"Jerry Darn Nation," a story I wrote a few years ago in grad school, was featured in the Chicago Reader's Pure Fiction Issue this year.
http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/jerry-darn-nation/Content?oid=2936718
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
The N-word: Huck Finn and “African-American Jim” float down the river?
To bowdlerize or not to bowdlerize, that is the question.
The word “bowdlerize” means to take out any material considered improper or offensive. It comes from Thomas Bowdler, who in the 19th Century went through Shakespeare and took out the naughty bits so he could read it to his family.
Or, as my wife puts it, he was the one who “neutered” The Bard.
This brings me to the most inflammatory word in our language, which a new edition of a classic American novel is seeking to bowdlerize.
It’s a slur so heavily laden with historical hatred and humiliation that it sinks to the very bottom of our American souls.
Nigger.
Test your response of seeing it printed here. Shocked? Surprised that it’s printed in your local newspaper?
You should be. Because it’s not just a word. It reflects an attitude that stinks like a bog in the back swamps of our nation’s racist history. Buried within the word is the brutal African-American narrative: slave ships, human beings bought and sold, back-breaking plantation work, whippings, lynchings and “white-only” water fountains.
While many of these are exclusive to the South, the word’s usage – and the power dynamic it invokes – are not.
Face it, white readers: many of the men and women we revere for founding our nation with other words like “freedom” and “liberty” were monstrous hypocrites.
White folks live the happy version of America. So, whitey, here’s a proposal: next time you’re driving around in your giant SUV chattering mindlessly on your cell phones, hurrying home to eat a Happy Meal in front of your favorite TV show, stop for a second to think about the millions of black folks whose version of America hasn’t been so easy.
Think about what it’s like to be completely powerless. Think about what it’s like to live in constant fear of violence. Think about how it feels to be, to use the great black novelist Ralph Ellison’s term, an “invisible man” in American society.
All these things are wound inside that hideous noun. The N-word is violent and humiliating. Its intention is to make a human being seem less human. The “peculiar institution” of slavery demanded such an attitude. How can you whip and subjugate people you think were “created equal?”
This brings me to “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” Mark Twain’s masterpiece uses the N-word 219 times. According to the copy I recently checked out from the Manistee Public Library (just to be sure they had it), the first time it’s used is in the first paragraph of the second chapter.
According to Ernest Hemingway, American Literature started with this novel. Before it, writers were working with more European concepts. For those of you who didn’t have it on a required reading list at some point in your educational career, the book -- published in 1884 but set sometime in the 1830s or 1840s -- follows the young (white) rapscallion Huck Finn and a runaway slave, Jim. They float down the Mississippi River on a raft, trying to escape the civilization that attempts to tame Huck and enslaves Jim.
A new version set for a Feb. 15 publication by New South Books will rid the book of the N-word. The edition’s editor, Alan Gribben, a Twain scholar and professor of English at Auburn University, hopes that by changing the high-octane noun to “slave,” more schools that have dropped the book from its curriculum will reconsider. His intentions to bring a great book to a wider audience are noble. But this begs the question: why change the book? Why not change the audience?
The only way to illuminate someone is to have them read the text in its original form. Twain wasn’t using the term with the unconscious ignorance of a racist. It’s used in a novel that attempts to illuminate the racial situation in America before and after the bloody Civil War.
Editing, excising and censoring out the unsavory parts of life in any form of communication doesn’t make these things go away. We haven’t always lived down on Sesame Street. Our literature should be honest about this.
Twain was trying to accurately render a world with nothing but language at his disposal, which is the aim of the literary arts. For instance, he uses dialect in dialogue. Here’s Jim speaking: “Dey ain’ no raf no mo’, she done broke loose en gone – en here we is!”
If we were watching a movie about drug dealers, how realistic would it be if they were sitting at a table drinking tea and one of them said, “Please, Mr. Smith, when you get a chance could you pass me the cocaine?”
“Why, yes, Mr. Jones. It is the most delightful cocaine I’ve ever had. Splendid!”
Does this ring true?
Of course not.
But it’s up to us. Do we want a culture that soothingly tells us the politically correct – but historically and emotionally incorrect – version, or a culture that explores the brutal truths of life on this earth?
We live in a great, awful, wonderful, criminal and majestic nation. It was forged on hard work, betrayals, imagination, lies and feats of strength. The good with the bad.
To lose the N-word in Huck Finn is just a sprinkle of the sweet stuff in a sugarcoated retelling of our past that skips over the uncomfortable parts. It is an insult to every black person who lived under slavery and makes our nation’s monstrous white ancestors seem more palatable.
It’s the beginning of forgetting a struggle that should never be forgotten.
The word “bowdlerize” means to take out any material considered improper or offensive. It comes from Thomas Bowdler, who in the 19th Century went through Shakespeare and took out the naughty bits so he could read it to his family.
Or, as my wife puts it, he was the one who “neutered” The Bard.
This brings me to the most inflammatory word in our language, which a new edition of a classic American novel is seeking to bowdlerize.
It’s a slur so heavily laden with historical hatred and humiliation that it sinks to the very bottom of our American souls.
Nigger.
Test your response of seeing it printed here. Shocked? Surprised that it’s printed in your local newspaper?
You should be. Because it’s not just a word. It reflects an attitude that stinks like a bog in the back swamps of our nation’s racist history. Buried within the word is the brutal African-American narrative: slave ships, human beings bought and sold, back-breaking plantation work, whippings, lynchings and “white-only” water fountains.
While many of these are exclusive to the South, the word’s usage – and the power dynamic it invokes – are not.
Face it, white readers: many of the men and women we revere for founding our nation with other words like “freedom” and “liberty” were monstrous hypocrites.
White folks live the happy version of America. So, whitey, here’s a proposal: next time you’re driving around in your giant SUV chattering mindlessly on your cell phones, hurrying home to eat a Happy Meal in front of your favorite TV show, stop for a second to think about the millions of black folks whose version of America hasn’t been so easy.
Think about what it’s like to be completely powerless. Think about what it’s like to live in constant fear of violence. Think about how it feels to be, to use the great black novelist Ralph Ellison’s term, an “invisible man” in American society.
All these things are wound inside that hideous noun. The N-word is violent and humiliating. Its intention is to make a human being seem less human. The “peculiar institution” of slavery demanded such an attitude. How can you whip and subjugate people you think were “created equal?”
This brings me to “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” Mark Twain’s masterpiece uses the N-word 219 times. According to the copy I recently checked out from the Manistee Public Library (just to be sure they had it), the first time it’s used is in the first paragraph of the second chapter.
According to Ernest Hemingway, American Literature started with this novel. Before it, writers were working with more European concepts. For those of you who didn’t have it on a required reading list at some point in your educational career, the book -- published in 1884 but set sometime in the 1830s or 1840s -- follows the young (white) rapscallion Huck Finn and a runaway slave, Jim. They float down the Mississippi River on a raft, trying to escape the civilization that attempts to tame Huck and enslaves Jim.
A new version set for a Feb. 15 publication by New South Books will rid the book of the N-word. The edition’s editor, Alan Gribben, a Twain scholar and professor of English at Auburn University, hopes that by changing the high-octane noun to “slave,” more schools that have dropped the book from its curriculum will reconsider. His intentions to bring a great book to a wider audience are noble. But this begs the question: why change the book? Why not change the audience?
The only way to illuminate someone is to have them read the text in its original form. Twain wasn’t using the term with the unconscious ignorance of a racist. It’s used in a novel that attempts to illuminate the racial situation in America before and after the bloody Civil War.
Editing, excising and censoring out the unsavory parts of life in any form of communication doesn’t make these things go away. We haven’t always lived down on Sesame Street. Our literature should be honest about this.
Twain was trying to accurately render a world with nothing but language at his disposal, which is the aim of the literary arts. For instance, he uses dialect in dialogue. Here’s Jim speaking: “Dey ain’ no raf no mo’, she done broke loose en gone – en here we is!”
If we were watching a movie about drug dealers, how realistic would it be if they were sitting at a table drinking tea and one of them said, “Please, Mr. Smith, when you get a chance could you pass me the cocaine?”
“Why, yes, Mr. Jones. It is the most delightful cocaine I’ve ever had. Splendid!”
Does this ring true?
Of course not.
But it’s up to us. Do we want a culture that soothingly tells us the politically correct – but historically and emotionally incorrect – version, or a culture that explores the brutal truths of life on this earth?
We live in a great, awful, wonderful, criminal and majestic nation. It was forged on hard work, betrayals, imagination, lies and feats of strength. The good with the bad.
To lose the N-word in Huck Finn is just a sprinkle of the sweet stuff in a sugarcoated retelling of our past that skips over the uncomfortable parts. It is an insult to every black person who lived under slavery and makes our nation’s monstrous white ancestors seem more palatable.
It’s the beginning of forgetting a struggle that should never be forgotten.
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