“Patrick Vincent and Ali El-Chaer’s collaborative book visualize’s El-Chaer’s original poem ‘Banned Books.’ The poem and its visualization reacts to historic and contemporary violence, colonialism, and oppression related to the restriction of writing and access to books.” –Unbannable Library project
Banned Books
Banned books, banned bodies
10% of a population gone
10 months of being unwritten—
Or not written at all—
No words, no numbers
Could hold all this silence.
A religion foreign to our lands,
Controlling our history.
And those who forget their history
Are doomed to repeat it
And, perhaps this time,
Those who are allowed to remember will perfect it.
Bombing, bombing, bombing,
And the displacement never stops.
You remove my people from the screens
And do not talk of our banned books
Or the books that never made it to the shelf.
Spines thrown across the streets,
Hands clutching the warning,
Pulling the memory...
And go to the prisons of our new state library!
Banned books, banned bodies,
Banned people, banned homelands
And whose morality is this anyway?
The chosen people?
The revolution not televised, not spoken
Sewn Black lips,
Ziptied hands,
Gassed while crossing the colonizer’s border,
Savages with the same red beating hearts as all of us,
asking:
“What about our stories?
Will we all be banned together?”
Ali El-Chaer علي الشاعر 