Margaret Atwood has released a new short story critiquing elected officials for a wide-ranging book ban in the Canadian province of Alberta. The controversial decision to remove books purportedly containing “explicit sexual content” has seen numerous works of literature swept up in the dragnet, including Atwood’s dystopian work The Handmaid’s Tale.
In a social media post, Atwood wrote that since her famed work was no longer permissible in Alberta schools, she had written a “suitable” short work for teens, adding the work was necessary because the province’s minister of education thought students were “stupid babies”.
The extremely brief story traces the lives of John and Mary, two “very, very good” children.
“They never picked their noses or had bowel movements or zits,” she wrote in the opening lines, adding they were ardent Christians who “paid no attention to what Jesus actually said about the poor” and instead “practised selfish rapacious capitalism” in the vein of the conservative literary hero Ayn Rand.
“Oh, and they never died, because who wants to dwell on, you know, death and corpses and yuk?”
Atwood writes that while the pair “lived happily ever”, the ominous warnings in her 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale – which describes a totalitarian fundamentalist regime in which enslaved women are forced to bear children – “came true came true and [Alberta premier] Danielle Smith found herself with a nice new blue dress but no job” – a reference to the novel’s elite wives who have power but are not permitted to work.
“The end.”
The Alberta ban emerged as a product of intense lobbying by socially conservative “parents’ rights” groups in the province and mirrors a trend in the United States.
Action4Canada and Parents for Choice in Education (PCE) have taken credit for the book ban and the latter sent an email to supporters after the ban was announced thanking them for their efforts in contacting government officials about “graphic” books.
The Alberta government defines “explicit sexual content” in its policy as “content containing a detailed and clear depiction of a sexual act”. Students from kindergarten to grade 12 cannot access any “content” in a school library that meets this definition.
Alberta’s public schools have until October to comply with the order, but some schools have already released their lists of banned books. The Edmonton school board said it would remove 200 books from school libraries, including The Handmaid’s Tale.
Other books to be pulled from shelves include George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, which officials say contains passages that discuss sexual intercourse and rape; Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
Last week, Smith criticised officials for drawing up such a wide-ranging list of books to be removed, describing the move as “vicious compliance”.
Smith showed reporters excerpts from graphic novels – including Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe – that prompted the new rules in the first place for the explicit illustrations of sexual acts they contain. The book is a globally acclaimed coming-of-age story about teenage life and young adulthood. Critics of the ban say increasingly powerful lobby groups are targeting books that affirm LGBTQ+ identities.
Ahead of the ban, Atwood also posted on social media warning against reading The Handmaid’s Tale because “your hair will catch on fire!”
“Get one now before they have public book burnings of it.”
