This discussion with Ashley Hope Pérez is part of a series of interviews — and essays by — authors who are seeing their books being challenged and banned in the United States.
Ashley Hope Pérez is the author of the winning article out of the darka youth novel that has faced challenges and bans in America in recent years.
Pérez — a professor of comparative literature at Ohio State University in addition to being the author of three novels — focuses her writing on Latin American narratives, giving space to those readers. young Latinos see themselves in her work. She published Out of the darkness in 2015, a year that evoked national conversation around issues of race, environmental racism, racist violence and police brutality.
out of the dark based on a true event: In 1937, a natural gas explosion at a school in New London, Texas, killed nearly 300 students and teachers — one of the deadliest school disasters in history. US history. This historical setting is highlighted by the fictional love story between an African-American boy and a Mexican-American girl. Characters cross color lines and navigate family tensions and trauma.
The novel re-contextualizes contemporary issues of race, providing a historical framework in an America that is not too post-apartheid. After years on the bookshelf, in 2021 this candid portrait has earned the book a place on the bookshelf American Library Association (ALA) Prohibited Books List because of “abusive description and because it is considered pornographic.”
The interview below has been edited for length and clarity.
Featured interview
When writing about human experience, even the hard parts
out of the dark, like many literary works, deals with all kinds of aspects of human experience. And as a professor of literature, I can tell you that literature from the Bible to Chaucer to Shakespeare to Faulkner deals with difficult subjects because those aspects of life are literary material. study… it’s not to provoke or upset anyone, but because when we want to write about the human experience honestly and completely, we have to include the pain of a child. People. And so I think out of the dark is literature. And in many ways, what the book banners of the moment are suggesting is that literature that faithfully engages with the human experience is somehow unsuitable for teenagers. And when we hear things like ‘there’s porn in the school library’, what we’re really hearing is an interaction with a human experience, such as a sexual experience – we’re hearing that it is described as pornographic. But it’s not that it’s not true out of the dark or other books that have been vilified in this movement than the fact that the Bible is pornographic because it contains sexual content.
On books about the past echoing in the present
With out of the dark I’m trying to do something a little different, which is to write a historical novel that readers like my students won’t be able to put down. A historical novel that, although written about the past, seems to resonate strongly with their lives. In out of the dark, for example, I’m involved in the history of school discrimination in Texas, not just how schools discriminate between black and white American students, but also what happened. out with Mexican-American children or anyone who doesn’t fit those classifications. Texas has “Mexican schools” that are unequal in different ways and in some ways more harmful. And my students don’t know that history. So I think with out of the dark about what my former students want in a book about the past so it tells them now. And much of what they want is honesty, not looking at things that are sugar coated or sanitized.
On bans that overwhelmingly target disadvantaged authors
Someone will buy the book because of this interview. But for the hundreds of authors whose work has been banned but not yet interviewed on NPR, this could be the end of their careers. I mean, losing access to the school and library market could end an author’s career. And since these bans are aimed primarily at people — authors of color and other marginalized authors, this is a real threat to the modest progress we’ve made. in diversifying children’s literature and youth literature.
Claire Murashima produced the broadcast version of this story. Meghan Collins Sullivan edited this story for the web.
