Welcome to the Moth. I'm Clavis Natera. I'm a moth storyteller. I'm a teacher, and most importantly for this episode, I'm a writer.

This week is Banned 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.

Mohamed bin Kulayv told us at a Houston story slam where the theme of the night was,

appropriately enough, books. Here's Muhammad, 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-word country

where censorship impact your buying purchases.

In Saudi Arabia, where I grew up, the government

censor books where there are certain books you're 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 banned.

So I don't know if you all remember message boards and internet forum, 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 tell 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 banned 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 band books and other cassettes. If you travel to

...