out that book burning is about “control . . . shaping the new public sphere. . . The burnings were the symbol; the repressive legislation that came in their wake was what really enforced it.”
One can brush off the Tennessee pastor’s book burning as the isolated act of a zealot, but the recent surge in book banning and rash of legislation to censor and control what history is taught in schools are another matter. While book banning is nothing new in America, these recent efforts, specifically targeted at books and instruction around race and gender that advance notions of tolerance and social justice, are part of a coordinated, aggressive campaign to control the narrative about what kind of society we are.
In an interview on NPR’s Throughline, historian and author Tamim Ansary, discusses the nature of history. “History is not just a list of isolated facts. History is the story we construct to understand who we are . . .” He points out that just in the last few decades—a nanosecond in human history-- all humans are interconnected for the first time. There is not a group or region in the world that is untouched by technology. This new era of globalization requires a new narrative. As he writes on his website, “we’d better ponder who we are as a whole. Because like it or not, we’re all characters in one big story: we all have some effect on where that story goes, and we all have a crucial stake in its outcome.”
Ansary, who writes historical fiction as well as history, believes it is not just the factual stories that make up the narrative, it is imaginative ones as well. Tim O’Brien said fiction is for “getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth.” No one individual or group can shape history. It requires a multitude of voices telling their stories. W.E.B. Dubois wrote, “Nations reel and stagger on their way; they make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful wrongs; they do great and beautiful things. And shall we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all of this, so far as the truth is ascertainable?”
Thankfully, there is a growing movement of students, parents, teachers and activists pushing back against efforts to suppress books and history. It is up to those of us who believe that truth should guide our narrative to speak up, push back against false narratives and respond with stories that speak the truth, so far as it is ascertainable.
Photo by Freddy Kearney on Unsplash
