On Joining Oulipo by Accident
Both authors of books banned from our nation's swelling prisons.
The federal government's most secure prison has determined that two books written by President Barack Obama contain material "potentially detrimental to national security" and rejected an inmate's request to read them.
Ahmed Omar Abu Ali is serving a 30-year sentence at the federal supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, for joining al-Qaida and plotting to assassinate then-President George W. Bush. Last year, Abu Ali requested two books written by Obama: "Dreams from My Father" and "The Audacity of Hope."
But prison officials, citing guidance from the FBI, determined that passages in both books contain information that could damage national security.
Brilliant.
Interestingly, whereas the president's inspiring tales of achieving as a black American were deemed dangerous to national security, Bolano's tales of penniless poets eking out a tortured existence were found to encourage homosexuality:
Inmate No. 1385412, in Huntsville, Texas (below), ordered a copy of the book, but on its arrival, the prison mailroom intercepted it and sent it, at the inmate's expense, to a relative of the inmate's in Austin. The prison determined that the material could "encourage homosexual or deviant criminal sexual behavior" and was "detrimental to the offender's rehabilitation." (For what it's worth, the sexual and violent acts described in the offending passage are in fact between a man and a woman.)
It feels appropriate that I'm reading Solzhenitsyn now.
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Though the specific offending passages in Obama’s book weren’t identified, I read somewhere that the chapters in question included his discussion of his opposition to capital punishment. And, of course, we can’t have sensitive and impressionable prison inmates reading that sort of thing.