The Bluest Eye from Ten Views of Florida

The 'view" of Florida inspired by the title of Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye references bathymetric maps of oceanic levels, the iris and pupil of an eye, and the sink holes that are proliferating in Florida. (Alise Cross's blog post, Tell Me About Sinkholes in Florida, explains the natural phenomena that cause sinkholes, as well as how climate change and human development are exacerbating the problem.) For most of the prints in Ten Views of Florida I tried to make imagery that responded to both the prompt of a banned book title and to some other verifiable reality of Floridian life that is under attack by the MAGA movement and its lackeys, in this case climate change. 

The print is a six-color reduction linoleum cut that I printed in increasingly darker shades of blue. In addition to the darkness, which is achieved by adding more pigment to each layer of ink, I also progressively skewed the pigmentation of the blue from green(ish) to redd(ish) to create more separation between the darker circles and those that came before them. This was done by starting with phthalo blue for the first two layers, adding milori blue to the third and fourth, and ultramarine blue to the final two layers.

Reduction block cutting entails printing an image from a block, then cutting away some of the printable surface, and printing this "reduced" block on top of the previous print. If you make a mistake on any layer of the print you have to start over, since there is no way to replace what has been cut away. In The Bluest Eye, this 'do or die' approach was mitigated by the fact that if I had mis-cut a layer I could easily have used a new block to print the successive layers. Luckily, this wasn't necessary.

In the image above you can see me starting to cut the sixth and final layer of the block. The rough outlines of the previous layers are visible in the cut-away areas of the block. The final print is shown at top; the five earlier states of the print are shown below, in reverse order so the last image shows the first layer of printing.

 

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If the supposed motivation for removing books from school libraries is sexual content, The Bluest Eye never stood a chance. Right on page 3 we learn that poor Pecola Breedlove is carrying her father's child. From there, the book proliferates with sexual 'red flags,' including a remarkable scene (beginning on page 129 in my edition) that is right up there with Molly Bloom's soliloquy. The scene is complex, conflicted, sexy, and brimming with yearning that goes far beyond the carnal. It is powerful and visceral and, like so much of the book, it captures the subtle nuances of human desire in startling detail.

The Bluest Eye is, by any metric, an adult book. It is an innovative literary work that maneuvers through such a breadth of emotional complexity that I find it hard to believe that any of the people calling for it to banned have actually read it. And if they have read it, I doubt they understood it. There's no way I would have understood The Bluest Eye if I had tried to read it in high school. I probably would have gotten the gist, but the subtleties would have been lost on me. The schools that I attended valued rote memorization (in service to our lord and master, the SATs) over comprehension and, as someone whose head was constantly in the clouds, I skipped merrily over both. I had to find my own way to reading. It was only after I had traveled a long, slow arc through life and books that I was ready for Toni Morrison. 

This doesn't mean that The Bluest Eye shouldn't be available in schools. I have only one memory of my brother expressing intellectual curiosity as a child. It was after he read The Bluest Eye in high school. The book had a profound effect on him. Suddenly the abstract (to us) concepts of racism, poverty, and many other isms besides, became relatable to him through the avatars of Pecola, Freida, Claudia, and their families. He excitedly described the premise of the book to me, and for days afterward he was visibly alive with the afterglow of his new insight into the world. There's no way of knowing if the book made him a better person, but it certainly planted the seeds of empathy, compassion, and change. 

It is precisely this response—one of the loftier goals of literature—that potential book banners find most threatening about The Bluest Eye. They can claim that they're protecting children from sex all they want, but it is the book's unflinching portrayal of the effects of racism and poverty that these people don't want their children to read. Because, according to them, racism and discrimination do not exist. (It's not as if there are people dedicated to silencing alternative viewpoints, to aggressively eliminating any mention of minority communities and historical perspectives.)

But arguments like these are pointless. The whole gambit of book banning is a ruse. No one is honestly worried about a contemporary student going to the library, selecting, reading, and comprehending The Bluest Eye. The chances of that happening are remote, especially if issues of critical race theory are not part of a school's curriculum. The goal of banning The Bluest Eye is not to protect children from sexually explicit material or from an awareness of how their behaviors might effect others. The goal of book banning is to normalize censorship, to marginalize dissent, and to keep the playing field as uneven as possible.

"Fade" print from "Ten Views of Florida"

The nine prints in Ten Views of Florida are inspired by the titles of books that are banned in Florida public schools. In an effort to situate myself in an imagined future where the book banners have succeeded and the lists of banned titles are all that remain, I specifically chose to work with books that I had not read. Now that I have finished printing, and the sheets are on their way to the bookbinder, I am reading the nine books on whose titles my prints are based, and posting my thoughts on them along with process descriptions of the prints. 

The first print is inspired by the title, Fade, the second book in Lisa McMann's Wake trilogy. From the outset I wanted the print to be a two-color transition, a fade from one color to another. It was a simple place to start and a nice opener for a book meant to increase in gravity. The narrative arc of the prints travels from sunrise to nighttime, so the color fade is well-suited to the print's "sunrise" position in the narrative. 

Initially, I was inspired by some of the more garish color combinations in hyper-saturated postcards, like salmon pinks sandwiched between cyan skies and cerulean seas. The Florida History and Florida Tourism Ephemera Collections at the University of Florida's Smathers Library are full of such images and, as a color printing fetishist, I find them irresistible. 

Once I began proofing my own print, though, nothing worked as I planned. I wanted to achieve a subtle gradation from cerulean to salmon. I first experimented with linear gradients, none of which captured the feeling I was trying to convey. I then switched to rainbow rolls and the situation only got worse. 

On a Vandercook press, a rainbow roll works by placing multiple ink colors on the oscillating roller in the press's roller assembly. As the roller oscillates it mixes the ink colors where they meet, creating a gradient or ombré effect. 

That's the idea, anyway. In practice, maintaining a rainbow roll is a highly precise balance between colors. It is also a race against time, trying to pull as many prints as possible before the colors mix too thoroughly and ruin the gradient effect. This time element was pushed to the extreme in my cerulean/salmon combination. After one or two prints, the pink and blue inks mixed into a slurry muck, more fetid swamp than cheery coastline. With a controlled rainbow roll I expect to have to clean the press and re-ink after every 15–18 prints. Having to clean after every two prints was not going to work. In my frustration I laid proofs of all the prints side by side and noticed that there was a lot of blue, but no yellow, in the book. The resulting orange to yellow gradient is more delightful and satisfying than any of the other prints I tried—another reminder (I need a lot of them) that what is in my head needs to be adjusted once it comes into contact with the outside world.

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The driving force behind Florida book bans is Moms for Liberty, an organization whose Orwellian name makes me shudder every time I hear it. Their Wikipedia description: "Moms for Liberty is an American political organization that advocates against school curricula that mention LGBTQ rights, race and ethnicity, critical race theory, and discrimination.^[6] Multiple chapters have also campaigned to ban books that address gender and sexuality from school libraries.^[2][7][8] Founded in January 2021, the group began by campaigning against COVID-19 responses in schools such as mask and vaccine mandates.... Moms for Liberty was co-founded in Florida on January 1, 2021, by former school board members Tina Descovich and Tiffany Justice, and by then-current school board member Bridget Ziegler, the wife of Florida Republican Party Chairman Christian Ziegler.^[20][21][22] In spring 2021, Christian Ziegler was removed from his position in the party because of a sexual assault allegation.^{[23]" [italics mine]}

^{I include the last bit about the sexual assault allegation because schadenfreude is particularly satisfying when aimed at the self-righteous. Of course the husband of one of the "Moms for Liberty" was accused of sexual assault. No one thinks about sex more than the censor.} 

^{Sexual assault is also relevant to the content of Lisa McMann's Fade. The book charts the fluctuations in the relationship between Janie and Cabel, two eighteen-year-old high school seniors who work as narcs for the local police. Their primary means of crime fighting is a supernatural power of Janie's—dream catching—in which she is pulled into the dreams of anyone sleeping nearby. As the story unfolds, McMann delicately traces the conflicting feelings of teenagers colliding against the challenges and responsibilities of adulthood.}

^{Janie and Cabel are a couple but, for eighteen year olds, they have a surprisingly non-sexual relationship. They are in love, they fool around a bit, they even stay at each other's houses, but sex is off the table for most of the book. When they do finally consummate their relationship (as consenting adults BTW), Janie presents Cabel with a condom and their ensuing safe sex is barely described.} 

^{The main sexual content of the book is a party put on by three of the male teachers in the school. The host is the chemistry teacher who makes homemade roofies that he and his friends use to dose the booze and the food. They then proceed to rape, or attempt to rape, multiple students. Where other writers might seize on this scenario for its shock value, McMann shows restraint. The situation is described, the assaults are not. The story is not about torrid sex, it's about surviving. In the lead up to the party, Janie, who is attending as bait in a sting operation, does extensive research on the types and effects of date rape drugs. She arrives at the party prepared for the worst case scenario. All the same, she succumbs to the drugs. Who thought they'd drug the meatballs? Ultimately she is saved by her self-defense skills and her cohorts in the police.} 

^{Fade is not a book about hyper-sexualized teenagers. The teenagers in the story are the survivors of prurient adults. Maybe the Moms for Liberty don't want children to be prepared to fend off sexual predators.}

Announcing a forthcoming book, Ten Views of Florida

Ten Views of Florida is a book I am producing as the 2024/25 Coffey Resident for Book Arts at the University of Florida. The residency "provides an opportunity for a selected artist to access materials from the Special and Area Studies Collections (SASC) at University of Florida George A. Smathers Libraries as the impetus for the creation of an editioned artists’ book." My intention in applying for the residency was to produce a book that provided a counter-narrative to the misinformation issuing forth from Florida's governor, Ron DeSantis, and his Department of Education. While doing research on the SASC website, I learned about a series of articles that Harriet Beecher Stowe had written, encouraging Northerners to relocate to Florida in the aftermath of the Civil War. The juxtaposition of Stowe's writings with the Florida DoE's absurd contentions about slavery felt like a good starting point for my project. 

    When I arrived in Gainesville last September, I set about looking through the SASC's broad holdings of tourist brochures and pamphlets, from the reconstruction era into the third quarter of the twentieth century. I had a vague idea of counter-posing Stowe's writings with current statistics about race relations in Florida, all in the guise of tourist graphics. As often happens, my idea began to change as soon as I started my research. Stowe's articles are too far removed from the current political moment, and the statistics about inequality are too obvious to register an impact. I put them both to the side and, instead, let myself get lost in the content, graphics, and structures of the tourist literature. I took hundreds of pictures, made some sketches, and put together a few half-formed ideas, none of which went very far. I put what I had seen in the back of my mind and got busy with other things. A few months later, I was looking up statistics about book banning, more for curiosity than anything else, and Ten Views of Florida quickly came together.

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According to pen America, there were 10,046 instances of school book banning in the 2023–24 school year. Nearly half of these, 4,561, took place in Florida. In the prior year, there were a mere 3,362 such bans in the entire country. The dramatic increase in 2023 was due in large part to state legislation. Books that had previously been removed from libraries as the result of local lobbying are now mandated to never make it onto the shelves in the first place. The majority of these books are banned for treating subjects that conflict with the supposed values of “normal” Americans; people who, if we are to believe the Florida legislature, are immune to doubt, grief, curiosity, and any of the pressures or pleasures of adolescent exploration.

 Perhaps the most harmful quality of these bans is their proposition that there is a state-sanctioned definition of normalcy, and that any child who falls outside its bounds is labeled as flawed. As if the social pressures of childhood weren’t enough, the State now sees fit, under the guise of “protection,” to pile on, expose, and shame these children for being different. Such a child is bound to internalize this shame, a harm compounded by the fact that any book that might give them some feeling of identification has been removed from their school library in order to “protect” them.

 The implicit messaging of “protection” in book bans suggests that if a child does not fit within the State’s limited definition of normalcy, there must be someone to blame. A child is not born that way, they are indoctrinated by nefarious, outside actors. By children’s book authors hell-bent on “making” kids gay, by young adult writers who describe real-life sexual and psychological scenarios, or by adult novelists who present a vision of America in which the actions of the ruling cadre are not always hunky-dory for others. It’s these others that are the problem, not you, and certainly not your child.

 This world view was made clear in a stunning example of double-
speak that the Florida Department of Education issued with this past year’s list of banned books: “There are no books banned in Florida and sexually explicit materials do not belong in schools. Once again, far left activist groups are pushing the book ban hoax on Floridians. The better question is why do these groups continue to fight to expose children to sexually explicit materials.” So, no books are banned, but certain books do not belong in schools, and this state-issued list of banned books is evidence that activists are pushing the “book ban hoax on Floridians.”

 The last sentence of the DoE’s statement tunnels most deeply into the historical mindset of book banners: “Why do these groups continue to fight to expose children to sexually explicit material?” If the righteous is substituted for children and heretical for sexually explicit, this statement taps into a tradition of othering and demonizing that goes back at least to the early Middle Ages, one that officially continued in the Catholic Church until 1966, the last year their index of banned books was published. Then as now, book banners portray themselves as the embattled victims of corrupting forces.

 Book banning relies on a world view in which human experience is flattened to such an extreme as to exist only in the imagination of the self-styled righteous. It presents a litmus test that no honest human can pass. To push these kinds of tests on children, who are already prone to extremes, can only have a negative effect in the longer term. But I suppose the Florida legislature prefers a society in which it is okay to shoot someone who makes you uncomfortable, over one in which adolescents read about masturbation.

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Most articles about book banning include lists of the prohibited titles. These lists remind me of similar catalogues of classical literature—lost plays, treatises, and histories sorted into columns like the ranks of war dead on monuments. Occasionally one of these titles is followed by an asterisk, signifying the existence of a fragment, some clue to the work’s plot or argument that is all the more frustrating for its lack of illumination. Is this the fate of today’s banned books? Like them, the lost classics were removed from our communal library, either by accident or intention; and although it is currently possible to acquire banned books, the pressures put on their production by a winnowed audience might conceivably hasten their disappearance. Book banning is a crucial step in a broader movement of erasure, a whitewashing of the past that is treated as a dubious precedent for discriminatory policies.

 There is a long history of such practices in Florida. From the late nineteenth century onward, Floridian businesses and municipalities issued innumerable brochures about the good life to be had in the Sunshine State. These pamphlets uniformly advertise prosperity, fun, and/or safety, employing vignettes and Grand Tour-style “views” to back up their claims. From halftones of celery fields to hyper-saturated sunsets, from docile Seminole tourist villages to shiny-toothed families playing beach ball, one thing is certain: Florida is open for business, so long as you are the right kind of person. In the aggregate, these views present a highly-edited picture of a homogenized reality, a similar fantasy land of “Coke and honey” that book banners must see when they look in the mirror.

 As I thought about these two forms of cultural editing, the banned book and the scenic view merged in my mind as parallel prompts for contemplation. What kind of view of Florida will these lists of books offer someone in the distant future if the texts themselves are lost? Will they reveal the preoccupations of those who banned them: their obsessions with sex and sexuality, their fear of difference, their lack of worldly experience? Or, deprived of their context, will the books’ titles read as enigmatic clues to unsolvable mysteries? After thinking about this for a while, I realized that I am not far removed from that imagined future reader. I have not read most of the books banned in Florida, even some of the more famous ones. I hadn’t even heard of many of them before the Florida Department of Education brought them to my attention. As for the ones I have heard of, such as The Bluest Eye, their banning has reminded me of the fragility of life. It’s about time I read them.

 But before stacking my bedside table with new books, I wanted to engage in a thought experiment. Having not read these books, how would I interpret the information their titles contain? Some of them are so evocative—Fade, Smoke, Beyond Magenta, Rainbow High—so charged with visual resonance that, disembodied from the books they name, they might easily describe images, rather than provide clues to plot or character. I selected nine books whose titles I found particularly inspiring, and began drawing. What I see when I read these titles is not a library shelf but a catalogue of views. They bloom in my mind as images, patterns, and colors, composed with no thought to the textual content of the books that inspired them. This indulgence in visual fantasy is its own kind of erasure, one that can be corrected by reading the books on whose titles my images are based. There is no guarantee that future readers will have the same opportunity.