Denial is a cartoon river
A friend recently forwarded an article to me. It talks about banning of Tintin in Congo and also of some bookstores moving it to the adult section.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070717/ap_en_ot/books_tintin_in_the_congo
The basis of this move on the part of Borders and other bookstores is a bit like relatives and relations. Like quirky Uncle Bob who has made it his life’s mission to embarrass you every time you are around him. You can pretend you don’t know him but that won’t work long. You can deny his existence and never see him again but that doesn’t change the fact that he is your uncle.
These books were written at a time when the world was a lot smaller. Strange and limited as their views were, those were at the time, the views of the West. Time and technology have helped bridge the chasms between cultures, but even today we don’t know everything about everyone. Someone once said that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. That’s the way it was written at that time. And open-minded and sensitive though we claim to be today, some people seem to be mighty insular about such issues.
Any arguments to not exposing children to this are even more confusing to me. Herge wrote about India as well, stereotyping us just as classically as the Africans in the Congo. I read these books when I was 8 or 9. I remember giggling over the portrayal of Indians. I don’t remember finding it insulting because I had been a learning history in school all that time. Even without Tintin I would have known exactly what many people thought Indians were like and how wrong they were. I also knew that this was a work of fiction, and a comic book. It was supposed to be funny. And damn it, it was funny. I love every book in the Tintin series even today and not until I came to America did this aspect of possible racism in them ever occur to me. My friend was as surprised as I was. She had never surmised any negative connotations from the books either.
Are we more uptight about such things these days? In an attempt to rectify the wrongs of the past, are we leaning in too random a direction? Or is it the knowledge that some of these attitudes continue even today forcing these crazy motions? A prejudiced parent would make a much stronger impression on a child than a random comic. And isn’t something like this a good time to teach children about how far we’ve come as part of the human race? What was and now is? How is denying it going to make it go away?
No one knows children’s book writer Enid Blyton here. This British author has taken me into her beautiful fantasyland way before Harry Potter was even an idea. Of course it was possible that she was prejudiced, it sure does seem like a lot of the villains in her books are black people or dolls or something of that nature. But in all honesty that never occurred to me when I was reading the books as a kid. It never occurred to me until I tried to get to the bottom of why I couldn’t find her books here and I surfed the Internet for them. She never attributed the mayhem caused by a bad character to his being black, he was just a bad guy who was black. And she has had white guys who were bad and gypsies who were bad, basically all the stereotypes of her time. Though I never reasoned out a work of fiction so much, this would be a logical conclusion if I tried. More than anything, I hate that all my favourite fairy tales and children’s books are being re-written so much that I no longer recognise them.
Maybe in some distant future, our age will be known as the Age of Over-Reason.
[...] And what really got me was the relentless bloodbath. Chapter after chapter, character after character, ceaselessly and endlessly killed off, if not hurt and maimed. I know it’s war, but it always was. It seems terribly concentrated to the end though. And some of the deaths seem pointless. In something I read somewhere, J.K had said she loved to write about Fred and George Weasley. No wonder there were recent reports that said she bawled when she wrote the final chapters of the book. But this is a children’s series, Yes, adults love it too, but that is what it essentially is. So much death. Was it really necessary? This is essentially what this book is all about. Death. Until the very end. Yes, I understand the story has grit and war in reality in not a package done up in pretty pink ribbon. But parents shield their kids from far less. Somehow, this book seems to have blurred some boundaries. If it’s okay here, why not in other books? Children can deal with death better than they can deal with history? (see ‘Denial is a cartoon river‘) [...]
Harry Potter and the Blood Bath « Summer Lightning said this on July 22, 2007 at 9:46 am