Welcome to The Moth. I'm Cleves Natera.
I'm a Moth storyteller, I'm a teacher, and most importantly for this episode, I'm a writer.
This week is Band Books Week, and to honor that,
we'll be sharing stories about censorship, courage, and the importance of the written word.
I'll talk a bit more about why this week is so critical later in the episode,
but let's start with a story.
Mohammed Ben Koleif told us at a Houston StorySlam where the theme of the night was,
appropriately enough, books.
Here's Mohammed, life at the month.
I wonder how many of you had to meet strangers in parking lot to buy books.
Otherwise,
you probably never lived in a third world country where censorship impact your buying purchases.
In Saudi Arabia, where I grew up,
The government censor books where there are certain books you are allowed to buy and there's books that they're just not allowed any books that explicitly argues with evolution or against the governments or Against religion they will be straight-up bent so I don't know
if you'll remember message boards and internet form.
That's when I would go and know about what books are banned and what like hot.
So I could go and chase down for those books because I'm not buying available books.
I'm buying all the banned ones that the government told me I should not read.
But the problem is there's a lot of books that are not available that we assume they're banned.
So when we want to buy by ban books we would hear of a friend of a friend or a cousin or someone off the online or going to a neighboring country So we would send them a list we would be like this is the books that we're looking for Michael Jackson cassettes the Titanic's and we would meet in a parking lot and we either give the money or we exchange with other ban books and other Cassettes