More on banned books

Sharon sent me an email yesterday morning if it was true that Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts. I know the book has been making its rounds for a while. I have not read the book myself; firstly because I have a certain aversion to big books these days, and secondly, due to my own personal prejudices. (One Tamil boy called Patel is enough.) Anyway, I made a few phone calls and confirmed the worst.


This is the third book this month. So far this year the distributors have told us that we cannot order the following books because they have been banned. The Malayan Trilogy by Anthony Burgess, Immortality and Laughable Loves by Milan Kundera, 1001 Arabian Nights, Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang and, Penguin says, all books by Khalil Gibran.


I have also been busy trying to acquire a list of banned books, I mean books that have actually been banned ie gazetted as prohibited under the Printing Presses and Publications (Control of Undesirable Publications) Act, for a long time - ever since all my Khalil Gibrans got nicked by the KDN at KLIA seven years ago, despite the books being available in every other bookshop in KL at that time. Anyway, I finally managed to get one with the help of some friends. I have posted it in PDF format if you'd like to take a look at it. (Read it here, some of it is really funny. Good party material. There is even one called Kunci Mencari Rezeki (2002) published by a company called the Speedy Self Study System!! Go figure.)


From the list one can conclude that that the government has major issues with sex, religion and, to a much smaller extent, drugs. Many of the banned books on sex are in Chinese and a few in English. One interesting note: the Chinese translation of Lady Chatterley's Lover (2000) has been banned, but not the English original. Hmmm! I don't know much about the Chinese books, but there is a certain surrealism about the English list. I mean, this is a country that allows free import and distribution of 'hard-core' porn Fanny Hill (what do they think that it is, a schoolgirl mystery novel?) and prebuscent children are allowed to watch and imitate MTV or Channel V which, to me, is little more that soft porn.


I wonder how many of you read this June 23, 2006 report Porn Up, Rape Down Anthony D'Amato Of Northwestern University - School of Law in the US. Here is the abstract: The incidence of rape in the United States has declined 85% in the past 25 years while access to pornography has become freely available to teenagers and adults. The Nixon and Reagan Commissions tried to show that exposure to pornographic materials produced social violence. The reverse may be true: that pornography has reduced social violence. (Read it here.)


There is no necessity to get your knickers in a knot over that report. You don't have to agree with it. But to me, it does stand to reason. This should mean that countries with more liberal attitudes and policies towards sex, should have less sex crimes. Is that a fact? It sure appears that way from afar.


And how about religion? Is religious tolerance directly proportional to liberal politics and society, or the reverse?


Anyway, coming back to book banning; one there is the official ban with the papers signed off by the Home Minister or his Deputy, then there is the other 'ban', arbitrary and unpredictable. It is almost as if there are two authorities running in parallel. The first one is quite clear-cut (even if you don't agree with it). The second is pure Kafka. Case in point: none of the books that have been proscribed by the KDN this year (according to the distributors) have been gazetted. Is the Minister aware of this?