What are books at the most basic level? Words and sentences that blend together to weave a story? A portal to another world, where wizards and magic abound? Or as Willie van Peer would have you think, the cornerstone of modern society? While these are all true, books are on the most simplistic level, merely ideas. Ideas that wear ink and adorn pages, so that they may be passed on to readers like you and me. Ideas that en-flame the heart and captivate the mind, that slowly grow on you like a lover and then leave, harkening for a better tomorrow. Stalin himself acknowledged the immense sway ideas hold, stating: “Ideas are more powerful then guns.”

Though the Nussbaum and Van Peer’s articles we’ve been told that words wield power, but it wasn’t until we read Obasan and noticed the dramatic effect it had upon Canadian society that we realized how powerful a book can truly be. While the Japanese-Canadians interned in Canada during the Second World War suffered unfair treatment, their ordeal was often overshadowed by the true nightmares of the Second World War, terrors such as Auschwitz and Nanjing. These victims went on, suffering in silence throughout the years, until Joy Kogawa published Obasan and gave the victims of Japanese interment camps a voice. Once they were seen and heard, the public rallied behind their cause, leading to the apology and reimbursement of all victims by the Canadian government. In the same vein, Ellie Weisel’s Night showcased the atrocities committed by Hitler’s Third Reich.  Weisel’s small but powerful book was a moving firsthand account of the inhumanities of the human creature, and his book’s legacy still impacts people today.

Seeing literature actively play a part in society has been most interesting, and given me a new perspective on the social impact of works such as the aforementioned Obasan. By being able to “relive” the interment of Japanese-Canadians though the eyes of young Naomi, Kogawa puts her readers through the same ordeal she faced and develops an attachment between the reader and Naomi, Obasan’s child protagonist.

While most people (understandably) find Obasan powerful in it’s retelling of the ordeal of Japanese-Canadians during the Second World War, I found Obasan meaningful as it led me to understand the impact literature has. Not only on the literary world, but in the real world as well.

“What gunpowder did for war the printing press did for the mind” – Wendell Phillips

An interesting topic was raised this week, on the merit of literature in modern society. A key piece we studied was Nussbaum’s “Democratic Citizenship and the Narrative Imagination”, in which she claims that literary works and arts serve to improve one’s empathy and perception by placing readers in an array of situations they may never be in. Nussbaum goes on to conclude that literature is a cornerstone of democracy, and should be promoted as being essential for the progress of society as a whole.

“Where they burn books, they will also burn people” – Heinrich Heine

It should be worth noting that all movements past and present that we often view as oppressive have banned books. Ideas, be they good or bad, are powerful weapons, and groups that seek to curb the power of the ordinary citizen know that if they can control what their people think, they essentially control their population. Orwell’s 1984 and Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 touch upon these issues of a power-bloated state and of censorship, respectively. The concept of democracy means “power to the people” and thankfully most of the modern world is aligned with the ideals of freedom of speech.

“I am he attesting sympathy” – Walt Whitman

For every voice heard, there are many more drowned out amidst the cacophony of society. The poor, the underprivileged; those whom mainstream society rarely see and would rather not hear about. Thus, according to Nussbaum, literature gives a voice to the voiceless, and a face to the faceless, so that we may see and hear them as what they truly are; human beings like you and me.

While that concept is noble and true, Nussbaum ought to note that the very ideologies that lead to book burning were themselves first transmitted through literature.