burning book
A man from Dorset has removed every book he owned and burned them, in a stand against racism, following the recent Black Lives Matter protests and the tearing down of statues. Gordon Mappling, a 40-year-old Policy Support Officer, who has been on furlough, took the action after seeing the protests on TV:
"When I saw what happened in Minneapolis, and the protests that followed, I knew I needed to do my bit to show a gesture of solidarity. But since there weren't any protests near me, and I couldn't get to London because of the Lockdown, I thought I'd take it upon myself to make a protest in my own living room."
He began by removing a copy of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which is well known for its repeated use of the N word, confessing that he felt a deep sense of shame for having it on his shelf for years:
"As soon as I realised my guilt, I felt white-shamed and so quickly went outside to set it on fire. But when I came back into the house, feeling a sense of satisfaction that I'd done my bit to make the world a better place, what was the first thing I saw? It was a Collins Dictionary on the dining room table. Of course, I knew it contains the same word, so that had to go too. So back out the house I went to commit it to the flames."
Having reduced Huck Finn and the Dictionary to ashes, it dawned on Gordon that if he was to be really free from all prejudice, he would need to go through his entire collection of books and purge everything that had even a whiff of intolerance:
"When I really started to look at some of the books I had collected down the years, I couldn't believe just how many were either full of intolerance or written by those with intolerant views. There were a few Roald Dahl books which — I'm ashamed to admit it — I'd really loved as a kid, but they had to go because of his antisemitism. Then there was the entire Harry Potter series, which of course had to go because of J K Rowling's opinions about trans people."
Before long, Gordon found he had to burn his entire collection of around 500 books, including even those he said didn't necessarily contain any bigotry, as such, but which were built on a bigoted and intolerant system of exploitation:
"It dawned on me that all books are really just the product of exploitation. I mean, when you think about someone like Dickens, who everyone says wrote against exploitation, I say well that's as maybe, but where did he live? He lived in that exploitative society, didn't he? His books were published by capitalist companies who no doubt exploited someone or other — whether those chopping down the trees for the paper, or those producing the ink — to make a profit. I mean, the fact is that if Dickens had been living in Sub-Saharan Africa, he'd never have achieved the fame he got from living in the British Empire. And so he's actually part of the problem. Plus he was of course an anti-Semite too and there are no people of colour in his books. At least I can't think of any. So I burnt them all."
After burning his entire collection of books, and posting it on his Facebook account under the hashtags #NoToPeopleWhoThoughtDifferentlyThanMe and #BurnEverythingThatIsAProductOfExploitation, someone pointed out that everything in Gordon's house was quite possibly the result of exploitation, from the labour that went into building it, to the electricity used to run it. When we went to press, we tried to get in contact with Gordon, but we were told by his ex-wife that after he tried to hire a demolition team to knock the whole house down, she had got a court order against him and he had now gone to live on a pole in a cave somewhere on the Jurassic Coast.