Banned Book Week: INVISIBLE MAN VISIBLE Beams Brighter

By Tony Diaz, El Librotraficante

“We are adding INVISIBLE MAN to all Librotraficante Under Ground Libraries.”

There are 1,000 ironies in that sentence, which is even shorter than a tweet. On the one hand, the statement should not make sense in 2013 in America. On the other hand, the statement is sheer poetry.

Banned Books Week allows me to first shed light on the sense created by these words. I’ll then focus on the art they unleash.

North Carolina’s Randolph County school board banned INVISIBLE MAN from its libraries because a parent called it “filthy.” This reveals a lot more about the oppressors than the book. I read that book in an Introduction to African American Literature at Kansas State University. (More ironies, perhaps for a later essay.) The potent prose and amazing style thrilled and shaped my imagination. In fact, it captured my imagination so much that my novel THE AZTEC LOVE GOD opens with a passage inspired by INVISIBLE MAN.

So of course, if you try to make the INVISIBLE MAN invisible, we shall me him even more brilliant.

The second half of the statement that begins with the word “Librotraficante” alludes to the fact that every week is Banned Books Week for Mexican Americans. Yes, it is 2013 and I have to translate “Librotraficante” into English as book smuggler because we have to traffic contraband prose across Arizona state lines.

Arizona House Bill 2281 was used to Prohibit Mexican American Studies at Tucson Unified School District.  That led to the confiscation from class rooms of the 80+ titles on the MAS curriculum. The oppressors want to make invisible such books as House On Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros; Curandera by Carmen Tafolla; The Magic of Blood by Dagoberto Gilb, Ana Castillos Loverboys, Bless Me, Ultima by Rodulfo Anaya; Always Running by Luis Rodiguez and more.

The sense the legal terms created by people such as Arizona Governor Jan Brewer makes is non-sense. She signed HB2281 into law.  The law is intended to prohibit courses that promote the overthrow of the government. That makes ALWAYS RUNNING sound like fact and HB2281 sound like fiction.

I am proud to have coined the word “Librotraficante.” If the words we are given make no sense. We must create words that do. It’s okay. I have an MFA. I am licensed to do that.

As a culture, we register on the American Imagination in 3 phases:

First we are ignored.

Then we are vilified.

Then we are accepted, but only as a consumer group. We are never thought of as Intellectuals.

If we are deprived of our voices, or our art, of our history, our books, we shall always remain invisible. Only Art Can Save Us. Which is exactly why the oppressors want to ban our books.

They want to run the Invisible Man into the Shadows, the don’t want us to have a House on Mango Street, they fear Mexican Americans studying Mexican American Studies.

But it’s too late. We have seen the light. They banned our History, so we decided to make more. They made our books contraband so we became Librotraficantes. They tried to dim the Invisible Man and the invisible people, but we have seen the light, and our Renaissance will end the Dark Age of racism in America.

Happy Banned Books Week, America.

Novelist Tony Diaz, El Librotraficante, is the Director of Cultural Diversity at Lone Star College in Houston, Texas.  He was named a Banned Books Week Hero for defying Arizona’s ban of Mexican American Studies.