"I am going to shrink my tirade to three personal experiences, one as a teacher, one as a publisher and one as a writer ... "
Ann Jungman is a Londoner and still lives there. After misguidedly studying Law and Reading for the Bar, Ann drifted into primary teaching and that led into writing children’s books. With a hundred and thirty books under her belt, Ann is semi-retired and enjoying a leisurely life while battling arthritis. Ann’s most popular series was about Vlad, a diminutive, vegetarian vampire with a serious identity problem. After the books were surprisingly mentioned by Penelope Lively at the Booker Prize ceremony, Ann is hoping against hope that Collins will reprint them. Currently, she is working on a book about a Jewish girl surviving in Berlin, during the War, Singing in Dark Times - a new venture, a serious novel for teenagers.
What does 'political correctness' seek to achieve? It holds up standards that promote decency, kindness, toleration, acceptance of difference, anti-racism, anti-sexism, religious freedom, equality, fairness, and hopes of a better future. Who could object to any of that? And yet 'political correctness' is widely met with many doubts and some distrust and much irritation.
Mulling on all of this and starting to do some reading, I realised that 'political correctness' is a huge subject, at times blending into discussions about censorship, freedom of speech and politics. As such it is much too grand a topic for me to write anything coherent in a short piece, or, to be honest, in a long piece - it is just too big and too controversial. So, I am going to shrink my tirade to three personal experiences, one as a teacher, one as a publisher and one as a writer, that touch on all the subjects mentioned above.
Firstly, as a very young teacher in a rough school, I read my class the stories of Uncle Remus, a collection of tales told to slaves in the American South. The book was full of stories told by Uncle Remus, an aged slave. Based on a real model, the old man told stories to the enslaved people that were Americanised versions of West African folk tales. In Africa, the trickster was Brer Anancy, a spider; transposed to the US he becomes a rabbit.
A child came in with the book and asked me to share it with the class. This was in the early sixties, when 'political correctness' wasn’t even a glint in someone’s eyes. The children loved the stories and I enjoyed putting on all the varied voices of Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox and all the others, I even managed a very respectable black Southern accent. I didn’t even have a flicker of doubt that these stories were not condescending or offensive – they were great stories, the language was rich, the small, weak but clever rabbit always outsmarted his larger opponents, and they were wonderfully funny.
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The Classic Tales of Brer Rabbit, collected by Joel Chandler Harris, published by Running Press Kids, illustrated by Don Daily
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In the decades since, Brer Rabbit has come in for huge amount of criticism and the stories have become extremely controversial, particularly since the era of Civil Rights and Black Power. Some black writers, like Richard Wright and Toni Morrison, found them a great source of information about attitudes in the pre-Bellum South and anthropologists discovered that the speech patterns, all spoken in argot, were amazingly accurate. The main problem was that Joel Chandler Harris, who retold the stories, was a white, Southern male. Harris had worked on a plantation, as a clerk, and spent much of his time in the slave quarters, fascinated by the culture the slaves had evolved, to keep a sense of themselves and to hang on to the culture of West Africa. The language the stories are told in was developed to make it hard for their oppressors to understand. However, over time that way of speaking became associated with Black and White Minstrel Shows and unflattering stereotyping that modern opinion thinks of as demeaning, implying negroes were less intelligent than others.
At various times there have been many attempts to ban the books but they are still available, though probably less popular than they were. Beatrix Potter claimed to have based Peter Rabbit on Brer Rabbit and Enid Blyton wrote a whole series about him. For a hundred and sixty years, the stories were popular all over the world. Will they survive in the era of 'political correctness'? Who knows?
At the same time as I was reading the books with my class, the film Song of the South, in which Walt Disney animated the stories, was showing at the Odeon, Camden Town. One Saturday afternoon, I took some fifteen of my class to see it. While I had no doubts about the stories, I was appalled by the film.
It's set on the Old White Plantation, where the young master, the future owner, is very ill. Uncle Remus tells the boy stories, while the slaves stand under the boy's window singing and crying, at the thought that the lad might die. It was truly terrible, a children’s Gone with the Wind, that helped set back Civil Rights for a bit. The depiction of all those happy and musical slaves, more than content with their lives, was outrageous. When the film opened in 1946, black audiences protested outside the cinemas and stayed away. Though a huge box office success it is rarely shown now, as it is generally accepted that it is racist and patronising. The sequences that were animated, were of course, beautifully done but even there, the story of the Tar Baby was seen as unacceptable. I believe it is now banned.
In retrospect, I do not feel guilty about reading the stories, which made a bond between me and the class. The film is different, and had I known I would not have taken the class, I feel bad about it. This thought brought Marshall McLuan to mind, “the medium is the message”, in which he claims that there are hot and cool types of media. Books are “cool”, often read alone and quietly, giving rise to thoughts rather than actions, whereas film, TV, plays etc are “hot”, potentially rousing people to imitate or copy the “hot message”. If this is correct, I wonder why it is that books, particularly children’s books, are the subject of constant intervention and change on the grounds of political correctness, when the audience is the same for both. When one thinks of what is so readily available online and on TV that children have access to now, the over policing of “cool” books seems even more absurd.
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| The Blood-and-Thunder Adventure on Hurricane Peak by Margaret Mahy, published by Barn Owl Books, illustrated by Wendy Smith |
Now to my publishing gripe. When running Barn Owl Books, I was lucky enough to acquire a book by Margaret Mahy,
The Blood-and-Thunder Adventure on Hurricane Peak, a wonderfully anarchic story of the “Unexpected School” where the children could only go out in stone boots because of the regular hurricanes that occur and where only imaginative subjects are taught. The headmaster has no time for science but is in love with a lady inventor. Eventually, after numerous totally wacky events amid a cast of bizarre characters, the headmaster and the lady inventor marry and run a more balanced curriculum. Marvellous language, brilliant Dickensian characters and musings on themes of education and the environment - what was there not to like?
Alas, a book club wrote to complain bitterly, because the pantomime villain, one Sir Quincy Judd Sprokett, who described himself as “a very wicked industrialist”, and wants to flatten Hurricane Peak for its minerals, is in a wheelchair. Not any old wheelchair, but one that would have made James Bond envious. Sir Quincy is a real pantomime villain; all the devices on the chair enable this wicked man to act out his wicked deeds, except that the pupils at the “Unexpected School”, always mange to outwit him. The book club thought that having a disabled villain would undermine children with disabilities, so rejected the book. I asked several disabled children about Sir Quincy and they said they loved the notion of a wicked man in a fantastic wheelchair.
One wonders who made that decision, so mean-minded and literal and showing such a lack of imagination. Who in that Book Club felt that they knew better than Margaret Mahy, writer of brilliant books, picture books, young readers and wonderful novels for YA - winner of every possible prize, including the Andersen? That is why I get angry with 'political correctness'. It can be a constraint on imagination and fun, both for authors and publishers, and so often it's a small, somewhat precious group that inflicts their limited world view on more creative folk.
My third example is from a book I wrote:
Vlad the Drac, my hugely popular series about a diminutive vampire with strong but rather old-fashioned views. In the book Vlad lives with a family in Kentish Town, where the mother is a doctor and the father a violinist. Vlad pretends to be progressive and thinks it's just splendid that women can now be doctors, unlike in his youth in Transylvania. However, when he gets ill, he yells “Don’t you bring a lady doctor anywhere near me!” I was told to leave it out, as it might be thought that the book was dismissing women in medicine. What it was intended to show was that Vlad is a hypocrite and has lots of prejudices that the family (and the reader) regard as absurd.
Here ends the lesson. I do still feel that anyone who sets themselves up as a “sensitivity expert” is very questionable. They have a vested interest to find a fault - if all is well, they are out of a job. It seems to me that you cannot write about peace if you don’t mention war, about racism without showing racist speech or prejudice, or sexism without some sexist content. Some people may get offended by a specific text but books are there to explain and provoke and show the world as it is and that means giving authors permission to have characters who don't fulfil the constraining requirements of a very narrow and literal interpretation of political correctness. At times it does seem to come dangerously close to a slippery slope. If authors and publishers feel that they cannot represent certain views, or use particular words, it will have a really deadly effect on literature, particularly as groups feel the need to protect children’s books more than others; children are seen as vulnerable and there needs to be a healthy balance between spontaneity and responsibility.
Children are often far more discerning than the guardians give them credit for.
While thinking about attempts to control what can be mentioned in books and even what words can be used, I was put in mind of the Oscar Wilde story,
The Happy Prince. The much loved Prince is protected by his parents from knowing about anything ugly or troubling. When he dies, a statue is built in the centre of the town, covered in the finest gold. But the Prince, high up on his plinth, sees nothing but suffering and is so shocked that he encourages the birds to take the gold from his statue and give it to the poor and needy. The story ends with the statue being grey and ugly and being thrown away.
The relevance of the story in the context of political correctness is all too obvious. We must do our bit to prepare our children for the world as it is, in all its wonderful beauty and all its darkness.
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The Happy Prince by Oscar Wilde, published by Thames and Hudson, illustrated by Maisie Paradise Shearring
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