Freedom to Read Week & The Place of Public Libraries

It’s February 2nd, 2015, the City of Toronto has a load of rather beautiful new snow, which fell, relentless, overnight. What, I wonder, are Toronto’s homeless doing today, with the temperature plus wind chill at a bone-snapping 22 degrees below zero. Whenever I think of homeless persons in Toronto I think of Martha Baillie‘s novel, The Incident Report (Pedlar, 2009), with its worry about urban landscapes of the 21st century, its multiple concerns about Toronto and its power elites, and its quiet applause for thinkers, planners, and Jane Jacobs-style advocates. The fictional library that is the setting for much of the action in Baillie’s novel is a place frequented by homeless persons and people with mental health difficulties, and that fact generates many questions in the reader, such as: Are we as a collective conversing sufficiently in public squares about homelessness, about illiteracy, about poverty and unemployment and disease and ignorance and over-population, and the inevitable stultification or rage caused by imperialism’s reckless greed? Martha asks whether we are, as does her novel’s protagonist, Miriam, a public librarian.Do literacy and homelessness and poverty and disease belong altogether in one brief piece about Freedom To Read Week? Yes, I think they do. Public libraries are gathering places, safe community spaces, places out of the cold where citizens can come together face to face, to improve their minds, to be enlightened or informed. Every citizen has a right to belong to a library, and librarians are there to ensure in part that citizens feel welcome, no matter their status, no matter their level of literacy. During the years Toronto City Hall was forced to endure the follies of Mayor Rob Ford, attention was turned away from talk about public space. But other, more competent, less divisive, Canadian leaders have been talking for a while now about how we can best navigate the changing worlds we live in, and how a community’s words, ideas, and imagination can be continually enriched, in order that the pressing, difficult, questions about our present and future continue to be asked.In a lecture he delivered last year at the Barbican in London UK, author Neil Gaiman said, “We have an obligation to support libraries. To use libraries, to encourage others to use libraries, to protest the closure of libraries. If you do not value libraries then you do not value information or culture or wisdom. You are silencing the voices of the past and you are damaging the future.” (Read an edited version of the lecture here.)According to Gaiman, writers have “an obligation to use language, to push ourselves: to find out what words mean and how to deploy them, to communicate clearly, to say what we mean. We must not attempt to freeze language, or to pretend it is a dead thing that must be revered, but we should use it as a living thing, that flows, that borrows words, that allows meanings and pronunciations to change with time. . .[As writers] we must tell our readers true things and give them weapons and give them armour and pass on whatever wisdom we have gleaned from our short stay on this green world.” Of utmost importance is his notion of language as a cascading, a living, a changing, thing, as it gets at something important about Freedom To Read Week, and that is, that reading freely and spaciously will help us to learn what words mean and how to deploy them; will give us the necessary capacity to address our communities critically.

To be human and alive will never reduce to a simple thing. Living is complexity: read Martha Baillie’s novel, The Incident Report, to see how her protagonist encounters and responds to life’s complex questions. Complexity: this is an important, a huge, a living word, and in its wide reach captures issues of public health, literacy, equality, and freedom to read. Hoped-for movements during Freedom To Read Week are those that take us in, out, up, and away from the millions of private, isolated, ‘squares’ we become through technology’s social media, into increased participation in the public square, of which all books and all libraries play a part. Critical of Mayor Rob Ford’s divisive antics, his reductionist tendencies, Ken Greenberg writes in Spacing magazine (Winter 2014/15), “Providing resources, services, activities and a helping hand to those in need is good economics and an essential investment in the future. We residents . . . will [in the near future] restore a measure of civility to our public discourse by seeing the world through many eyes, not through narrow blinkers that reduce complex issues to sound bites.”Martha Baillie, Neil Gaiman, and Ken Greenberg: three thinkers on the same huge and complex page. Were you to read any one of these three writers during Freedom To Read Week, you could hardly do better.