It’s not Banned Books Week any more. But while it was, it made me think of my own job as a censor. For among my many roles in life has been that of Chief Golliwog Exterminator on some classics lists.
The task involved looking through material and deciding which parts of it were morally fit to be (re)published. Just one golliwog hiding up a tree in an illustration, and the whole cartoon strip was out.
The idea was to avoid reprinting anything unsuitable for modern children and also, of course, to avoid getting the publisher’s arse sued off (for example, there was a stir around the republication of Tintin in the Congo). One provocative but literally true way of looking at things would be to say I was eliminating all the black characters, because there certainly weren’t any in there apart from the gollies.
The distinctions between Tintin and the material I was looking at runs along two lines: age and culture. Tintin is recognised as being a canonical cultural artefact, while the stuff I was sorting through would have been classed as general nostalgia. As for the age issue, Tintin has a large adult readership and the Congo book was published with a belly band (a strip of paper around the book, warning that it’s not suitable for children) and booksellers were advised to shelve it in the adult section.
Those wanting Tintin in the Congo out of print altogether seem wrongheaded to me. For people like me who are white and comfortably off in a white majority society, it’s easy enough these days to understand that racism is bad, but it also seems rather remote; something done by bad/stupid people that I can comfortably look down on. Reading a relatively recent text that comes from my own culture and contains racist assumptions brings home how easy the casual acceptance of an unjust status quo actually is. As an adult I’m not going to suck those assumptions unquestioningly off the page and interiorise them, but learn from them.
So it does seem reasonable to me that it’s OK to republish Tintin in the Congo in an adult edition but not OK to republish material that contains casual racism and package it as being for children.
As usual there is a continuum of censorship, with calls to suppress a ‘pornographic’ book about a rape survivor (the Speak debacle) at the extreme end, and concerns about not inculcating racism in children at the end of the spectrum where most people mentally hang out.
It does boil down to accepting a degree of censorship though – the process just happens at the ‘decision to (re)publish’ stage, rather than out in society. Which seems fine, as long as right-thinking people are in charge of said decision
That’s the liberal dilemma: I think I am a right-thinking person…
I am also bothered by the sort of politically correct censorship which only allows some topics to be treated in certain ways. e.g. the notion that all children with disabilities are suited to a mainstream education and are going to be defended by their siblings at all times or that all refugee children will settle happily as long as you are 'nice' to them or that you can learn to get along with your mother's new partner, especially if the new partner is female. Real life is not like that and making out that it is may do more harm than good. I suppose even thinking like that makes me "politically incorrect"!
ReplyDeleteYes, I think children are relieved when they find the sort of crap that happens to them in real life happening in books. They want fantasy as well, but world-building not world-blanding.
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