The Inquisition Nobody Expected. How Books and Bookkeepers Can Save the World
by Ana Laguna
“They’re organized, they know where everything is, and you never know which way they’re coming because they’re so quiet,” Stephen Colbert quipped after learning that the ongoing criminal investigation against Donald Trump, launched by the Department of Justice, had been prompted by the National Archives and Records Administration. These librarians, “silent but deadly,” are one of the main reasons why the Trump administration may be held accountable for its treatment and accruement of vital—i.e., nuclear—US secrets. It might be no exaggeration to say that, in these renewed nuclear times, the information improperly “stored” at Mar-a-Lago holds the key to avoiding a human—rather than just national—calamity.
This is one of the places where literature and politics most clearly diverge: in matters of national security, the importance of a document corresponds directly to the limited access to its content—its secrecy—whereas the significance of a work of literature is determined by the scale of its public dissemination—the number of copies it sells, the languages it is translated into, its permanence in best-seller rankings. And yet, these days reading literary fiction seems to pose a bigger threat to the nation than selling nuclear secrets to our enemies, because while we are still debating the damming information about the former president treatments of highly classified materials, there seems to be little question, at least for the Texas School Board and other 75 districts all over the country, about the need to ban “dangerous” books. The Diary of Anne Frank was one of the last 40 tomes to make it to the shamefully long list of banned readings. Although, after a justified public outcry, Anne’s Diary has been reinstated, the ban on the other 39 still applies. We may talk a lot about the almost daily shootings occurring in American classrooms, but in the minds of ultra-conservative parents, “activists,” and board directors, the real danger posed to students and their well-being apparently comes from the fictional or testimonial work of authors like Anne Frank, Toni Morrison, and Margaret Atwood.
At a time in history where books can be instantly downloaded and accessed in all kinds of formats, two million of North American students have lost access to more than 1,500 old and new, traditional and non-normative literary works. Most of them treat the topics of race, sex, and history. Rather than AR15s, it is books, and the succulent conversations they facilitate, that have been taken out of the classrooms. Paraphrasing the Monty Python’s famous sketch, it is fair to say that “nobody expected the American Inquisition,” but that here it is, in all its infamous glory. Could archivists and bookkeepers save us from this inquisitorial danger? Could those librarians abandon their usually calm and silent habitat in order to engage in the good fight of defending the precious attributes of democracy, culture, literacy, and literature in loud and noisy ways?
If history is really a reference, the answer is yes. In the US, one of the most striking and still little-known examples of how librarians did their part in the rebuilding of the nation was the Pack Horse Library initiative, an element of the New Deal that started in 1935 and ran until 1943. This group of intrepid Indiana Jones-like, horse-riding librarians sent deep into Appalachia with their saddles full of classics, became the walking libraries that the remote communities of Western Kentucky desperately needed. Their record of efficiency was spectacular, as they covered 10,000 square miles of the state, they provided “quality books” (the most popular were Robinson Crusoe, “and anything by Mark Twain”) to 29 counties, 155 schools, and 50,000 families. By the time the program was cancelled in 1943, these “book ladies” had left behind 30 physical libraries and 100,000 devoted Kentucky readers.
Pack Horse Library initiative. Images Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
A similar impetus occurred in the Spanish 30s, when a group of young, errant Spanish educators and scholars—most of them emerging philosophers, poets, and playwrights—travelled throughout Spain’s rural villages and towns fueling a similar educational mission. They were part of another unique cultural experiment, the still not sufficiently-celebrated Misiones Pedagógicas (Pedagogical Missions) a rural educational intervention conceived and supported by the democratically-elected Spanish Republican government (1931–36) in order to improve the literacy rates of remote and barely-accessible rural areas. Instead of considering which books, images, or discussions should be taken out of school curriculums, the aims of these contemporaneous US and Spanish governments was to bring as many of those masterpieces as possible to the largest number of remote communities. We have for the most part lost touch of who these anonymous, intrepid librarians were in Kentucky, but in Spain those launched into the dusty roads of the country were some of the most accomplished luminaries of the twentieth-century Spanish culture, such as María Zambrano, Luis Bello, and Luis Cernuda. Young and enthusiastic, even poets as uber sophisticated as Cernuda apparently did not mind using and being immortalized astride Sancho Panza’s vehicle of choice, a donkey. Their impact and record, like those of their Kentucky co-legionnaires, was epic: they founded more than 3,000 libraries and served over 450,000 readers.
La Barraca y las Misiones Pedagógicas.Images Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Changing the cultural landscape of Spain through the public awareness of the country’s literary and artistic legacy was undoubtedly a quixotic quest with a genuine Cervantine flavor. If in their trucks and mules, these educators brought reproductions of Velazquez, Murillo, and El Greco and discussed the unabridged works of canonical Spanish authors like Calderón de la Barca or Lope de Vega, the author of Don Quixote appears to have been the most often performed author. Federico García Lorca, director of the most famous companies of the Misiones, “La Barraca,” enthusiastically praised the fresh nature of Cervantes’s interludes, whose “rhythm, wisdom, and grace” allowed them to connect with the heavily illiterate rural audiences.
Patronato de Misiones Pedagógicas : septiembre de 1931-1933 (Madrid, 1934). Images Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Some of Cervantes’ works, like El juez de los divorcios (The Divorce Judge) were ideally suited to educate the public on controversial pieces of legislation like the 1932 codification of divorce with which the Republic was trying to modernize the country. Some astute activists, like the sinsombrero Maria Teresa de León, advocated for changing the ending of the play to deconstruct more explicitly the rampant misconceptions that church officials and moralists in rural regions had built around the measure (divorce). Lorca—at least publicly—always opposed making any kind of alteration to the original, but others, like the fellow poet Rafael Alberti had fewer objections. In 1937, Alberti and de León updated Cervantes’ tragedy Numancia, performing it in Madrid precisely when it was under siege by another merciless imperial army (now fascist rather than Roman).
In the 1930s, Cervantes was ubiquitous in the saddles of errant educators, the stages of rural or urban areas, and the curriculums of the “nueva educación.” The author had left the pedestal that suffocates classic texts and authors entering the classrooms through fresh educational editions that invited children and teenagers “to enjoy and be moved by the perfect prose and sublime thinking of the Prince of Spanish letters,” without forgetting that, just as he had suffered and overcome many “limitations and troubles in his life,” so could his new young readers transcend their own constraints (Noguer, 1936). Cervantes was also the author that invited his reader to approach him as a friend (“insta a que se le trate de tú). In that promising decade went horribly wrong by 1939, Cervantes was a constant presence, a fitting illustration of the country that was trying to overcome its systemic deficiencies to take a giant step forward into its future.
“Homenaje a Cervantes.” The Pedagogical Missions. Primary School, Murcia (Spain). 1934. Author Unknown.
All such attributes would make Cervantes an unpopular choice for the fascist curriculums and performances that came after 1939, when the dictator Franco took power. Just like today ultra-conservative circles consider unforgivable Tony Morrison’s masterful vindication of the African American historical experience, the Spanish fascist ideologues viewed as highly undesirable the effort to make treasured classics like Don Quijote or El juez de los milagros accessible to the country’s most humble citizens, bridging the gap between high and low cultures with the same ease that Kentucky librarians crossed the high and lows valleys of the territories they served. The author’s boundary-breaking inclusivity and irritating secularism were two attributes that earned him the epithet of “enemy of the state” from the prominent fascist ideologue Ernesto Gimenez Caballero. It is no surprise that once Giménez Caballero took charge of the Spanish education system after 1939, Cervantes would go back to the stiff pedestals and insipid invocations that had been transcended just a couple of decades earlier. The dictatorship quickly drafted long lists of censored authors and works, and a good number of literature professors and specialists were killed, prosecuted, investigated, and/or expelled from their country and the profession. Friendly heroes, and errant libraries led by philosophers, painters and poets would never be seen again in Spain’s remote areas.
The US and its allies did defeat fascism in 1945; yet, neither Kentucky nor Spain seem to have recovered completely from the reactionary backlash to those intrepid librarians. Two or three generations later, Kentucky, despite being home to a fabulous public university, only has a 21% of residents 25 or older with a BA; Spain does not cease to invoke Cervantes or reference Don Quixote but only 21.6 % of Spaniards appear to have read the entire novel (others argue it is four out of ten). Now more than ever, with Spain and the US both seeing a concerning rise of pro-fascist forces, we could benefit from the enriching path-crossings that those errant libraries provided. Imagine if we all read and discussed authors like Anne Frank, Toni Morrison, and Cervantes; imagine if we took those discussions to the places that are least likely to have them.
Luckily, we do not have to resort to a time machine to bring back to our day initiatives like the ones I explored here. NGOs like “Libraries for peace” (“Bibliotecas para la paz” (Colombia), “Libraries Without Borders” (in USA), “Bibliothèques sans frontières” (in France and Belgium) continue the good fight of strengthening democracy and increasing social mobility and equity one book at a time. In the US, the Public Library of New York and the Brooklyn Public Library allow the free downloads of all banned books in America. By donating time or resources to any of these platforms and initiatives we can support with the click of a button the struggle against the growing Inquisitorial purges happening now in USA and too many other corners of the world. In doing so, we can be part of an urgent humanistic and humanitarian mission led by some of the most unlikely heroes of our time, the librarians, the nomadic writers, those men and women that fit Cervantes’ description of the wise person “who reads much and walks much, [and in doing so] goes far and knows much.”
Let’s join them on the ride! Mules are optional.
