The Other N-word

Of course, that word is Nazi.

It was directly or indirectly evoked last week in editorial cartoons about a new edition of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that replaced the word "nigger" with the word "slave."  There was much debate following announcement of that edition, and almost all of it negative.

Some of my friends may have been surprised when I posted "Goodbye, cruel word" and stated that the new edition didn't bother me much.  They may have been surprised because I teach American literature, and I have taught Huck Finn before.  As a literature professor, aren't I supposed to protect the importance of words and the sanctity of the artist's statement?

Yes and no.  Words are important.  But stories have lives of their own after publication, especially when they become as culturally significant as Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn have.

I understand what the cartoonists were doing.  When you communicate in a medium as highly compressed as an editorial cartoon, you need to communicate as quickly and efficiently as possible.  For instance, a lab coat on a person in a cartoon could communicate either a scientist or a medical doctor.  But if you put a stethoscope around the person's neck, the image immediately communicates "medical doctor."  That stethoscope has become iconic for that profession.  Sometimes these iconic images outlive their real-world predecessors.  Look through The New Yorker cartoons and you will see businessmen in fedoras and carrying briefcases.  Although you may have found those hats on the street in the 1950s and 1960s or in an episode of Mad Men, you won't see them on Madison Avenue today.  Briefcases, yes.  Fedoras, no.  Yet they remain in some of the cartoons.  Their iconic status remains.

So, if you are a cartoonist and you wish to communicate something quickly and powerfully about repression or excessive use of government power and/or some kind of intolerance, you might depict someone in your image as a Nazi.

That is what these cartoonists did.  Despite the fact that the analogy makes little sense.

www.news.yahoo.com

In his illustration, Pat Oliphant refers to those wishing to sanitize Twain's novels as the "political-correction Nazis."  In Michael Keefe's version, we do not have the word "Nazi," but we do see what we would call a German staff car flying flags that may or may not have swastikas on them and filled with dogs and men with tall caps.  These are all signs of Nazis that we have learned to identify from hundreds of World War II movies.

www.denverpost.com

The problem here is that the "Nazis" wishing to "correct" Twain's novels are not government officials.  It is a private concern, a company producing an edition to be used in a Big Read Event in Alabama.  It seems more like the National Socialist Party of Hitler's Germany to burn a book rather than replace one word with another.  Or if they did allow an offending book to be printed, they would require an extensive rewriting, and not such a cosmetic change.  Although he may be called a "slave" in this new edition of Huck Finn, Jim remains a human owned by other humans who attempts to escape this fate and who is still clearly the target of prejudice and hatred in the antebellum South.

(We should note that the Alabama Big Read will use Tom Sawyer and not Huck Finn, but the latter novel has dominated the recent discussions about censorship probably because Jim is more central and "nigger" appears in it more often.  Huck Finn could also be dominating the conversation because it is the book more often taught, since it speaks more powerfully to race and class issues in American history than does Tom Sawyer, which is perceived as "just" an adventurous book for young people.)

One could say that a government entity is behind the censorship, since the National Endowment for the Arts sponsors Big Read events.  But it is unclear to me that the NEA requested Twain scholar Alan Gribben to make the changes when he was tapped to edit the volume officially connected to the Big Read.  But there is no requirement that those who participate in the Big Read use the NewSouth edition.  I am sure that school districts that participate will most likely order the new edition, but again they may not. 

None of this so far sounds very coercive or violent or mean-spirited, which are qualities we associate with Nazis.  Just ask Indiana Jones.

Nor is the effort to create a "nigger"-free version of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn also an effort to supplant all other versions, as Keefe's cartoon imagines.  Gribben's edition will exist alongside the MILLIONS of other copies of the novels already in existence.  And his edition very self-consciously calls attention to the changes it has made.

My previous post considered not whether these changes were right or wrong, but whether they were effective.  For me, this is little different from editing a film for broadcast on network television or altering Cee-Lo's lyrics.  Everyone listening to his latest hit knows he isn't saying "forget you" to the woman who spurned him.  Everyone reading Gribben's edition will know "slave" has taken the place of "nigger."

The strangest thing about the Nazi imagery is that the most recent efforts to ban the novels from schools or libraries have been from African Americans.  For instance, in 1998 the U.S. Court of Appeals heard a case brought by an African American mother seeking to have her daughter and "all other similarly situated individuals" not be required to read Twain's work.

Black Nazis?  NWA meets the SS?  Kind of a strange idea, if you ask me.  And definitely not depicted that way in the cartoons.  Nazis are usually the victimizers, not the victims.


Would Oliphant and Keefe have been willing to draw their cartoons that way, with African Americans showing up at the library to remove Twain's novels?  I don't think so.

I was open to Gribben's edition because I have never had the word "nigger" thrown at me in anger.  I do not know that pain, but I can imagine it.  And I can imagine it could interfere with one's enjoyment or participation in the novels' reading.  And if someone who otherwise would not read Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn WILL read them because he/she can avoid the pain of that word -- I don't have a problem with that.

As cultural institutions, Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn are large enough to withstand the change.

Oliphant and Keefe's cartoons also raise the issue of overusing powerful words rather than avoiding them.  We went through this in 1995, when Rush Limbaugh was criticized for talking about "feminazis."  If anyone with whom we disagree and whom we perceive as militant or extreme or repressive can then be equated with a military-political complex associated with killing millions of people and starting a world war that killed millions more, then "Nazi" has lost much of its meaning and much of its power.  And if we let it lose that, we might lose touch with the pain caused and injustices enacted by Nazis -- and if we do that, we might be more likely to think Nazis aren't that bad and allow them among us again.

Goodbye, cruel word

WWJD?

That is, What would Jay-Z do?

What would he do if someone changed his lyrics the way Alan Gribben has changed The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for NewSouth Books.  (Read about it here.)  You see, Gribben has eliminated the word "nigger" from two of Mark Twain's novels. 

He has removed it more than 200 times from Huck Finn alone.

He also removed the word "Injun," but that is not the word that got Twain's novel in trouble each year with school boards and parents and students.

Gribben's goal was to make the book acceptable to a broader audience for a Big Read event in Alabama.  A Big Read is a campaign to get everyone in a city or a state to read the same book at about the same time.  Gribben, who is a university professor and a Twain scholar, had encountered many people who refused to read the book because of that word so beloved by Mr. Beyonce Knowles.  Gribben felt the trade-off was not worth it: the benefit of avoiding that word for the price of not reading the novel.  He felt a different deal needed to be made: the alteration of a classic for an expansion in its readership.

So people have been debating whether this OK.  Is it OK to change the novel in this way?  Is it OK to broaden the novel's potential audience by making it less likely to offend readers, when making it more appealing may mean changing its impact?  The novel itself isn't racist, but it is about racism.  Perhaps removing the offending word will make the racist environment in which Huck grows up also less ugly to the audience.  Perhaps readers will think life wasn't so bad after all in the South for a person of African descent.

My friend, Dean Rader, writes for the San Francisco Chronicle's blog site, and he wrote about this issue this week.  His take: "For me, the Neosporined Huck Finn is not the right remedy for the injuries of slavery and racism; it's a band-aid that doesn't cover the wound." 

I have taught Huckleberry Finn and other texts containing "nigger."  What do I feel about this new edition?

I don't really care.  I wouldn't use it in my classroom.  But its existence doesn't cause me to worry.

After all, has Gribben really changed the novel?  No.  It still exists in its original version -- in millions of copies.  People who like Gribben's version well enough might be inclined to experience Twain's version.  That's good.  And everyone reading Gribben's edition probably will know they are reading the "Neosporined" version.  It's not like people who eat at Taco Bell believe they are eating real Mexican food.  Gribben's readers will know they have been given a version altered to fit their tastes.

That's the funny thing about censorship.  It so often calls attention to the thing it tries to hide.   

If you read my last posting, about the snow penis in Lafayette, Ind., you might have watched the video from the TV station that covered the story.  If you did, you would have noticed that the snow penis is never visible.  Instead, it is hidden by a pixelated blur.  But you know what?  Everyone looking at the blur was, in some fashion or another, imagining what the offending sculpture looked like.

Follow my instructions: Do not think of a snow penis.

See how that works?

Was anyone ever fooled by f--k?  Isn't "bleep" more effective than that?  At least then my mother could insert "darn!" or "dang!" in the place of "bleep."  But once a magazine or book is coy enough to present only the first and last letters of the offending word, the editors have forced my mother to hear in her head a word she would prefer not to hear.

Although we can create techniques for recalling information, it seems futile to create techniques for forgetting.  Italian writer Umberto Eco speculated on this in his essay "An Ars Oblivionalis?  Forget It!" -- "But this technique allows one not to forget something but to remember that one wanted to forget it."

For many of Gribben's readers, each time they see the word "slave," they will register at some level, "This word is replacing 'nigger'."  And so the offending word remains present by the marker of its absence.

The way true damage would be done to American literaray tradition would be if Gribben's version replaced all other versions of Huck Finn.  I don't think that is likely to happen.