Lit’s Top Ten Single Moms

By Robin Bates | Published: February 9, 2022
Reginald Birch, illus. from Little Lord Fauntleroy

Thursday

The Guardian newspaper recently had an article on “the top single mothers in fiction,” which is my kind of article. Sadly, only the top three are from classic fiction (which partly explains why they’re the only ones I recognized), so I set myself the challenge to see if I could come up with another seven. Here’s my list. Please send in your favorites.

I love the Guardian’s top three, with the choice of Euripides’s Medea particularly inspired. Here’s what author Beth Morrey has to say about her:

Medea

“It might seem odd to start with a drama about a barbarian witch who kills her own children when her husband leaves her for a princess. But shoutout to Euripides for featuring a female protagonist who dominates the action, a chorus of Corinthian women, and a scot-free exit. Medea murders her sons in cold blood to annoy her ex, Jason. But Jason is maddening – a shameless social climber who rubs salt in the wound by suggesting Medea stay on as a mere mistress. Medea has the last laugh, escaping with the bodies of their sons in Helios’ chariot, hinting the Gods are on her side. This is a woman scorned taking back control and getting away with it. The Athenian audience didn’t react favorably to the notion, awarding the play third place (out of three) at the Dionysia festival of 431 BCE. I’m sure Euripides would be heartened to know Medea’s No 1 in my top 10.” [Beth Morrey]

Mrs. Dashwood

I heartily approve of Morrey’s selection of Elinor and Marianne’s mother in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. Mrs. Dashwood all but reverts to her teen years after her husband dies, relegating head of the family duties to eldest daughter Elinor. As a result, she doesn’t exercise motherly caution when Marianne falls in love with Willoughby, which almost ends in disaster. A great moment is when, late in the book, she realizes that heartbroken Elinor needs her to be a mother.

Marmee

Morrey includes Margaret (Marmee) March in her list because her husband is absent, elevating her to head of the household. Morrey describes Little Woman’s matriarch as “the archetypal single mother saint” and describes her as “infuriatingly perfect.” She adds, however, that

Alcott hints at dark depths when Marmee confesses she was once as hot-headed as her daughter Jo, but learned to control her temper. I would love to have seen a tiny flare of it, the glimmer of original sin.

Hester Prynne

I don’t know how Morrey could have left the protagonist of The Scarlet Letter off her list, but so she has. The mother of Pearl eventually arises to sainthood herself but at one point thinks that she can just throw away her scarlet letter and live free of the taint. (Pearl lets her know otherwise.)

Helen Graham

Another character who must be included on every such list is the inhabitant of Anne Bronte’s Wildfell Hall, who flees there with her son to save him from his abusive and alcoholic father. She is accused by villagers who don’t know her story of overprotecting her son, but she knows what’s at stake and risks social shunning to keep him safe. Tenant of Wildfell Hall ranks right up there with Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.

The Countess of Roussillon

This is the mother-in-law every woman should dream of. The mother of the irresponsible Bertram in Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, the countess takes Helena’s side when Bertram proves a brute. I saw Judi Densch play her in a Stratford-upon-Avon production and will never forget the scene where she lets Bertram have it for abusing his wife. Dench did no more that make a tiny dismissal gesture with her right hand, but I was thrown back in my seat by the move. That’s the moment when I realized Dench’s greatness.

Clara Copperfield and then adoptive mother Betsey Trotwood

Widowed Clara may be angelic—one of Dickens’s child women—but she’s an incompetent mother, with her worst action being marrying the abusive Murdstone when David is seven. After being sent away to an awful school and then an awful job, David is fortunate (after running away) to be taken in by Betsey Trotwood, recently named by my English professor son as Dickens’s greatest creation. Toby Wilson-Bates quotes David Copperfield’s opening lines before declaring Trotwood the winner of his contest:

“Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.” The pages show you lost, son. From donkeys to dandies, Betsey takes and vanquishes all comers.

Taylor Greer

Barbara Kingsolver exploded on the literary scene with her sassy, foul-mouthed protagonist in The Bean Trees. Greer is given and unofficially adopts an Indian baby, after which Kingsolver had to write a sequel (Pigs in Heaven) to clean up some of the mess she had gotten into with her story. (A white woman can’t just take and raise an Indian baby, even if it is given to her, without the author addressing the various ethical and cultural issues that arise—which Kingsolver then does in Pigs in Heaven.)

Lulu Nanapush Lamartine

One of Louise Erdrich’s great creations, Lulu is rescued from a reservation school by village elder Nanapush (in Tracks), who raises her as his own and tells her stories about her extraordinary mother Fleur. Lulu goes on to have her own colorful life, birthing nine children (eight of them sons) to five different fathers—and while members of the tribe try to shame her, she always walks with her head high. As she explains at one point in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Love Medicine,   

When they tell you that I was heartless, a shameless man-chaser, don’t ever forget this: I loved what I saw. And yes, it is true that I’ve done all the things they say. That’s not what gets them. What aggravates them is I’ve never shed one solitary tear. I’m not sorry. That’s unnatural. As we all know, a woman is supposed to cry. 

Mrs. Cedric Errol

This last character few will recognize outside myself, but the mother of Little Lord Fauntleroy was an important part of my childhood. In Frances Hodgson Burnett’s 1886 novel, Fauntleroy’s father, the son of an earl, has married this American woman, been disinherited as a result, and then died, leaving her alone with her angelic son. When the death of the earl’s older sons leaves Fauntleroy as the next heir, mother and child return to England, but the harsh and unforgiving earl refuses to see her, even though he is won over by Fauntleroy. In the end, of course, he learns to appreciate the woman his son risked everything to marry.

My girl side was in love with Fauntleroy when I was young, especially his long locks, his velvet suits and his lace collars. I was later to learn that there was a Fauntleroy craze for a while, with mothers dressing their sons up in this fashion. While many boys hated it, my father loved his mother outfitting him this way. (This would have been forty years after the book appeared but Granny, born the year the book appeared, was very Victorian.) Rereading Burnett’s novel now is like eating one of those sugary treats we loved as children but find inedible as adults. For an example, here’s a passage highlighting one of the consolations of single motherhood:

So when he knew his papa would come back no more, and saw how very sad his mamma was, there gradually came into his kind little heart the thought that he must do what he could to make her happy. He was not much more than a baby, but that thought was in his mind whenever he climbed upon her knee and kissed her and put his curly head on her neck, and when he brought his toys and picture-books to show her, and when he curled up quietly by her side as she used to lie on the sofa. He was not old enough to know of anything else to do, so he did what he could, and was more of a comfort to her than he could have understood….

As he grew older, he had a great many quaint little ways which amused and interested people greatly. He was so much of a companion for his mother that she scarcely cared for any other. They used to walk together and talk together and play together. When he was quite a little fellow, he learned to read; and after that he used to lie on the hearth-rug, in the evening, and read aloud—sometimes stories, and sometimes big books such as older people read, and sometimes even the newspaper; and often at such times Mary, in the kitchen, would hear Mrs. Errol laughing with delight at the quaint things he said.

So that’s my list. Some of the mothers are angelic, some supremely confident, some murderous killers. Expect a post on single fathers in the near future.

Further thought: A slighting reference to Fauntleroy shows up in the Eugene Field poem “Just afore Christmas”: 

Father calls me William, sister calls me Will,
Mother calls me Willie, but the fellers call me Bill!
Mighty glad I ain’t a girl – ruther be a boy,
Without them sashes, curls, an’ things that’s worn by Fauntleroy!
Love to chawnk green apples an’ go swimmin’ in the lake –
Hate to take the castor-ile they give for belly-ache!
‘Most all the time, the whole year round, there ain’t no flies on me,
But jest ‘fore Christmas I’m as good as I kin be!

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments closed

Is the Left Attacking the Bard? Nope

By Robin Bates | Published: February 8, 2022
William Shakespeare

Wednesday

I’m not usually one to bash a fellow Shakespeare enthusiast but an article by one Casey Chalk  in the American Conservative has me riled up. (Thanks to Rebecca Adams for the alert.) According to Chalk, Shakespeare is currently under assault by the forces of diversity and inclusion. Or as the article’s title contends, “The push by Shakespeare companies to abandon Shakespeare in the name of diversity seems driven by resentment of his greatness and our smallness.”

My instant reaction was, “Huh? Who’s pushing to abandon Shakespeare?” I combed through Chalk’s article and didn’t see much evidence of a Shakespeare decline, much less of “resentment of his greatness” being the reason. Chalk’s major examples are:

—a Washington Post article that, while it reports on Shakespeare theatre companies scrambling in the wake of the pandemic, gives only one example of Shakespeare getting booted for something else—that being D.C.’s Shakespeare Theatre Company staging Once Upon a One More Time, a feminist fairy tale set to the music of Britney Spears;
— an assistant professor of performance studies at State University of New York at New Paltz who says that Shakespeare is edging out black playwrights; and
–a “teacher at Luther Burbank High School in Sacramento [who] told the Post several years ago that she does not like Shakespeare because she ‘cannot always easily navigate’ him. She adds: ‘there is a WORLD of really exciting literature out there that better speaks to the needs of my very ethnically-diverse and wonderfully curious modern-day students.’”

These three meager examples lead Chalk to this overblown conclusion:

Put more bluntly, Shakespeare the dead white male is too distant to relate to non-white, 21st-century students. This same thinking has much to do with the abandonment of Shakespeare on stage.

This is patronizing and demeaning. What about 20th-century urban “ethnic” youth whose first language was Italian or Polish? Are Latino kids incapable of being inspired, challenged, or taught by someone simply because his language and culture are different from theirs? If Shakespeare represents an excellence not only of the English language, but of storytelling and human psychology, wouldn’t we want all people, regardless of race or ethnicity, to know him?

To sum up Chalk’s contention: because one Shakespeare theatre put on one non-Shakespeare play; because an assistant professor of performance studies said that too many Shakespeare productions were depriving Black playwrights their time in the sun; and because a California high school teacher several years ago complained about the difficulty of teaching Shakespeare to high school students, we’re supposed to accuse the left of being patronizing, demeaning, and resentful of greatness.

To be sure, Chalk also quotes (from the Post article) Tai Verley, artistic director of Philadelphia-based Revolution Shakespeare, saying, “This pedestal we have put him [Shakespeare] on should be smacked down to the floor!” Chalk misunderstands the quote, however. Verley is not attacking the Bard but bardolatry–which is to say, the blind worship of Shakespeare.

In my experience, there’s no better way to ruin Shakespeare for students than to tell them to genuflect before his greatness. By contrast, Shakespeare shines for them once you show how deeply and imaginatively he grasps key issues that they care about. The Post article reports on recent productions that creatively find new ways to do this:

New varieties of that elasticity [in presenting Shakespeare] are evident in shows by writers of color who are using the dramatist as inspiration. The 2022 season of Cal Shakes near Oakland, Calif., for instance, consists entirely of Shakespeare adaptations by Latina and Black playwrights: a bilingual Romeo y Juliet by Karen Zacarias and a modern-verse Lear by Marcus Gardley. In Manhattan last summer, the single attraction of the Public Theater’s Shakespeare in the Park was Jocelyn Bioh’s critical and popular hit, Merry Wives, based on The Merry Wives of Windsor and set among the West African immigrant community in Harlem.

These efforts should excite Chalk. After all, he tells us he’s a fan of Japanese director Akiri Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood and Ran, which are renditions of Macbeth and King Lear respectively.

Another way to ruin Shakespeare for audiences is for Brits to inform the rest of the world that they’re superior because Shakespeare was British. This is a problem voiced in the Post article by Nicolette Bethel, an anthropology professor and head of the Bahamas-based Shakespeare in Paradise. Bethel observes that Shakespeare “was the weapon that was used to tell us we were not good enough.” Something similar occurred when the British colonized India, causing Indian nationalists for a while to push back against Shakespeare—not because of his works but because of how the colonialists used him to denigrate works like the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. Once Shakespeare was judged on his own merits, he became as popular in India as he is in the rest of the world.

Chalk misreads the Shakespeare conference described in the Post article as a program to topple Shakespeare rather than as an attempt to put him to the test to see what new perspectives emerge. As it turns out, Shakespeare is strong enough to withstand a great deal of testing, and the Post author notes that everywhere he witnessed “an abiding respect” for the Bard. Indeed, for all of Chalk’s complaining, there is no evidence of a widespread abandonment of Shakespeare on stage, and I guarantee that Shakespeare is universally taught in American colleges and universities—with any declines due more to reductions in humanities and arts requirements than in the actions of politically correct literature professors. I can report that, in my Sewanee English 101: Composition and Literature class, tomorrow I’ll start teaching Twelfth Night and follow that up with Othello. (I’ll conclude the course with Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.)

Chalk, who has written a book entitled The Persecuted: True Stories of Courageous Christians Living Their Faith in Muslim Lands, apparently wants to write a sequel, Persecuted: True Stories of Courageous Shakespeare Lovers Living Their Faith in Multicultural America. He complains about leftwing resentment but appears intent on using the straw man of diversity fanaticism to inflame rightwing resentment.

Which, come to think of it, pretty much sums up the rightwing culture wars these days. First Critical Race Theory, which isn’t actually taught, and now Shakespeare Skepticism, which also isn’t happening.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Comments closed

Mike Pence Kept the Sky Suspended

By Robin Bates | Published: February 7, 2022
John Singer Sargent, Atlas and the Herperides

Tuesday

As I’m currently in an essay-grading frenzy, I’m rerunning a post from last November that, given Mike Pence’s speech last week, is more timely than ever. After a year of waffling, Pence finally came out and stated that “President Trump is wrong. I had no right to overturn the election.” Important though the speech was, however, Pence’s most significant action occurred 13 months ago.

Since I wrote the column, we’ve learned even more about the pressure on Pence not to certify the election. We also now know about the self-appointed Republican electors in states that Biden won and about the requests made by Trump associates to various agencies that they seize voting machines. Fortunately none of the agencies complied with the requests while the fake electors are now being investigated.

Reprinted from November 18, 2021

We’re slowly but surely getting a clearer picture of Donald Trump’s coup attempt, and it appears to have come much closer to succeeding than we realized. In the end, we were saved by the most unlikely person imaginable: Donald Trump’s sycophant-in-chief, Vice President Mike Pence.

Literature is filled with stories of unlikely heroes. The hobbit who saved Middle Earth is the first who comes to mind, but Mike Pence is no Frodo. I think of him more as one of A.E. Housman’s hirelings in his delicious little poem, “Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries.”

Before applying it, here is my simplified understanding of the coup attempt:

–Trump wanted to create enough doubt about the election that Mike Pence would refuse to certify the election but instead send it back to the states, where anything could happen;
–to create doubt, Trump pressured Attorney General Barr and various governors, secretaries of state, and election boards in critical states to claim voter fraud;
–those in the White House who resisted him after the election were fired and replaced by flunkies ready to carry out his will;
–during all this time, Pence was put under intense pressure, not only by Trump but by lawyer John Eastman and others, who redefined his duties by reinterpreting the Constitution;
–to further pressure Pence and Republican members of Congress, Trump inspired a mob to descend upon the Capitol. The mob was financed by, among others, various rightwing billionaires;
–while Trump may or may not have anticipated that the mob would storm the Capitol, once they did so, he refused to call them off for four hours;
–if Pence had refused to certify the election, Trump’s circle anticipated there would be massive protests from Biden supporters. Various fascist and white supremacist groups like the Proud Boys would then get involved, seeking to stir up trouble, at which point Trump could declare martial law and, voila, stay on as president. It was because the Armed Forces feared such a scenario that they stayed away from the Capitol when it was being attacked.

As a result, for only the second time in American history (the first being 1860) we did not have a peaceful transition of power. Democracy was in danger of “falling” as America’s “foundations fled.”

And who stood true to the Constitution? Who, despite immense pressure, performed the duties he was constitutionally required to do? The man who had groveled before the Trump for four and a half years.

In Housman’s poem, the unlikely heroes are mercenaries who, against all odds, insist on fulfilling their contractual obligations:

Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries

These, in the days when heaven was falling,
The hour when earth’s foundations fled,
Followed their mercenary calling
And took their wages and are dead.

Their shoulders held the sky suspended;
They stood, and the earth’s foundations stay;
What God abandoned, these defended,
And saved the sum of things for pay.  

Pence, when he convened Congress and called for the certification vote following mob violence, did indeed hold the sky suspended. And while he did not, like the mercenaries, die in the process, he is politically dead, loathed by both sides. No one, outside of Housman, gives either mercenaries or sycophants credit when they do something noble. Why should either hirelings or Mike Pence be applauded for just doing their job?

But given all the incentives for them to have acted otherwise, we should hold them up and honor them.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Comments closed

Are Liberal, Conservative Bans Equal?

By Robin Bates | Published: February 6, 2022

Monday

Since I’ve been writing a lot recently about rightwing book bans, it’s only fair that I should look at liberals doing something similar. I have in mind a school system in Washington State booting Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird from the required curriculum. The comparisons are revealing but so are the contrasts.

Crosscut reporter Venice Buhain has the story:

The Mukilteo School District recently approved removing the text as a required assignment for ninth graders. Under the change, the district retains the book as an option for teachers who still want to assign it. Three teachers at Kamiak High School made the request in the fall to remove Lee’s iconic novel from the required ninth grade curriculum, said Monica Chandler, the district’s director of curriculum and professional development, told Crosscut in an interview before the school board approved the proposal. The book will not be not banned, however, and teachers may still choose to assign the book in their classrooms.

The attacks on Lee’s classic are not unlike rightwing attacks on their favorite targets. Critics highlight certain aspects of a work as potentially damaging to young people and those stand in for the whole work. Here’s what the Mukilteo critics had to say:

The teachers’ objections to the book included criticism that Black characters are not fully realized and that the book romanticizes the idea of a “white savior.” 

The teachers also cited concerns that characters in the book frequently use the N-word while no character explains that the slur is derogatory, and that the word and the portrayal of Black characters cause harm to students of color.

In other words, these teachers are worried about literature that makes students “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin.” I’m quoting from the new Florida guidelines that are being promoted by Donald Trump wannabe Gov. Ron DeSantis. A friend wrote last week that

that kind of statement is straight from the playbook of the left, with their trigger warnings and wokeness.  You can’t decry the old canon for all those reasons and then cry “no fair” when they shoot the same (silly) language back at you. 

I agree and think that the Mukilteo teachers went about their criticism the wrong way. Rather than seeking out ways that the book has certain white blindnesses—which it does, as I’ve pointed out myself—they should just have said that there are better books out there. Curriculums have to pick and choose which books they teach and a novel like, say, Toni Morrison’s Bluest Eye is far superior. Flannery O’Connor delivered the most devastating critique of Mockingbird when it appeared, observing, “It’s interesting that all the folks that are buying it don’t know they’re reading a child’s book.” In other words, she regards it as a fairy tale. 

 It’s not a bad fairy tale, with wondrous characters like Scout and Jem and a gripping plot. That it has engaged so many readers over the decades (Oprah Winfrey is a huge fan) should not be dismissed. But as a fairy tale, it sugarcoats the depth of southern racism and, for that matter, classism (note its handling of poor whites). Harper Lee is no Toni Morrison or, for that matter, Flannery O’Connor.

But if teachers want to take advantage of how Mockingbird engages readers, they can supplement it with its sequel, Go Set a Watchman. Mockingbird is set in the Great Depression, and by the time the Civil Rights Movement rolls around, the white upper class can no longer maintain its fairy tale illusions. Calpurnia, no longer content with the good mammy role, has quit the Finch household. Atticus, meanwhile, is freaked out that African Americans are no longer treating him with the deference they once did and has joined the White Citizens’ Council. (In Mockingbird, he has contempt for the KKK, which attracts poor whites; the WCC is an upper class version of the Klan.) Scout, as a white liberal born to privilege but awakened to Black anger, must renegotiate her relationship to the south and to her (no longer) saintly father. It’s a perfect drama for teens as they step out of their family cocoons and start to think for themselves.

In a New York Times column, Vietnamese-American author Nguyen complained that parents underestimate their kids’ resilience when it comes to the books they read (read my post on the essay here). Liberal parents can be just as guilty of this as conservative parents. It’s as though both sides regard children as delicate flowers that must be raised in a hothouse environment or they will be irrevocably damaged. The fact, however,  is that we’re constantly reading material that is insensitive in one way or another. The answer is not to forbid it but to address the controversy.

And that’s where right and left differ. The left is not pulling books off of school library shelves or encouraging parents to snitch on teachers or passing laws banning certain content. It is not forbidding teachers from teaching Maus (as a Tennessee school district 90 minutes to east of me did) or throwing Harry Potter and Twilight into bonfires (as a Tennessee church 90 minutes to the north did). In the Mukilteo School District, teachers still have the option of teaching Mockingbird.

Which is to say that the school system appears to regard them as professionals who are in the best position to figure out what their students need. Leftwing wokeness and liberal cancelation pale in comparison to the authoritarian right’s book attacks.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments closed

Leave Your Nets, Bring Your Hearts

By Robin Bates | Published: February 5, 2022
Raphael, Miraculous Catch of Fish (1515)

Spiritual Sunday

Today I share a poem by my favorite poet when I was growing up. As a romantic teen, I was enthralled by three Alfred Noyes poems in particular: “The Highwayman”(which I had memorized), “Song of Sherwood,” and “The Barrel-Organ.” (Less romantically, I also got a kick out of “When Daddy Fell into the Pond.”)

Noyes’s “Fisher of Men” alludes to today’s Gospel reading (Luke 5:1-11):

Once while Jesus was standing beside the lake of Gennesaret, and the crowd was pressing in on him to hear the word of God, he saw two boats there at the shore of the lake; the fishermen had gone out of them and were washing their nets. He got into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon, and asked him to put out a little way from the shore. Then he sat down and taught the crowds from the boat. When he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, “Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch.” Simon answered, “Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing. Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets.” When they had done this, they caught so many fish that their nets were beginning to break. So they signaled their partners in the other boat to come and help them. And they came and filled both boats, so that they began to sink. But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” For he and all who were with him were amazed at the catch of fish that they had taken; and so also were James and John, sons of Zebedee, who were partners with Simon. Then Jesus said to Simon, “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people.” When they had brought their boats to shore, they left everything and followed him.

“The blind welter of war” in “Fishers of Men” refers to World War I, which must have been underway when the poem was written. According to his Wikipedia biography, Noyes was a pacifist who opposed the Boer War and also wrote a long anti-war poem in 1913, hoping to stave off the meaningless slaughter that was to come. (Poetry can do only so much.) He supported the allies in the two world wars, however, believing that, “when threatened by an aggressive and unreasoning enemy, a nation could not but fight.” His “fight for right and not for might” can be read in that context.

Fishers of Men

    Long, long ago He said,
    He who could wake the dead,
        And walk upon the sea–
        “Come, follow Me.

    “Leave your brown nets and bring
    Only your hearts to sing,
        Only your souls to pray,
        Rise, come away.

    “Shake out your spirit-sails,
    And brave those wilder gales,
        And I will make you then
        Fishers of men.”

    Was this, then, what He meant?
    Was this His high intent,
        After two thousand years
        Of blood and tears?

    God help us, if we fight
    For right, and not for might.
        God help us if we seek
        To shield the weak.

    Then, though His heaven be far
    From this blind welter of war,
        He’ll bless us, on the sea
        From Calvary.

Added Note – To give you a sense of what Noyes means by “blood and tears”—he foresaw only too clearly the horrors of World War I—here’s an excerpt from his 1913 anti-war poem The Wine Press:

Slaughter! Slaughter! Slaughter!
The cold machines whirred on.
And strange things crawled amongst the wheat
With entrails dragging round their feet,
And over the foul red shambles
A fearful sunlight shone….

The maxims cracked like cattle-whips
Above the struggling hordes.
They rolled and plunged and writhed like snakes
In the trampled wheat and the blackthorn brakes,
And the lightnings leapt among them
Like clashing crimson swords.

The rifles flogged their wallowing herds,
Flogged them down to die.
Down the the slain the slayers lay,
And the shrapnel thrashed them into clay,
And tossed their limbs like tattered birds
Thro’ a red volcanic sky.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Comments closed

LGBTQ Books under Fire

By Robin Bates | Published: February 3, 2022
Some of the most challenged and banned LGBTQ books

Friday

A recent NBC new story has captured, in a particularly effective way, the effect that Texas’s new book ban is having on young people. Often we talk about these book bans in an abstract way, but reporter Mike Hixenbaugh interviewed a 17-year-old queer student in the city of Katy about the impact on her personally:

From a secluded spot in her high school library, a 17-year-old girl spoke softly into her cellphone, worried that someone might overhear her say the things she’d hidden from her parents for years. They don’t know she’s queer, the student told a reporter, and given their past comments about homosexuality’s being a sin, she’s long feared they would learn her secret if they saw what she reads in the library.

That space, with its endless rows of books about characters from all sorts of backgrounds, has been her “safe haven,” she said — one of the few places where she feels completely free to be herself.

Hixenbaugh reports that some of the student’s favorite books “have been vanishing from the shelves of Katy Independent School District libraries the past few months”: 

Gone: Jack of Hearts (and Other Parts), a book she’d read last year about a gay teenager who isn’t shy about discussing his adventurous sex life. Also banished: The Handsome Girl and Her Beautiful Boy, All Boys Aren’t Blue and Lawnboy — all coming-of-age stories that prominently feature LGBTQ characters and passages about sex. Some titles were removed after parents formally complained, but others were quietly banned by the district without official reviews.

The student told Hixenbaugh, “As I’ve struggled with my own identity as a queer person, it’s been really, really important to me that I have access to these books,” adding, “You should be able to see yourself reflected on the page.”

So what are parents afraid of? Do they think that, by reading such books, their straight children will become queer? Or do they want those of their children who are repressing “a certain tendency” (to use the euphemism used in Oscar Wilde’s trial”) to keep repressing it and fear they might stop doing so once they encounter these works.

Or here’s a third possibility, expressed by Vietnamese-American author Vien Thanh Nguyen, whom I wrote about yesterday. Sometimes such parents

see danger in empathy. This appeared to be the fear that led a Texas school district to cancel the appearance of the graphic novelist Jerry Craft and pull his books temporarily from library shelves last fall. In Mr. Craft’s Newbery Medal-winning book, New Kid, and its sequel, Black middle-schoolers navigate social and academic life at a private school where there are very few students of color. “The books don’t come out and say we want white children to feel like oppressors, but that is absolutely what they will do,” the parent who started the petition to cancel Mr. Craft’s event said. (Mr. Craft’s invitation for a virtual visit was rescheduled and his books were reinstated soon after.)

Examining the parent’s comments, Nguyen concludes that what makes the “sweet, shy, comics-loving” protagonist of New Kid so dangerous to white parents is his “relatability”:

The historian and law professor Annette Gordon-Reed argued on Twitter that parents who object to books such as New Kid “know their kids will do this instinctively. They don’t want to give them the opportunity to do that.”

Nguyen continues,

Those who ban books seem to want to circumscribe empathy, reserving it for a limited circle closer to the kind of people they perceive themselves to be. Against this narrowing of empathy, I believe in the possibility and necessity of expanding empathy — and the essential role that books such as New Kid play in that. If it’s possible to hate and fear those we have never met, then it’s possible to love those we have never met. Both options, hate and love, have political consequences, which is why some seek to expand our access to books and others to limit them.

If this is true, then parents of the queer teen interviewed by NBC may not only fear that their kids will come out after reading LGBTQ fiction and memoirs. It’s that they might start accepting them LGBTQ folk as fellow human beings rather than as abominations. They might leave their parents’ hatreds behind.

Grim as these book bans are, there are a few signs of hope. When I applied Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 to the situation last week (Nguyen also cites the work), I mentioned the old professor’s lament that he did not do more to stand up against the book censors. It so happens that book lovers have started fighting back against rightwing ban efforts. Another NBC story reports the efforts in another Texas community, Round Rock, which is 20 miles outside of Texas. When the local school district debated whether to removed Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You from the curriculum–the book is a youth adaptation of Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, which won the 2016 national book award for nonfiction–thousands of parents, teachers and community members signed a petition calling on the district’s board of trustees to keep the book on school shelves:

One way the parents association did this was organizing groups such as ACT (Anti-racists Coming Together)to speak out in support of diverse literature at a local school board meeting. 

“Taking away that book would have completely whitewashed history, and that’s not what we are for,” Ashley Walker, 33, one of more than 400 members of the Round Rock Black Parents Association, said. 

The district’s trustees eventually decided to keep the book, so chalk one up for progressive counter-pressure. The forces of reaction and intolerance don’t always win out.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | Comments closed

Let Kids Read Politically Incorrect Books

By Robin Bates | Published: February 2, 2022
Emile Munier, child Reading to Cat

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.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Comments closed

Our Parents’ Invisible Sacrifices

By Robin Bates | Published: February 1, 2022
Russell Lee, Man on general store porch near Jeanerette, Louisiana (1938)

Wednesday

As Tennessee experiences frigid temperatures (frigid for Tennessee, that is—the twenties are mild for other parts of the country), I’ve been tending to our wood stove and thinking of Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays.” Yesterday I welcomed in “Black History Month” with a series of history poems, but this intimate poem is my favorite lyric by an African American author. While appearing to be a simple account of a father getting up early to tend to a fire, the poem explores a wide range of emotions. The final two lines throw me back in my chair every time I read them:

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

One senses it has not been easy to grow up in this household given its “chronic angers.” Perhaps the cold in the house is emotional as well literal, with the boy feeling he must tiptoe around his father to avoid setting off an explosion. The boy certainly has learned to hide his own feelings (he speaks “indifferently”).  There aren’t too many hugs or thank yous here. In fact, none.

And yet this man, beaten down by his work, braves the cold to keep his family warm. Not only that but, in a wonderful small touch, he polishes his son’s church shoes. Looking back, the son is amazed by what his father did for him. When he repeats, “What did I know,” it’s to emphasize how much he overlooked the love that was there. His use of the word “offices” gives these small actions a ceremonial, almost religious feel: love has its rituals that are no less powerful for being austere.

The poem is a testimony to all who serve quietly without drawing attention to themselves. Hayden’s recollection reminds me of Wordsworth mentioning, in Tintern Abbey, those “little, nameless, unremembered, acts of kindness and of love” that “have no slight or trivial influence on that best portion of a good man’s life.” Hayden’s view is a bit more mixed because these acts are also intertwined with chronic angers. Still, the poem is a wonderful testimony to what parents will do for their children. It is also a thank you, one that comes years later and perhaps even after the parent has died.

Now that he is older, Hayden has learned about love. Thanks to his poem, I think of my tending the fire in the morning as my own act of love for my mother and my wife.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Comments closed

Black Poetry–Next on the Right’s List?

By Robin Bates | Published: January 31, 2022
Jacob Lawrence, The Library

Tuesday

February as Black History Month has a different feel this year as GOP legislatures around the country hurry to pass laws designed to censor teachers who teach any aspects of American history that make white students (in the words on a Texas legislator) “feel discomfort.” Washington Post’s Greg Sargent, for instance reports on a New Hampshire bill that

would ban the advocacy of any “doctrine” or “theory” promoting a “negative” account of U.S. history, including the notion that the United States was “founded on racism.”

Additionally, the bill describes itself as designed to ensure teachers’ “loyalty,” while prohibiting advocacy of “subversive doctrines.”

Indiana legislators, as they propose their own bills, are also backing them up with “extreme penalties.” Pen America reports,

In addition to HB 1040, two others threaten teachers with termination. Six include a private right of action. And three would punish schools by cutting them off from all state tuition dollars and levying a fine of up to $10,000 per student subject to the violation.

It’s particularly rich that these bills come from a party that refused to impeach Donald Trump for inciting a takeover of the Capitol, that has attempted to undercut investigations of that takeover, and that now simply ignores (when it doesn’t actually applaud) his open admission that he was trying to overturn the election. Perhaps seeing subversive doctrines amongst fellow Republicans has caused them to see subversion everywhere.

I find myself wondering, given all this, how English teachers will be viewed as they teach those many African American poems that deal with America’s uncomfortable racial history. It’s not hard to imagine certain Virginia parents taking advantage of Gov. Younkin’s recent snitch law to report those teaching the following poems in their classes. The first addresses lynching in general, the next two specific racial killings:

Song for a Dark Girl
By Langston Hughes

Way Down South in Dixie
(Break the heart of me)
They hung my black young lover
To a cross roads tree

Way Down South in Dixie
(Bruised body high in air)
I asked the white Lord Jesus
What was the use of prayer.

Way Down South in Dixie
(Break the heart of me)
Love is a naked shadow
On a gnarled and naked tree.

Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till
By Gwendolyn Brooks

(after the murder,
    after the burial)

Emmett’s mother is a pretty-faced thing;
    the tint of pulled taffy.
She sits in a red room,
    drinking black coffee.
She kisses her killed boy.
    And she is sorry.
Chaos in windy grays
    through a red prairie.

Ballad of Birmingham
By Dudley Randall
 (On the bombing of a church in Birmingham, Alabama, 1963)

“Mother dear, may I go downtown
Instead of out to play,
And march the streets of Birmingham
In a Freedom March today?”

“No, baby, no, you may not go,
For the dogs are fierce and wild,
And clubs and hoses, guns and jails
Aren’t good for a little child.”

“But, mother, I won’t be alone.
Other children will go with me,
And march the streets of Birmingham
To make our country free.”

“No, baby, no, you may not go,
For I fear those guns will fire.
But you may go to church instead
And sing in the children’s choir.”

She has combed and brushed her night-dark hair,
And bathed rose petal sweet,
And drawn white gloves on her small brown hands,
And white shoes on her feet.

The mother smiled to know her child
Was in the sacred place,
But that smile was the last smile
To come upon her face.

For when she heard the explosion,
Her eyes grew wet and wild.
She raced through the streets of Birmingham
Calling for her child.

She clawed through bits of glass and brick,
Then lifted out a shoe.
“O, here’s the shoe my baby wore,
But, baby, where are you?”

I conclude with a poem that directly addresses the issue of black history itself:

i am accused of tending to the past as if i made it
By Lucille Clifton

i am accused of tending to the past as if i made it,
as if i sculpted it
with my own hands. i did not.
this past was waiting for me
when i came,
a monstrous unnamed baby,
and i with my mother’s itch
took it to breast
and named it
History.
she is more human now,
learning language everyday,
remembering faces, names and dates.
when she is strong enough to travel
on her own, beware, she will.

Speaking for myself, I spent much of my childhood being discomfited by all kinds of things. When I learned how to talk about them, they discomfited me less. On the other hand, anything I tried not to see but pushed under assumed a toxic power. The return of the repressed, as Freud called the process.

Repressing our racial history will not help our kids. Or heal our country.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments closed