August 5 is the anniversary of Toni Morrison’s death.The interstate from Columbus to Lorain, Ohio, carries the troubled weight of the United States’ history. The grey flatlands of America rolled past my bus window. My thoughts were constantly hovering about the state-sanctioned project of engineering “human forgetfulness.” A few months ago in India, I learned about the yearlong statewide commemoration of the late Nobel laureate Toni Morrison’s Beloved, titled Ohio Celebrates Toni Morrison. Touring the length and breadth of Ohio, I spoke with locals and listened to people discussing the importance of Morrison’s books as living history rather than mere literary works. With this, a paradoxical truth was unveiled: local institutions in the district were actively censoring and banning Beloved and The Bluest Eye from library shelves, treating their pages as contraband. This fracture in the US idea of democracy seems to be a desperate campaign to sanitise its long history of enforced slavery and racism. Grassroots movements like ‘Right to Read Ohio’ and ‘Authors Against Book Bans’ are actively challenging it. These are ordinary citizens who understand the power of literature to heal the collective trauma of racism. Witnessing this tug-of-war firsthand, I realised that the personal is never merely political; it goes beyond that. Geography, too, is a comfortable illusion; as an Indian, I witnessed these grassroots common people fighting their own battles to reclaim their past. I did not feel like a detached foreigner but felt a sharp resonance with what was happening in my home country. Toni Morrison’s ‘Beloved’.To better understand the psychological truths in Morrison’s works, I needed to travel south to Cincinnati. On the banks of the Ohio River, one can see the grey, churning water separating Cincinnati from the hills of Kentucky. Going back to the nineteenth century, the Ohio River was a terrifying borderline. To cross it from the slave-owning South into the free North was to leap from death into the fragile promise of human existence. Precisely across this frozen expanse of water, Margaret Garner, the real-life enslaved woman who inspired Morrison’s novel, Beloved, fled in the brutal winter of 1856. To recall the incident from the book, the slave catchers surround Garner in a cabin in Cincinnati. She chose to kill her own two-year-old daughter. The trauma is so severe that she refuses to be dragged back across the Ohio River, where on the other side resides the living death of human bondage. Close to the Ohio riverbank stands the National Underground Railroad Freedom Centre. It can also be called a museum of conscience, as it was constructed to ensure that these deadly crossings are never erased from human memory. While walking through the museum, I stood before the reconstructed wooden slave pen. I felt numb and heavy; as for me, the pen represented the absorbed sufferings of captive enslaved people. The air inside the museum felt loaded, a tangible manifestation of what Morrison termed “rememory.” The “rememory” is a profound personification of a traumatic event that leaves a permanent picture in the world for future generations to see. Morrison has beautifully depicted this haunting reality in her novel; she writes, “If a house is haunted, it is because it contains a memory that cannot be put to rest.” On the ground floor of this museum, there is a souvenir shop where I bought a copy of Beloved as a “rememory” of this visit. A local volunteer in this shop, her voice trembling, said, “They want to censor this book because looking into the mirror it holds up is too painful for them… But the river remembers.” This museum stands upright as an anchor against deliberate amnesia being manufactured, while local school boards just a few miles away are passing administrative diktats to ban Morrison’s book because they fear texts that give trauma a human voice. The anxiety that drives this Morrison book ban in the United States is the same anxiety that drives bureaucratic bodies globally to rewrite school textbooks to erase decades of social movements and mute the voices of the marginalised populace. It seems there is a synchronised global assault on memory. Authoritarian impulses across the globe follow a similar toolkit, replacing complex, painful human histories with manufactured, cosmetic, and simplified myths of machismo and patriotism. Power structures today feel more threatened by resilient human testimonies, which disrupt the state’s sanitised, state-sanctioned rhetorical narratives. Resonances in IndiaToni Morrison’s ‘The Bluest Eye.’This aggressive censorship of Beloved and The Bluest Eye resonates with the recent revisions in the Indian education system. The chapters on the Mughal era, subaltern peasant movements that foregrounded the idea of India, and centuries of gender and caste oppression have been sanitised from school textbooks. The underlying political objective is identical in both geographies: to replace the pluralisms of the historical past with a monolithic, state-approved, majoritarian myth that serves ideological propaganda. This is a gargantuan project designed to produce historical amnesia and legitimise structures of dominance. The above portrayed state-sponsored narrative-building in both countries is exactly what Morrison warned of in her 1993 Nobel Prize speech. She warned about the perils of oppressive, hegemonic deployment of language that perpetuates systemic acts of violence and restricts knowledge rather than enhances the contours of human understanding. Morrison said that dead language “is proud of its lockstep precision, its lack of nuance, and its mechanical rigidity,” existing primarily to “mask the suffering of those it purports to represent.” Efforts to enforce collective amnesia cannot force memory to vanish. Memories have their own internal resilience; they have their underground railroads, creating lively shadow archives, and later spring up as acts of open defiance. During my time in Lorain, the exact place where Morrison was born, local readers told me they read Morrison’s novels voraciously to keep their ancestral experiences alive. In this neo-era of bans, I was witnessing these small yet radical acts of freedom. Morrison’s texts, when bought, shared, and read aloud on a street corner, become a powerful form of physical resistance. Art has always been dangerous to the establishment that thrives on neo-fascist tendencies. It is because Art has the capacity to energise the demand that confronts the human mistakes of the past, rather than accept a manufactured, sanitised, state-approved myth. When I stood in Morrison’s hometown, I was moved by how the ordinary citizens are waging a daily fight to keep her legacy alive. As fellow humans, our moral duty, in the spirit of public inquiry, is to step out of comfortable circles and march onto the ground where these cultural battles are being fought. If we choose to look away when a society is being forced into amnesia, we are also accomplices in this project of erasure of our histories. Our moral task is to ensure that these difficult memories remain in the light for everybody to see. Today, the ideological battles have entered the library shelves and pavements. In the state of Ohio, many people whom I spoke to confessed to me about a paralytic fear of the crackdown by the state and non-state actors when students try to grapple with America’s original sin of slavery. But outside many schools, there are pop-up libraries, independent bookstores, and community read-ins, which are transforming Morrison’s banned books into badges of honour, giving a sense of purpose to people’s lives, and upholding the principle of truth. This reality revealed to me that those who wield power can control curricula, but they cannot control the human conscience. The survival of memory today relies on these everyday spaces, which are unaligned, where citizens refuse to let political dictates mutate or manage their true past. Also read: The Trouble With Saying Goodbye to Toni MorrisonAs I ended my journey through the US, these lines resonated in my mind: When we allow history to be sanitised anywhere, we help weaken the defences of truth everywhere. This attempt to quiet Toni Morrison’s voice is part of the same global current that seeks to flatten the diversity of their own societies. The suppression of an African-American narrative in Ohio and the marginalisation of dissenting voices in India are symptoms of a similar, deep, and long-standing structural malaise. By being witnesses to both, our writings must serve to deter this process of othering and act as a conduit for a transnational solidarity that resists state-sanctioned forgetfulness. The events across Ohio made me realise one truth: memory is a living entity. Any state-led or non state bans, administrative or institutional, cannot easily cover it up. These steps to ban Beloved have, in fact, embedded it more deeply in the community’s psyche, transforming Morrison’s classic novel into a manifesto of memory. History teaches fundamental lessons that resonate universally. It is an empirical fact that power structures always fear art and artists. Our task, as the defenders of democracy, is to remain steadfastly committed to these principles. Through such rigorous, transnational commitment to the truth, we keep our shared heritage alive, proving that the stories we are told to forget are precisely the ones we must deliberately and fiercely remember. Nikhil Sanjay-Rekha Adsule writes on constitutional law. He is a John Dewey Emerging Scholar and a Creighton Peden Scholar in the USA. He tweets @Surajya_Raje_.