She was tired. Her husband was always reminding her: Tania, you have no sense of self-preservation. She had thought about pushing back against the district, had imagined putting up posters all over the walls from the American Library Association celebrating “freedom to read,” a final act before her last day on Friday. But even if she did put up the posters, who would be there to see them once she left? The library would be closed after this week, until they found someone to take her place.

But most everyone agreed that the library drama started with a single July 2021 Facebook post, in which a county commissioner expressed disapproval of the gay pride month display the library had put up. Soon a dozen or so people signed up to speak at the Board of Commissioners meeting, in a radical departure where the five elected commissioners usually skipped the public comment sessions because of lack of interest. This time comments lasted for more than an hour. “Parents should be informed of the queer agenda the library is implementing,” said one attendee. Another railed against the idea of a pride display in the library. “If we’re not encouraging heterosexuality among teenagers for a month in the public library,” he said, “we definitely should not be doing that with sexual identities that are known to cause things like suicide and HIV.” A stern-looking woman thundered against the young adult room. “I know about their dark basement for the teens, and enough is enough,” she said. Later that month, a local pastor posted on Facebook that he had discovered that the magician who was scheduled to perform at the library was transgender. The magician canceled her show after reportedly receiving threats.

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I came to librarianship the way most other librarians do: I fell into it. After a full-time job that had thoroughly burned me out, I found a student job in the college library; this one was part-time and entailed reshelving large academic books and sitting at the big circulation desk with a stamper, ready to land that perfectly placed due date. It came with a lot of quiet and a lot of time to read—excellent for repairing burnout, terrible for teaching me what working in libraries was actually like. 

People who do not work in libraries tend to have a romanticized view of what it is to work in libraries, and I was no exception. Once I graduated and needed to find another job, I did the next best thing and applied to work at a public library as a library associate in the children’s department. 

Unlike my last library job, this one was not quiet, did not come with reading time, and after seven years, thoroughly re-burned me out so hard I would spend years unlearning toxic workaholic traits I’d picked up there (an unlearning that is still in process). This particular public library served a population of 200,000 well-educated, affluent, self-described library lovers. They were also Tea Party Texans who saw taxes as an affront to their personal liberty; they loved the library, just not enough to fund more branches or a larger staff. 

The place was as busy as a Target on Saturday every day of the week. And because we were the only library in town, we ran the place like an amusement park. Story time was a back-to-back affair—every half-hour from 10 a.m. to noon, Tuesday through Friday—and was filled to capacity for nearly every slot. 

While our patron base was mostly conservative, white, and straight, we wanted our collection to reflect the community it served—which also included a large immigrant population and a handful of queer families. With that in mind, one of our librarians used story time to read The Family Book by Todd Parr. The Family Book won a Scholastic Parent and Child Magazine Best of 2003 Award; it also contains a single page that says “Some families have two mommies; some families have two daddies.” One parent raised such a stink with our manager that we were told to stick with reading “noncontroversial” books at story time, lest we risk losing all the queer books in the collection. 

This was in 2013. Ten years later, things haven’t changed for the better. I still work as a librarian, albeit in a different major Southern city. But my work has changed drastically. I’m trained in violence de-escalation, trauma-informed reference, and medical and mental health first aid, which includes overdose prevention training. I have intervened in fights, talked people down from suicide, removed domestic violence victims from their abusers, hugged strangers, and been screamed at and threatened. My coworkers once solved a murder. 

Yes, sometimes I even recommend books. But increasingly, being a librarian is less and less about books and more and more about community survival. We are a lifeline for populations that have slipped through the spaces in a weakening social safety net; we are a target for organized harassment and censorship campaigns. Yet, people are grateful for our help. They hold our hands and thank us, they tell us we are blessed, they say they can’t believe someone so kind found them so deserving of love. 

In library school, the threats of censorship and propaganda were drilled into us constantly—but mostly in the context of past authoritarian regimes, and never with the idea that past might become present. The last three years, in particular, have been difficult ones in librarianship, but they are also the ones in which I have felt most committed to the job. The work I’m doing now is possibly the most important of my life. 

“Have you been to the library lately?” asked Nicholas Hune-Brown in The Walrus earlier this year. No, really—have you? Because whatever ideas you have about what it’s like to work in libraries these days, I can assure you it’s not like that. It’s frustrating, depressing, and underpaid. It’s also life-affirming. Some days feel like utopia; many days feel like war. That’s life on the library front lines. Welcome. 

Have You Been To The Library Lately? (Nicholas Hune-Brown, The Walrus, June 2023)

When I first read this piece, I saw something I hadn’t in a long time: a realistic portrayal of life in public libraries. In fact, it inspired this very reading list.

Hune-Brown doesn’t mince words, doesn’t shy away from hard truths, but also doesn’t only focus on the toxic mix of vocational awe and trauma porn that currently overshadows life in public librarianship. Yes, the job is necessary, even admirable. Yes, it’s extremely difficult and downright dangerous at times. No, none of us who got into libraries expected to be doing this kind of work. But what I love most about this piece is that Hune-Brown cuts right to the heart of the issue. If a society feels it acceptable to cut funding to social necessities like housing, education, and  healthcare, are we really that surprised that that same society wouldn’t see a problem with allowing an underpaid, women-driven profession such as librarianship to pick up the pieces? 

When people tell the story of this transformation, from book repository to social services hub, it’s usually as an uncomplicated triumph. A recent “love letter” to libraries in the New York Times has a typical capsule history: “As local safety nets shriveled, the library roof magically expanded from umbrella to tarp to circus tent to airplane hangar. The modern library keeps its citizens warm, safe, healthy, entertained, educated, hydrated and, above all, connected.”

That story, while heartwarming, obscures the reality of what has happened. No institution “magically” takes on the role of the entire welfare state, especially none as underfunded as the public library. If the library has managed to expand its protective umbrella, it has done so after a series of difficult decisions. And that expansion has come with costs.

The Small Town Library That Became a Culture War Battleground (Sasha Abramsky, The Nation, August 2023)

Let’s go back to the basics of the censorship conundrum libraries currently find themselves in. When I started working in libraries 15 years ago, we regularly talked about how librarians were some of our most trusted public servants, right behind firefighters and nurses. Book bans were vestiges of the past; when they came up, our minds would settle on imagery from Nazi book-burning parties and the cover of Fahrenheit 451. Phew, we said. At least we don’t have to deal with that anymore. 

Fast forward to 2023 and librarians are being cast as public enemy number one, pedophiles, and groomers-in-chief, courtesy of extremist groups like Moms For Liberty. The year 2022 saw a record 600-plus book challenges leveled against library collections, and 2023 is on track to beat that number handily. From the outside, this might appear to be a groundswell of public support for censorship—however, a recent Washington Post analysis of the American Library Association’s 2023 “State of America’s Libraries” report showed that the majority of book challenges being leveled at library boards around the country originated with eleven people. Eleven. 

Abramsky’s piece is a perfect cross section of the nationwide fight, distilled into one rural library’s story. Library lovers had better wake up, because the other side is currently going faster than we can drive. 

In the coming years, the conservative three-person Board of County Commissioners will likely continue to appoint people to the library’s board who reflect the values of Ruffcorn and her fellow petitioners. In other words, Ruffcorn could lose in November and yet still ultimately come out on top, setting a precedent in which a few angry citizens would get to dictate to librarians which books should carry warning labels, or be relegated to the top shelf of the adult section, or require parental approval for a child to check out.

The Coming Enshittification of Public Libraries (Karawynn Long, Nine Lives, July 2023)

Speaking of library lovers needing to wake up to the myriad threats facing public libraries, I feel compelled to highlight this Substack from Karawynn Long that dives deep into the now-defunct user recommendation feature from OverDrive (the increasingly powerful middle man between e-books, libraries, and their patrons) and what it portends for the other outsourced reader services libraries have come to rely on. 

Long is a library lover herself, and she highlights an uncomfortable truth about libraries and how they must exist in this increasingly capitalistic world: we have to buy in to our exploitation in order to survive. And because we’re forced to buy in to this exploitation thanks to the popular tech business practice known as “functional monopolism,” libraries are vulnerable to the whims of those vulture businesses, such as KKR (who also recently purchased Simon & Schuster), who exist to extract ever more money from their customers—libraries. 

Every extra dollar that KKR sucks out of libraries is another dollar they don’t have for buying books, or for librarian staffing, or for supporting any of the dozens of other small but important services that public libraries provide their local communities, like free access to computers and the internet. Some libraries that already struggle for funding might be starved out of existence…. And if OverDrive goes belly-up at some point in the future, crushed by KKR’s leveraged debt, it’s going to take down access to the digital catalogs of nearly every public library in North America. Between now and then, I expect the user experience to degrade precipitously. The removal of the recommendation feature, I believe, is the canary in the coal mine.

What They Didn’t Teach Us In Library School (Chip Ward, TomDispatch, April 2007)

Chip Ward’s heartbreaking essay has been cited by many in the library sciences tasked with advising new recruits. Written in 2007, it treats the idea of library as social safety net as a little-known concept. Ward talks about going to conferences on housing and homelessness, and other attendees wondering what in the world a librarian would be doing there. Now, librarians, housing advocates, social workers, and first responders are all too familiar with the work the others do; while I’d like to consider this a win, it only proves that we are more than 15 years down the road and conditions have only remained the same—that is, if they haven’t worsened. 

In the meantime, the Salt Lake City Public Library — Library Journal’s 2006 “Library of the Year” — has created a place where the diverse ideas and perspectives that sustain an open and inclusive civil society can be expressed safely, where disparate citizens can discover common ground, self-organize, and make wise choices together. We do not collect just books, we also gather voices. We empower citizens and invite them to engage one another in public dialogues. I like to think of our library as the civic ballroom of our community where citizens can practice that awkward dance of mutuality that is the very signature of a democratic culture.

And if the chronically homeless show up at the ball, looking worse than Cinderella after midnight? Well, in a democratic culture, even disturbing information is useful feedback. When the mentally ill whom we have thrown onto the streets haunt our public places, their presence tells us something important about the state of our union, our national character, our priorities, and our capacity to care for one another. That information is no less important than the information we provide through databases and books. The presence of the impoverished mentally ill among us is not an eloquent expression of civil discourse, like a lecture in the library’s auditorium, but it speaks volumes nonetheless.

Are Libraries the Future of Media? (Kate Harloe, Popula, August 2023)

I’d like to end a difficult reading list with this universal truth: public libraries and their librarians are scrappy. Always have been. Over and over again, the world proclaims the death of libraries; over and over again, libraries respond by ascending from the grave. Don’t count us out, and don’t call our resilience a comeback.

Kate Harloe’s piece provides a perfect example of a library understanding its role in a community and leveraging it to better serve the public. Here, the Albany Public Library pairs with the local newspaper to provide citizens with publicly funded, community-owned and accessible journalism, the library and local journalists reporting and publishing community stories together. As Harloe puts it, people may not trust the media but they “really, really love the library.” And why wouldn’t they? Libraries are the last place where “your ability to exist as a human being doesn’t depend on your ability to pay.” Combine that with quality community reporting that isn’t hidden behind a paywall and you’ve got a KO combination. 

As she finished speaking, the crowd was in tears. There were many reasons for that, but for me, one was the way in which Koepaomu captured how libraries feel—how, often, they can be experienced as places outside of space and time; as small territories to retreat from the unstable, transactional realities of the world, and as pathways to a sense of belonging, and even safety, in a deeply unsafe time. Libraries represent the best of our efforts to take care of one another. Their ongoing existence is a reminder that—not just in some far-off future, but even today—other ways of being are possible.

Lisa Bubert is a writer and librarian based in Nashville, Tennessee. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Texas Highways, Washington Square Review, and more.

Editor: Peter Rubin

Copyeditor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

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As Shawn Yuan reports at Wired, the Chinese government knew that a new SARS-like pneumonia had appeared in late 2019, yet they worked hard to keep this deadly virus a secret from their population and the world. As citizens shared accounts of the devastation with one another on social media, as reporters wrote and published stories about the outbreak, the Chinese government’s censors vigilantly deleted their posts and their accounts. Why? To conceal the extent of the outbreak and the inadequacy of its response, so that China could portray itself as a benevolent savior to its people and a generous friend supplying medical equipment to the world.

That night, just when Yue was about to log off and try to sleep, she saw the following sentence pop up on her WeChat Moments feed, the rough equivalent of Facebook’s News Feed: “I never thought in my lifetime I’d see dead bodies lying around without being collected and patients seeking medical help but having no place to get treatment.”

Yue thought that she had become desensitized, but this post made her fists clench: It was written by Xiao Hui, a journalist friend of hers who was reporting on the ground for Caixin, a prominent Chinese news outlet. Yue trusted her.

She read on. “On January 22, on my second day reporting in Wuhan, I knew this was China’s Chernobyl,” Xiao Hui wrote. “These days I rarely pick up phone calls from outside of Wuhan or chat with friends and family, because nothing can express what I have seen here.”

Unable to contain her anger, Yue took a screenshot of Xiao’s post and immediately posted it on her WeChat Moments. “Look what is happening in Wuhan!” she wrote. Then she finally drifted off.

The next morning, when she opened WeChat, a single message appeared: Her account had been suspended for having “spread malicious rumors” and she would not be able to unblock it. She knew at once that her late-night post had stepped on a censorship landmine.

It’s not hard to see how these censored posts contradicted the state’s preferred narrative. Judging from these vanished accounts, the regime’s coverup of the initial outbreak certainly did not help buy the world time, but instead apparently incubated what some have described as a humanitarian disaster in Wuhan and Hubei Province, which in turn may have set the stage for the global spread of the virus. And the state’s apparent reluctance to show scenes of mass suffering and disorder cruelly starved Chinese citizens of vital information when it mattered most.

While articles and posts that displease Chinese censors continue to be expunged across the Chinese internet, the messages that thrive on television and state-sanctioned sites are rosy: News anchors narrate videos of nurses saying how honored they have been to fight for their country despite all the hardships and video clips of China “generously” shipping planeloads of medical equipment to other countries hit hard by the virus are playing on a loop.

As the outbreak began to slow down in mainland China, the government remained cautious in filtering out any information that might contradict the seemingly unstoppable trend of recovery. On March 4, a Shanghai news site called The Paper reported that a Covid-19 patient who had been discharged from the hospital in late February later died in a post-discharge isolation center; another news site questioned whether hospitals were discharging patients prematurely for the sake of “clearing all cases.” Both stories vanished.

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Melissa Batchelor Warnke | Longreads | May 2019 | 14 minutes (3,668 words)

“What you have heard is true. I was in his house.” So begins one of the most famous poems of the late twentieth century, Carolyn Forché’s “The Colonel,” which was part of an early body of work that seemed to contemporary admirers as if it had “reinvent[ed] the political lyric at a moment of profound depoliticization.” The poem describes a meeting Forché had with a Salvadoran military leader in his home in 1978, a year before the coup that sparked that country’s extraordinarily brutal civil war, which lasted for more than twelve years. The poem’s power lies in the quick juxtaposition of quotidian details — the colonel’s daughter filing her nails, a cop show playing on TV, mangoes being served — with his sudden sadistic flourish:

…………..The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries
home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like
dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one
of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water
glass. It came alive there. I am tired of fooling around he said. As
for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go fuck them-
selves. He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last
of his wine in the air………..

“Something for your poetry, no?” the colonel says next. The implication is clear; the young human rights advocate’s writing is pointless, the colonel’s position will forever afford him impunity.

*

Censorship is a constellation of disparate but related experiences. Censorship can come from within, a feeling that your interpretations of reality are not worth speaking aloud; and from without, the knowledge that you will suffer for having spoken them. These types reinforce one another: you imagine that what you wish to say will not be received without backlash by another party, whether it be your community or the government, and so you do not say anything, or say something different, something you believe less or do not believe at all.

Censorship has long been a central concern for those who make their lives in the field of expression, and influential figures like Toni Morrison, Susan Sontag, Christopher Hitchens, Paolo Friere, and Salman Rushdie have detailed its corrosive effects. Morrison’s latest book, The Source of Self-Regard, contains an essay titled “Peril”; by virtue of its position (it is the first in the collection) and its framing (“Peril” is the only essay that stands alone; the others are grouped), it is granted unique significance. Morrison begins:

Authoritarian regimes, dictators, despots are often, but not always, fools. But none is foolish enough to give perceptive, dissident writers free range to publish their judgments or follow their creative instincts. They know they do so at their own peril. They are not stupid enough to abandon control (overt or insidious) over media. Their methods include surveillance, censorship, arrest, even slaughter of those writers informing and disturbing the public. Writers who are unsettling, calling into question, taking another, deeper look. Writers — journalists, essayists, bloggers, poets, playwrights — can disturb the social oppression that functions like a coma on the population, a coma despots call peace, and they stanch the blood flow of war that hawks and profiteers thrill to.

Censorship is, of course, pervasive in police states, where comprehensive data gathering and a foundational lack of justice circumscribe citizens’ movements; a 2015 PEN America report found 61% of writers living in authoritarian countries admitted to engaging in self-censorship, as did 44% of those living in semi-democratic countries. But their counterparts in liberal democracies share many of the same concerns, with 34% reporting they’d avoided writing or speaking on a particular topic, or seriously considered it, because of government surveillance.

There is a substantive call for greater writing and accounts of life from within marginalized communities, which would ideally include the inhabitants of authoritarian states and societies. But the perspectives of police state insiders are something an outsider by definition cannot, whatever effort they may expend, offer a comprehensive account of. Outsiders change the dynamics of a room when they enter it. What outsiders can do is relate what they have seen; they can tell us if what we have heard is true.

The first line of “The Colonel” became the title of Forché’s latest book and first book of narrative nonfiction, What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance. The celebrated American poet and human rights advocate has lived a dynamic life, working across the globe, but What You Have Heard Is True is somewhat mislabeled as memoir — a fact Forché addresses in the acknowledgements tucked at the end. In this book, she has sought to tell the story of what she saw, rather than the story of who she is or what she’s done.

In fact, What You Have Heard Is True’s subject, it slowly becomes apparent to the reader, is not Forché, but her mentor and friend, the famed Salvadoran advocate Leonel Gómez Vides. The narrative’s central frame is El Salvador between 1978 – 1980, where Forché lived on a grant in the lead-up to, and eventual explosion of, civil war; the book contains only circumspect glimpses into the rest of her life. The reader first learns, for instance, that Forché had previously been married when she dispassionately drops the phrase “my former husband” on page 196. She reserves the bulk of her precision for the Salvadoran advocates soon to be forced into exile; depraved military officers affecting superficial courtesies, like the subject of “The Colonel”; and, most exactingly, her courageous, complex shepherds: Gómez, Archbishop Monsegñor Romero, and advocate for the desaparecidos — the disappeared — Margarita Herrera.

*

There are innumerable examples of writers who have assumed the role of observer and performed dreadfully, and much of the ‘outside’ writing about countries in conflict remains paternalistic, obtuse, exploitative, or small-minded. (Years later, I still shudder to recall the opinion piece Bono published in the New York Times, in which he writes that a displaced 10-year-old Syrian kid “has the wisdom of the ages in his eyes.” Love to romanticize PTSD.) But Forché’s account shows how, in an environment where insiders’ abilities to speak about the conditions they’re being subjected to are severely constrained, the outsider can play an essential role. In her own anti-didactic, atmospheric manner, she implies that we who are able are obliged to play it — carefully. (For the purposes of this piece, ‘outsider’ refers to a person who, while they may also have citizenship in an authoritarian country, maintains citizenship in a freer country, while ‘insider’ refers to one who possesses citizenship exclusively in an authoritarian country. Simple language, while necessary, is necessarily reductive.)

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The role Forché is concerned with, more precisely, is that of the witness. Forché told an interviewer she is reticent to “fall back on the foregrounding of a self having experiences.” And so as narrator, the Carolyn of What You Have Heard Is True is a blurred object, the motions of which are largely determined by the whims and decisions of others. Such a choice works to center Gómez, to whom Forché is the listener, and El Salvador, of which she becomes an observer.

“Witness” is a fundamental, oft-revisited theme in Forché’s work. In What You Have Heard Is True, she recalls carrying the words of poet and French Resistance member René Char in her notebook: “The poem rising from its well of mud and stars, will bear witness, almost silently, that it contained nothing which did not truly exist elsewhere, in this rebellious and solitary world of contradictions.” She includes the term in three of her book titles: What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance, and two acclaimed anthologies, Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness and Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English, 1500-2001. “Try to see, Leonel had said. It was what he was always asking me to do,” Forché writes. “Try to see. Look at the world, he’d say, and not at the mirror.”

Salvadorans repeatedly invite her to not only see but to relate the story of their struggle. “My child,” Monsegñor Romero says as she prepares to leave El Salvador after she is nearly killed, “my place is with my people, and now your place is with yours.” Upon her return to the United States, Forché published The Country Between Us, which the Poetry Foundation deemed “that most-rare publication: a poetry bestseller,” then traveled the United States speaking to “anyone who would listen” about its central subject, El Salvador’s political climate. She attended Congressional hearings and a meeting at the United Nations with Amnesty International. “We hoped to prevent U.S. military intervention, to provide sanctuary for refugees, and bring the war to the end, but every year U.S. military aid for the war increased exponentially, and so for most of that time, we believed ourselves to have failed,” she writes. She has taught, spoken, written about, and returned to El Salvador in the intervening years.

In What You Have Heard Is True, Forché, who is now in her late 60s, writes, “I hope I have at last fulfilled [Gómez’s] only request: that I write about what happened.” It is a testament to Forché’s humility that she feels she has not yet, across these forty dedicated and prolific years, done so. During the lobbying period, Forché remembered other words of Monsegñor’s, who had by then been assassinated: “We must hope without hoping. We must hope when we have no hope.”

*

Forché spends the bulk of her time with those who are doing organizing and documentation work in El Salvador, whose experiences are related through a mélange of scenes in cars and churches, colonias, casitas, and champas. She conveys the words of the Salvadorans she speaks with or observes in such places in threads of exacting, albeit often translated, dialogue.

What You Have Heard Is True begins in earnest when Gómez — insider social critic, coffee farmer, hobby motorcyclist, decorated marksman, omnilegent intellectual, veritable chameleon, charismatic shit-stirrer — arrives unannounced on Forché’s doorstep in Southern California, having driven from his isthmus country, two daughters in tow, to meet her. Forché is twenty-seven, working as a poet, assistant professor, and translator. She is established, having won the Yale Younger Poets prize for her first collection Gathering the Tribes and received a Guggenheim Fellowship, but, writing about this period of time, she does not name her decorations; instead, Forché tells the reader she was “too young to have thought very much about the whole of my life, its shape and purpose.” After Gómez proves he is the cousin of a friend, the poet Claribel Alegría, whose work Forché studied in Mallorca, she invites him in.

Gómez proceeds to spend the coming days — or perhaps weeks; time, as it often does in What You Have Heard Is True, blurs here — restlessly dictating the history of El Salvador, starting in 3114 BC and using, among other tools, maps, pamphlets, pencil drawings, Congressional reports, and inscrutable non sequitors. He then invites Forché to visit, insisting that such a trip will provide “the education that you missed in your U.S. schools,” insight into how conflicts spark and fester, and an opportunity to improve her Spanish. In exchange, she will tell her countrymen what she has seen. “War is coming, and the United States is going to play a pivotal role, as it always does in our region, and what the United States decides will determine how long the war will have to be fought,” Gómez tells her.

Gómez later sends a plane ticket in the mail, which Forché accepts. In El Salvador, the political climate is threatening and repressive. Forché and Gómez are told of, directly experience, or, yes, witness signs of the war to come: military curfews, wretched prisons, near-deaths, vicious murders, car chases, corruption, whispered secrets, and fear. Gómez has keys to every room, while Forché and the reader struggle to discern from what material such insider keys might be made. Though Forché admires, is even devoted to, Gómez, What You Have Heard Is True is not hagiography; the reader trusts that Gómez is a madman, never suffers under the illusion that he’s a saint, and, until the very end, doesn’t know whether his circuitous, sometimes bewildering, occasionally self-interested or apparently self-defeating efforts amount to anything.

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It is only later that we come to understand, and Forché understands, who Gómez was in a broad sense. He was neither CIA nor a member of the guerilla forces; his profound access was rooted in the fact that he could move between disparate groups, and that he’d talk to anyone, even the guys he hated. Ultimately, Forché learns from a source, “it was Leonel, working tirelessly for years, who ‘put the peace talks together,’ as they said, and brought about the end of the war.”

In a pivotal scene, Gómez brings Forché to a barrio to meet with a group of young Salvadoran poets. Uncharacteristically, Forché asks to cancel the meeting. Gómez exposes Forché to shock immersions and trauma as a matter of practice, but after he has led her to a room where prisoners are padlocked in wooden boxes, something within her snaps; she sobs, vomits, and grows angry. Eventually, though, she relents and speaks with the poets, in a small, bare home where a baby has just been born. They read, thank her for coming, and share their revista, which contains some political poems. Forché writes:

“We were hoping that if you translate and publish them in the United States, you will be careful not to say who gave them to you. These aren’t our real names, but there are other ways of finding out who we are, and we don’t know all of these ways. It’s just that we — we trust you, of course, but…”

“I’ll keep your poems safe,” I said.

That night I knew that something had changed for me, and that I wasn’t going to get tired or need a shower or want to call something off so I could rest, and I hoped that if I forgot this I would somehow remember Alma [the newborn] in the cardboard box in the barrio, and the mimeographed poems.

I never saw the young poets again. I don’t know what happened to them, if they survived or are among the dead. Shortly thereafter I wouldn’t want to know who people really were or where they lived, where they were going, or who their friends were.

Those whose sole citizenship lies with an authoritarian state cannot take the risks that more privileged outsiders can. They may be fired or fined, dismembered or disappeared. If they expose the truth, who will listen? Their media outlets are often government-owned. An outside byline could result in the loss of their livelihoods or their lives. Activists and advocates assume these risks regardless, like Gómez did. After eight assassination attempts, he was exiled and received political asylum in the United States, though he eventually returned to El Salvador. (Gómez and Forché remained confidants and colleagues for the rest of his life.) When Gómez died in 2009, his daughters, their mother, and Forché scattered his ashes high on the slope of the Guazapa volcano. She writes:

People ask me now what it was like to work with him in the early days before the war. Some still want to know who he really was, of course, but that is now becoming apparent to friends and also to enemies, as he knew it might one day. This is what I tell people now.

It was as if he had stood me squarely before the world, removed the blindfold, and ordered me to open my eyes.

*

Many of the Salvadorans Forché introduces the reader to are murdered for speaking aloud what they see, while others, often narrowly, survive. “Tell them on the outside, tell them,” Gómez implores Forché. Many outsiders have worked or are working at present to tell critical stories about authoritarian countries on an international stage. The risk an outsider assumes when attempting to bear witness is that the insider’s government, which traces its citizens’ thoughts and actions, will identify those whose thoughts and actions the outsider describes. The young barrio poet’s insight that “there are other ways of finding out who we are, and we don’t know all of these ways” is even truer now, as surveillance technology becomes increasingly advanced. Consent may be offered, but unless that consent is deeply informed, the responsibility for the insider’s protection should rest heavily on the outsider.

One way around this tangle is to write elliptically, as Forché has now done in myriad poetry collections; to fully anonymize sources, not just in name, but in context, as Forché has also done; or to let significant time elapse between the witnessing and the telling, as Forché does here.

Forché is neither a journalist nor interested in playing one, as she repeatedly tells both the reader and the Salvadorans she encounters. As such, she intentionally relays context as it is relayed to her: interpersonally, often confoundingly, as if filtered through a broken sieve. What You Have Heard Is True is remarkable for many reasons, not least of which is that in guiding us through an authoritarian country, where citizens’ accounts are necessarily shifting or stilted, Forché simultaneously mirrors and rejects such a country’s conditions. She cultivates confusion, even anxiety, but will not tell us how to think.

*

Bearing witness is not a passive act. One can see without witnessing. There are hotel pools across the world strewn with those who came to pursue a PhD, or aid work, or write a book, ambitions long forgotten in the plush comfort a developing country’s cost of living might afford Westerners. Now, the extended visitors hold cold beers, swim slow laps, take air-conditioned cars from those hotel pools to their air-conditioned homes round the bend. An outsider can breathe the air of another place without generating meaning.

With rare exception, the norteamericanos Forché and Gómez encounter in El Salvador are useless. One of Gómez’s pursuits — in which he has enlisted Forché who, as a young, white American writer, functions as witness, calling card, and occasional shield — is investigating the convoluted story of an American who Gómez believes was tossed alive from a helicopter into the sea on the order of a Salvadoran military official, and whose alleged murder was never brought for justice. When Forché raises the issue, the U.S. Ambassador tells her he regards the case as “unsolvable and hence closed.”

Needless to say, no action is taken on the case.

Once, Forché and Gómez visit an American hippie named Greg, who lives deep in the countryside, yet doesn’t speak a word of Spanish. Gómez asks Greg for help building a portable bridge, which would enable Salvadorans to access rural cooperative farms in the rainy season. Greg, Gómez knew, had been an engineer and when they arrive, he offers his help. “Just tell me what you want me to do,” he says. But after Greg realizes genuine assistance would require concrete action, he declines. “I studied engineering, but it was boring. I don’t, you know, want to get involved with all that stuff anymore. I came here to get away from all that,” Greg says.

Another time, Forché meets with an American health program officer, whose flagship program is to encourage Salvadorans to utilize their dilapidated local hospitals and clinics. Forché, who knows how desperate these facilities are, asks if the officer has visited them. “There are only so many hours in a day, and, as you can see, I have plenty of work right here to do at my desk,” the officer replies, gesturing to a pile of papers.

This serves as useful, if unsurprising, context. The outsiders were barely present; the outsiders who were present largely did not help. Later in the book, Gómez says to Forché regarding a man she’d seen behaving strangely, and whom she suspected of being a bomber:

If you had a photograph of the goddamn thing no one would believe you. As for your man in the basilica, your observations are imprecise. Next time pay closer attention. Someday you will be talking to your own people. Writing for your own people. I promise you that it is going to be difficult to get Americans to believe what is happening here. For one thing, this is outside the realm of their imaginations. For another, it isn’t in their interests to believe you. For a third, it is possible that we are not human beings to them.

Forché doesn’t strain to connect past to present, nor does she need to. The connections make themselves. The Chinese government interns an estimated million Muslims in concentration camps and Western diplomats barely bat an eye; it is going to be difficult to get Americans to believe what is happening here. A historic revolution occurs in Sudan and largely misses U.S. media; this is outside the realm of their imaginations. Central and South American children are stored in cages on U.S. land; it is possible that we are not human beings to them.

What You Have Heard Is True is powerful both for technical reasons — the book is a gorgeous literary achievement; it took Forché 15 years to write, which somehow seems a bargain — and human ones. The principals of Forché’s memoir are Salvadorans driven by the belief that they can, even in the context of pervasive censorship and surveillance, create more just societies. “It isn’t the risk of death and fear of danger that prevent people from rising up,” Gómez tells her. “It is numbness, acquiescence, and the defeat of the mind. Resistance to oppression begins when people realize deeply within themselves that something better is possible.” As witness, Forché sketches a world of both astounding cruelty and absolute possibility, a world that asks our full engagement.

* * *

Melissa Batchelor Warnke is a writer living in Los Angeles. Her work is focused on gender, power, and pop culture.

Editor: Dana Snitzky

In today’s attention economy, ideas don’t need to be deleted or redacted to be silenced. They can be drowned out privately, screen by screen, by unchecked noise from decoy bots, doxxing campaigns, and filter bubbles.

In WIRED‘s Free Speech issue, Zeynep Tufekci describes how so many of the “most noble old ideas about free speech simply don’t compute in the age of social media.”

The most effective forms of censorship today involve meddling with trust and attention, not muzzling speech itself. As a result, they don’t look much like the old forms of censorship at all. They look like viral or coordinated harassment campaigns, which harness the dynamics of viral outrage to impose an unbearable and disproportionate cost on the act of speaking out. They look like epidemics of disinformation, meant to undercut the credibility of valid information sources. They look like bot-fueled campaigns of trolling and distraction, or piecemeal leaks of hacked materials, meant to swamp the attention of traditional media.

These tactics usually don’t break any laws or set off any First Amendment alarm bells. But they all serve the same purpose that the old forms of censorship did: They are the best available tools to stop ideas from spreading and gaining purchase.

John Stuart Mill’s notion that a “marketplace of ideas” will elevate the truth is flatly belied by the virality of fake news. And the famous American saying that “the best cure for bad speech is more speech”—a paraphrase of Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis—loses all its meaning when speech is at once mass but also nonpublic. How do you respond to what you cannot see? How can you cure the effects of “bad” speech with more speech when you have no means to target the same audience that received the original message?

Freedom of speech continues to be an important democratic value, Tufekci writes, “but it’s not the only one.” The First Amendment isn’t even the only amendment to the Constitution, let alone our only vision for a functioning democracy. Ideally, we’d also have a knowledgeable public, a capacity for informed debate, an atmosphere of honesty and respect, and a transparent system for holding powerful people and institutions accountable to their constituents.

But constituents aren’t users, and today’s giants of search and social are hardly bastions of free speech. Algorithms promote democratic ideals about as often as they safeguard friendships from advertisers. While social media platforms may feel like vibrant public spheres, they’re more like operating theaters. Procedures are expertly monitored in a controlled environment, and the glass only goes one way.

“To be clear, no public sphere has ever fully achieved these ideal conditions,” Tufekci reminds us, “but at least they were ideals to fail from. Today’s engagement algorithms, by contrast, espouse no ideals about a healthy public sphere.”

But we don’t have to be resigned to the status quo. Facebook is only 13 years old, Twitter 11, and even Google is but 19. At this moment in the evolution of the auto industry, there were still no seat belts, airbags, emission controls, or mandatory crumple zones. The rules and incentive structures underlying how attention and surveillance work on the internet need to change. But in fairness to Facebook and Google and Twitter, while there’s a lot they could do better, the public outcry demanding that they fix all these problems is fundamentally mistaken. There are few solutions to the problems of digital discourse that don’t involve huge trade-offs—and those are not choices for Mark Zuckerberg alone to make. These are deeply political decisions. In the 20th century, the US passed laws that outlawed lead in paint and gasoline, that defined how much privacy a landlord needs to give his tenants, and that determined how much a phone company can surveil its customers. We can decide how we want to handle digital surveillance, attention-channeling, harassment, data collection, and algorithmic decision­making. We just need to start the discussion.

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Writing in Real Life magazine, Juli Min explores the way WeChat, China’s most popular messaging app, has become a place to both mourn death and share graphic videos of the moment itself—a place where users post “viral videos of death as we create an endless stream of idle gossip.” What does this mean broadly, and what does it mean in a country where all data is subject to government monitoring?

Tencent WeChat accounts, like Facebook accounts, are technically leased to their users. The data and photos do not belong solely to individuals in the end, as Tencent maintains the rights to copy, use, and forward whatever is shared on the platform. Accordingly, Tencent’s servers themselves are leased from the Chinese government, subjecting all messaging data to government monitoring and surveillance. A viral video of a mother’s death by escalator will happily make the rounds, whereas a video of a Tibetan monk burning himself in protest will be shuttered by government monitors — “we” are allowed to gawk at the spectacle of death, but not the spectacle of resistance. In 1967’s The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord, prescient founder of the Situationist International, wrote: “The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.” Aside from the work of mediation, he wrote, spectacle also allowed for the proliferation and control of the masses and degraded authentic life and experience.

Monitoring is both the source and the function of internet spectacle.

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America, 1981: Ronald Reagan was sworn in as president, MTV aired its first video, and the culture wars were on. That January, the Rev. Jerry Falwell—a televangelist-turned-political-kingmaker who essentially invented the religious right as we know it today—had sent a massive direct mailing to his Moral Majority constituency, urging readers to examine their school libraries and textbooks for “immoral, anti-family and anti-American content,” and to bring indiscretions to the attention of the Moral Majority. The American Library Association, which had long tracked complaints about attempts at book censorship, was reporting soaring numbers. Enter our heroine, Judith Krug, and the origins of Banned Books Week.

As censorship complaints continued to metastasize, Krug, who was then the Director of the ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom (a position she held from 1967 until her death in 2009), fought back in 1982, working to create a national Banned Books Week to draw attention to the issue. From The New York Times’ original coverage in September 1982:

To alert people about the need to preserve “freedom to read,” a national coalition has designated this week as Banned Books Week. The aim is to encourage resistance by communities against efforts to suppress books. The coalition includes the American Booksellers Association, the American Library Association and the National Association of College Stores.

Judith P. Krug, director of the office of intellectual freedom of the American Library Association, said: “An atmosphere conducive to censorship hovers over the country. The trouble is not simply the present Administration’s tolerance of such censorial groups as the Moral Majority—it’s more than just a cause-and-effect thing. Rather, I really believe these censors are searching for something unreal—the good old days. It’s ‘Alice in Wonderland’ thinking.”

”Last year the Moral Majority sent out letters signed by its leader, Jerry Falwell, ‘suggesting’ that certain books might be inappropriate for some students to check out of libraries. They claim this isn’t censorship -but the climate they create surely encourages vigilantism.”

Known as a fiery defender of the first amendment and a fierce warrior for libraries, Krug’s fingerprints “are literally on every case having to do with library freedom.” She was a leader in the fight against internet censorship in the 1990’s, and later was among the first to publicly criticize the USA Patriot Act.  “Some users find materials in their local library collection to be untrue, offensive, harmful or even dangerous,” Krug explained in a 2002 talk. “But libraries serve the information needs of all of the people in the community—not just the loudest, not just the most powerful, not even just the majority. Libraries serve everyone.”