Oh, for shame!

Today I went to Joseph-Beth, picked up my last gift for the season (really, that's it guys, no more!) and spent a couple of gift certificates I received. [I got The Wide Window by Lemony Snicket and the second Artemis Fowl book. Okay, so I was in a kid's book mood]. Thus, I was able to knock a couple of books off my Amazon.com wish list. If you go to that link, though, you'll find a couple of new ones, due to the events below.

That said, I found a book in the kid's section that sent my teeth grinding. I can't find a copy online by way of illustration, but it was basically a white-washed version of Little Black Sambo. For those of you unfamiliar with the story, a young Indian boy who is very proud of his clothes runs into a group of tigers who one by one take the clothing from him. The boy is very clever, though, and tricks the tigers into fighting amongst themselves, recovering his clothes. The book was written in 1899 by a British woman living in India. The setting is India. The characters are Indian (as in, those from the subcontinent in Asia, as opposed to the American kind). For English children, the setting and its characters were very exotic. Unfortunately, the use of the term "black" coupled with illustrations in the American version made it seem more racist in content. Today the book is largely banned as being terribly politically incorrect.

My main trouble with the book I found was that it lifted the story entirely and attempted to make it more obvious that the characters were Indian by calling them things like Sambajiti, Mamajiti and Papajiti or some sort of thing--in otherwords, give them some sort of made-up presumably Hindu-sounding names, couple them with illustrations of light, Northern Indians, and everything would be okay. Why they couldn't just update the problematic illustrations, I don't know. But even so, the main problem with the books weren't the text, or even the illustrations, but in how they were perceived by Americans who were pretty ignorant. As the author knew, there are plenty of blue-black people in India--the skintone variances are enormous--there are many languages, many variations in religion, etc. One re-write of the story places it all as happening within a happy phantasy American South with Southern language and helpful animals.

Tsk. Tsk. I loved "Little Black Sambo" as a kid. I ran around trees imagining tigers melting into butter. I had a 45-record and storybook that I read over and over. And never once did I look down at Sambo or his parents. I thought he was vain, but many children are. I certainly didn't think all black children were vain or were chased by tigers, for that matter. I can't tell you for certain whether I realised that he was Indian and not living in a jungle in Africa (when I was really little I didn't know much about the geographic habitats of tigers), but I certainly didn't confuse him with African-American children I played with. Nor did I meld him together with some sort of "Amos and Andy" caricature as seems to be the case of those adults who made so much of it. It's a children's story, and a good one, but a product of its time. I'm glad to see that you can still read it in the original form--although, apparently, only if you have the money to buy it. I haven't seen it in a library in over at least a decade.

But I know just mentioning how disappointed I was with the re-write to the clerk set me up for some sort of "you're just not seeing things from the right point of view" lecture. You know the type. Like the people who once came up to a gay Jewish friend and decided he must be a neo-Nazi because he shaved his head. Or the bead shop clerk who gave me a lengthy lecture about the evils of buying coral when I needed some not because of a whim, but for religious purposes, wasn't asking her to go out and pull some off a reef, and would have been quite happy to have bought one antique bead. Seeing as the clerk was a "white" as I am, I doubt he had any real insight to how oppressing the story is, either. I'd be interested in hearing from others on their point of view. But it seems to me that if we just remove it from libraries and sweep it under the rug, no one ever talks about it, the history of its racism (rather real or perceived in this case), etc. And while I'm sure I could special order the book (for after all, he did say they sell the original), I've certainly never seen it on the shelves there. As far as I'm concerned, it doesn't matter if books are condemned by the right or the left, it's still wrong. It's one thing not to buy a book. It's another to discard it and re-write it all over to reflect supposedly enlightened sensibilities. I would like to see the book in other editions to see if it would likely produce the same confusion in other countries.

Do we rewrite Rudyard Kipling because of his outdated Victorian values? Forrester? Wharton? Twain? Where does it stop? Doesn't it make more sense to discuss the context rather than dismiss it?

Okay, I've ranted enough for one night. :)