Robert Azzi is a photographer and writer who lives in Exeter. His columns are archived at theotherazzi.wordpress.com.

The first book I ever received as a gift was “Trixie Belden and The Red Trailer Mystery.” Arthur, my best friend, gave it to me for my birthday. I was probably eight or nine at the time and the idea of personally owning a book was new to me. It was a story about an amateur detective and tomboy who eschewed schoolwork and makeup in favor of adventure and solving mysteries. I devoured it and, over the years, even into adulthood, collected and read the 38 other books in the series.

My daughter now owns the 39 volumes I collected!

I’ve been reading — and collecting — ever since. I read everything. No one ever told me to look only for age-appropriate, gender-appropriate, color-appropriate books.

I never told my daughter what to read (although I did strongly suggest Tayeb Salih, Naguib Mahfouz, and Edward Said).

I never considered that we would someday be living in a dystopian world. A world more closely approximating Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451” than approximating an America celebrating Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass.”

I never considered living in an America where books are figuratively burned in public squares. A world where so-called Moms of Liberty sit, Madame Defarge-like, and knit as a well-honed guillotine drops and severs democracy from its enlightenment roots.

Knit with needles sharpened on stones of grievance and resentment as public libraries and schools are attacked, books banned and removed, communities of color and minorities marginalized and sidelined.

While book bans, like book burnings, lynchings, gerrymandering, parental rights laws, and other instruments of discrimination and exclusion are not new, they are happening much more frequently. Driven by ignorance and prejudice, they are crude instruments of hate intended to perpetuate a cultural divide between Americans, to divide America along lines of race, sexual orientation, gender, ethnicity, and faith.

This week, it was revealed, a poem written by Amanda Gorman for President Joe Biden’s inauguration, The Hill We Climb, was restricted by an elementary school in Miami-Dade County, Florida.

Gorman, the youngest poet to read at an inauguration ceremony since Robert Frost read to John F. Kennedy in 1961, was just 22 years old in 2021 when she asked the nation: “Where can we find light / In this never-ending shade?”

The question persists: “Where can we find light / In this never-ending shade?”

The truth, we answer, is that there is less light today than there was at Biden’s inauguration, itself only two weeks after the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

In response to the restriction of her poem, Gorman, in part, responded, “And let’s be clear: most of the forbidden works are by authors who have struggled for generations to get on the bookshelves. The majority of these censored works are by queer and non-white voices.”

I once suggested to my daughter that when her oldest child reaches eight or nine she read Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories to her, tales of a storyteller who “knew what he knew: that the real world was full of magic, so magical worlds could easily be real.”

Stories by Salman Rushdie who triumphantly returned to America last week and spoke at PEN America’s annual gala, his first public appearance since he was stabbed and gravely wounded, losing an eye, while speaking last year at the Chautauqua Institution.

Read stories to inform the intellect, inflame passions, stir the imagination, challenge orthodoxy.

Truth is I cannot imagine a world where I couldn’t read to my daughter Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are” and “In the Night Kitchen” because he was gay.

I cannot imagine a world where I couldn’t read to my daughter Margaret Wise Brown’s “Goodnight Moon” and “The Runaway Bunny” because she was bisexual.

A world where I couldn’t read to my daughter lesbian Louise Fitzhugh’s “Harriet the Spy,” a story about a girl who wore boy’s clothes and who had more bravado than Senator Josh Hawley exhibited during the insurrection of January 6, 2021.

A world where I couldn’t read to her Langston Hughes’ “The First Book of Rhythms” because he was Black and gay.

Where I can’t imagine a world without Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Virginia Woolf, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Gertrude Stein, Jackson Bird, Angela Davis; a world without queer friends, colleagues, and inspirations.

A world where I can’t share my appreciation of a book, “Sultan in Oman,” and its meaning in my career as a photojournalist because its author, Jan Morris, was transgender.

Recently, in Jackson, Mississippi, a transgender girl was forced to miss her high school graduation because school officials, arguing that a graduation ceremony is voluntary and not a constitutionally protected right, told her to dress like a boy, told her she couldn’t wear the dress she had chosen.

“Our client is being shamed and humiliated for explicitly discriminatory reasons,” said Linda Morris, staff attorney at the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project, “and her family is being denied a once-in-a-lifetime milestone in their daughter’s life. No one should be forced to miss their graduation because of their gender.”

How free are we when we’ve come to a point where the government is telling people how to cut their hair, what to wear, and which pronouns are meaningful to them.

“People who try to control people and change people’s habits are the ones that make all the trouble,” Louise Fitzhugh wrote in “Harriet the Spy.” “If you don’t like somebody, walk away ... But don’t try and make them like you.”

I don’t care if they like me. I just want them to leave me, and you, alone.

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