Thursday
My dear friend the Rev. Sue Schmidt alerted me to a recent New York Times article about uncomfortable books, written by Vietnamese-American novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen. At a time when Republican legislators and school boards are demanding that books that discomfit students be removed from libraries and school curricula, Nguyen points out that some of the most life-changing books are those that challenge us.
In his case, one such book was Larry Heinemann’s Vietnam novel Close Quarters (1974), which he read when he was 12 or 13 and which appalled at him with its depiction of American racism. Nguyen summarizes the plot and notes his reaction at the time:
Mr. Heinemann, a combat veteran of the war in Vietnam, wrote about a nice, average American man who goes to war and becomes a remorseless killer. In the book’s climax, the protagonist and other nice, average American soldiers gang-rape a Vietnamese prostitute they call Claymore Face. As a Vietnamese American teenager, it was horrifying for me to realize that this was how some Americans saw Vietnamese people — and therefore me. I returned the book to the library, hating both it and Mr. Heinemann.
And then:
Here’s what I didn’t do: I didn’t complain to the library or petition the librarians to take the book off the shelves. Nor did my parents. It didn’t cross my mind that we should ban “Close Quarters” or any of the many other books, movies and TV shows in which racist and sexist depictions of Vietnamese and other Asian people appear.
Later, when writing his own novel about the war, Nguyen revisited the novel that had so impacted him and had a very different reaction. The novel, he realized,
wasn’t endorsing what he depicted. He wanted to show that war brutalized soldiers, as well as the civilians caught in their path. The novel was a damning indictment of American warfare and the racist attitudes held by some nice, average Americans that led to slaughter and rape. Mr. Heinemann revealed America’s heart of darkness. He didn’t offer readers the comfort of a way out by editorializing or sentimentalizing or humanizing Vietnamese people, because in the mind of the book’s narrator and his fellow soldiers, the Vietnamese were not human.
Nguyen then makes a point that I make repeatedly in the book that I’ve just finished writing: books are indeed dangerous. Reading them can be like playing with mental dynamite. Or as Nguygen puts it,
Until “Close Quarters,” I believed stories had the power to save me. That novel taught me that stories also had the power to destroy me. I was driven to become a writer because of the complex power of stories. They are not inert tools of pedagogy. They are mind-changing, world-changing.
Just because they are dangerous, however, does not mean they should be banned or controlled. Nguyen takes a very laissez-faire approach here:
But those who seek to ban books are wrong no matter how dangerous books can be. Books are inseparable from ideas, and this is really what is at stake: the struggle over what a child, a reader and a society are allowed to think, to know and to question. A book can open doors and show the possibility of new experiences, even new identities and futures.
And then:
Here’s the thing: If we oppose banning some books, we should oppose banning any book. If our society isn’t strong enough to withstand the weight of difficult or challenging — and even hateful or problematic — ideas, then something must be fixed in our society. Banning books is a shortcut that sends us to the wrong destination.
Nguyen here is not thinking only of the books attacked by rightwing parents and legislators and mentions Huckleberry Finn, which some liberal parents have objected to. He then turns to a series that was very close to my heart when I was growing up, Hergé’s Tintin. My brothers and I loved these books when we were growing up and so did Nguyen and so does his son. Only when they started reading the books together, however, did Nguyen notice
Hergé’s racist and colonialist attitudes…, from the paternalistic depiction of Tintin’s Chinese friend Chang in The Blue Lotus to the Native American warriors wearing headdresses and wielding tomahawks in the 1930s of Tintin in America. Even if I had noticed, I had no one with whom I could talk about these books. My son does. We enjoy the adventures of the boy reporter and his fluffy white dog together, but as we read, I point out the books’ racism against most nonwhite characters, and particularly their atrocious depictions of Black Africans. Would it be better that he not see these images, or is it better that he does?
A word on those depictions of Black Africans. I remember, when I was an eleven-year-old spending a summer in Paris, scouring second-hand bookstores for the one Tintin book we didn’t have. Tintin au Congo is so racist that even in 1962 people had stopped reading it. Belgium, of course, has a terrible history in the Congo and Hergé, while not ignoring bad colonialists, depicts Tintin as a white savior, saving the Congolese, who in the end worship him as a god. While he doesn’t achieve god status in any of the subsequent books, Tintin continues to perform the white savior role.
By pointing out such a fact to his son, Nguyen reports that the two together grapple with complicated issues. Nguyen observes,
By banning books, we also ban difficult dialogues and disagreements, which children are perfectly capable of having and which are crucial to a democracy. I have told him that he was born in the United States because of a complicated history of French colonialism and American warfare that brought his grandparents and parents to this country. Perhaps we will eventually have less war, less racism, less exploitation if our children can learn how to talk about these things.
And then he adds an important point:
For these conversations to be robust, children have to be interested enough to want to pick up the book in the first place. Children’s literature is increasingly diverse and many books now raise these issues, but some of them are hopelessly ruined by good intentions. I don’t find piousness and pedagogy interesting in art, and neither do children. Hergé’s work is deeply flawed, and yet riveting narratively and aesthetically. I have forgotten all the well-intentioned, moralistic children’s literature that I have read, but I haven’t forgotten Hergé.
Our kids are going to read books that are good for them and books that are bad for them but it’s all part of the process of growing up. As parents and teachers, however, we can at least get them to have conversations about what they have read.