Censor This: A Love Letter to Banned Books

Berlin book burning, 10 May, 1933: Students march books deemed ‘un‑German’ into flames at Opernplatz.

Has History Taught Us Nothing?

As the morning light spills across my desk like ink across unlined paper—unruly, impossible to contain—I paused mid-sentence, pen hovering above edits to my own story, caught in a loop of headlines scrolling across my feed all because of one Instagram notification: another book banned in a school district two provinces over. Another author's voice silenced in the name of decency. Another chapter struck from the syllabus of a generation's education.

I am a Portuguese woman living in Canada, shaped by stories passed down through whispers, by the smell of old paper and sun-warped covers stacked in the corners of my home as a child, and, perhaps most importantly, by the warning carried from a generation before me, who knew what it meant to speak in hushed tones under Salazar’s Estado Novo. I grew up knowing that books weren’t just bound pages—they were blood memory. They were exile and homecoming. Resistance and refuge. We read because someone before us wasn’t allowed to.

So forgive me if my breath catches when I hear the words "book ban." Not because it is new. But because it is old. Older than we care to admit.

During the Nazi regime, it was fire that consumed the pages—bonfires built in the name of purity, morality, and national pride. Jewish authors. Marxists. Poets. Professors. Gone in ash. In Stalin's Soviet Union, books vanished like people did—quietly, completely, rewritten into obedience or erased altogether.

Even here in Canada, our past is not clean: the Padlock Law of 1937 allowed authorities to shut down anyone promoting "communist propaganda," a term so wide it swallowed poets and pacifists alike. Queer books. Indigenous languages. Dissenting history. All targeted. All vulnerable.

And now, again, we whisper the same old script.

In the United States, over 10,000 books have been banned in the past year alone. Not for obscenity, as they claim—but for truth. For honesty. For daring to say what some would prefer buried. Books by Black authors, by queer voices, by those who don't fit neatly within the margins of the accepted narrative. Even Canada—a country that prides itself on multiculturalism and free expression—has seen quiet bans, removals, and parental challenges rising under the radar.

We ban books and tell ourselves we are protecting children. But we are only teaching them to fear difference. To distrust empathy. To swallow a version of the world that does not and has never existed.

What we censor today, our children will not know to miss tomorrow. And what they do not know, they cannot question.

I now walk past my shelf of Pessoa, his words like old wine—dark and enduring. He knew what it meant to write under regimes that smiled with one face and silenced with another. I run my fingers over the spines of banned books, not just for what they contain, but for what they continue to withstand.

We must ask: who gets to decide what is dangerous? And for whom?

Censorship is not about protection. It is about control. And control, when wrapped in righteousness, is among the most dangerous violences of all.

Berlin's "Empty Library" memorial at Bebelplatz—formerly Opernplatz: the void left by erased words and voices. It marks the exact location where over 20,000 books were burned by the Nazis in 1933.

In their voices we hear the arc of history—of regimes that feared thought, fictional or real. As Salman Rushdie reminds us, “What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.” Ursula K. Le Guin once wrote, “A dangerous book will always be in danger from those it threatens with the demand that they question their assumptions. They’d rather hang on to the assumptions and ban the book.” And Heinrich Heine’s warning from the 19th century still sears across time: “Where they burn books, they will in the end also burn people.” These aren’t just words: they are guardrails against forgetting.

So no, this isn’t just about books. It never was.

It’s about the right to be seen. To be heard. To be remembered.

And if we forget that—if we let history fade in favour of comfort—then we are only ever one vote, one law, one matchstick away from the fire.

So I ask again: Has history taught us nothing?

Or have we simply stopped listening?

Right: "That was but a prelude; where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people as well. – Heinrich Heine, 1820". | Left:"In the middle of the square on 10 May 1933, Nazi students burnt the works of hudreds of independent authors, journalists, philosophers and academics."