Rewriting children's literature: Yay or Nay?

Great Debates
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To add just a little to the excellent comments of goboy and ** kniz**, admittedly, there was a popular version of the Little Black Sambo story that had very stereotypical illustrations (google-eyed, oversized lips and head, etc), and a resturant chain that used the same imagery, but the story itself was far from racist. I remember that it was Sambo that tricked the tigers into chasing each other around the tree–as resourceful a little child as Hansel and Gretel, at least.
Like irishgirl’s parents, my mom never limited what I could read–and I had three olders sisters, all readers, as was Mom, so there was a big range of reading material around the house. She figured that if I didn’t undersand it, I’d get bored and stop reading, and if I did understand it, there was no reason to prevent me from reading it. Granted, there were themes that slipped right by me, so that when I read the same book years later, I discovered subplots and motivations that I missed the first time around, but I certainly wasn’t scarred by the experience. I did recognize racism fairly early–the civil rights movement was in full swing during my childhood, and, although I lived in a very white community, I was aware of the injustice in our country, at least in theory. Perhaps because I was living in a time when people were being challenged to re-think their beliefs about race, I knew that ideas abut race do change, and a book written even 20 years earlier (in the 1940’s), could reflect thinking that was wrong, even though it was not recognized as wrong at that time. If I liked the characters in the books, I believed that they wouldn’t think that way in today’s society–I gave the characters, and thus the author, the benefit of the doubt.

I think it is vital for parents to exposed their children to these types of ideas. Children need to know that ideas about race, the treatment of animals, mental illness, gender, etc., can and do change. I believe it helps to create a society that has faith in improvement , because it shows that society has indeed made progress. Is American society as racist as it was 100 years ago? No. Is it still racist? Yes. Will preventing our children from knowing that our society was more racist/sexist/specisist in the past help or hinder our continued progress towards justice?

And, of course, under my high-minded, albeit impossible to prove rationale, is the more straight forward reluctance to have anyone but the author change the books.

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Oh, and by the way, The Story of Little Black Sambo, has been reissued (with new illustrations), so run, don’t walk to your local bookseller and pick up a copy.

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Goboy, thank you for your comments on Little Black Sambo. I agree with your post that LBS is a lovely story about a very resourceful little boy.

However, I did want to clarify that LBS is not set in India, nor is it set exactly in Africa. Helen Bannerman is an English woman who lived in India, and when she wrote this story as a tale for her children, she deliberately set it somewhere remote and foreign. As they lived in India, the remote setting was an African-like jungle. The land of make belive, if you will, as we have talking tigers who want clothes. There is a good biography of the author (although sadly out of print now), called “Sambo Sahib: The Story of Little Black Sambo and Helen Bannerman.” It’s interesting (to me, at least) to note that “Sambo” was already in use at the time as a term for someone of mixed African and Indian heritage, and that it was sometimes used as a slur.

Kallessa, does changing the illustrations count as revising children’s literature? Or is the literature only the text and not the illustrations? If kids are capable (and I agree, kids are smart and savvy) of handling the original version of Mary Poppins, then why not the illustrations in LBS?

There’s also a fairly recent retelling of LBS, called Sam and the Tigers, by Julius Lester. At first I thought this was a very neat book, and that it complimented the original LBS. But after reading some of the views posted here on “new” versions of old classics, I wonder if there is really a point to offering Sam and the Tigers in addition to Little Black Sambo.

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delphia, you’ve got me there. Often, the illustrations are an essential aspect of a book, a true collaboration between author and artist. I can’t imagine Winniethe Pooh without Shepard’s illustration (Disney does not even come close to catching the truth of Pooh, et. al.). However, just as often, the illustration is done at the publisher’s request, and an author may have little or no control over it. And in later editions, the author may be dead. In the case of LBS, I know the author did original illustrations, but I’m not sure if they are the ones I remember as being so stereotypical.

Part of me says that illustrations may have a greater impact on a child, but another part says that a child may well see what I consider to be a negative representation as just a silly picture. What a quandary! If the story is illustrated by the author, changing the illustration is very much like changing the text, and so I have to be consistent and oppose it. If it is obvious that the author had no input into how the book was illustrated, then I have no problem with it.

Of course, this begs the question as to what opinion I would have if the book was considered a classic because of both the text and the pictures.

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Does anyone know whether there is a copy of the original Little Black Sambo on the internet? I grew up on a sanitized version and was always mystified about the hoopla over the restaurant’s name. As I read more, however, I discovered that Sambo was a stock British name for the over-sexed black character in a lot of cheap Britsh stories (making me now wonder what Ms. Bannerman was thinking in her choice of names). A couple of years ago, I came across a 1940s publication of the book. Not only were the characters draw in the worst stereotypical fashion–huge lips, bulging eyes, lolling tongues, etc.–but the dialogue was a horrible example of minstrel show darkies’ faux dialect.

I would be interested to know whether that was an American retelling with deliberate stereotypes, or was it closer to the original?

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BTW, I’ve tried project Gutenberg and I am getting 404s on all the Sambo sites.

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http://pages.thingsfromthepast.com/3/PictPage/1168480.html#images

This person is selling a copy of Little Black Sambo, and the site contains a photo of the cover, and of one illustration. The cover illustration matches the Applewood Books reprint of the original. The quality of the photos isn’t great, but it will give you an idea of the Bannerman illustrations.

I grew up with my mother’s copy, which would have been from the 1940s, and had different illustrations. Based on tomndebb’s description, I think I had the same Americanized version that he saw as an adult.

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The Story of Little Black Sambo

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The link by zgystardst is the story and illustrations that I knew as a kid. That would tend to let Ms. Bannerman off the hook for deliberate racism. (I still have a slightly raised eyebrow over her choice of names, but I wouldn’t keep it from my kids on that account.) The book I saw later, however, was pure racist trash, redone in bad dialect and with deliberately distorted features in the drawings.

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One book I have seen in several versions, from children’s abridged to original adult, is Gulliver’s Travels, by Jonathan Swift. Done for children it is a set of funny adventures. When the palace in Lilliput is burning, Gulliver fills his mouth with water and spits it out(saw that in an old movie too). That’s not how he put it out in the original(heh, heh) And a child’s version doesn’t get into how Gulliver was the plaything of the female giants in Brobdinag(sp?) I remember how startled as was in junior high to get my hands on the original and read about him being naked and straddling their nipples.
Maybe a childs version could serve a purpose.If you TELL a kid it’s altered for them, they MAY try to find the original, just to “put one over” on the grownups. That’s what I did in high school Spanish class. We were reading “El Sombrero de Tres Picos” and were told three scenes had been excised to make them more “appropriate” for teenage students. So the first thing I and several others did was head to the public library to find out what we were missing.

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I can remember the copy of Little Black Sambo that I had back in the 40’s. The boy had on clothes like those worn in India and so did his parents. As I got older I learned that tigers are from India, so when they said that the book was being censored I could not figure it out except for the word black. Even if the boy was drawn like an African black the story is not degrading. Like goboy says it shows the boy is able to outsmart the tigers. If the book was changed in a way that did make it offensive, that to me should be yanked off the shelves and would not be censorship. However, it should also not give a bad name to the original, which is what was done in this case.

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ooh, devious… I like it.

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I was refering to this post. Didn’t see kniz’s. -SS.

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I, too was quite a reader as a child.

Among my many favorites, I always loved Curious George best. I still do! But its funny how perceptions change.

I recently reread the story: imagine my horrors: the man in the yellow hat was a POCHER. He wasn’t a nice guy at all, it seems.

BUT,
I am strongly against revising books, be they adult or children’s.
I wish I could give some elloquant point, but I can’t. It’s just wrong, to me. and it seems to further disneyfy our culture by doing so.

History was not always pretty. Let the books preserve that.

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Damn, Baker, as little kid I had a pop-up book of Gulliver and I don’t remember ANYTHING like that popping up! Don’t recall Ted Danson doing that to Mary Steenburgen, either… :slight_smile:

I dunno, this is a very murky issue. Especially in light of the experience I just described - I loved the kid-story version of Gulliver, but I sure as hell wouldn’t let my kid read the original, if it’s got scenes like that. I guess what it boils down to is that we want our child to experience the great stories from the past, but aren’t wanting to expose them to “adult” concepts until they’re ready to handle them. I guess that’s WHY they sell simplified versions.

I guess the lesson here is, while your kids are young read everything they read before they read it. It’s your responsibility to restrict the flow of information into your child (books, TV, movies, internet) until you have given them sufficient mental tools to deal with what they experience themselves. Use abridged versions of classics until you feel they are ready to handle the more adult concepts of the originals.

Thanks to you other posters here for helping clear my confusion re: Little Black Sambo. My parents were strongly anti-racist, yet we did have a copy of this book that I read as a little child. So I was (still am, somewhat) perplexed when it came out to be racist.

irishgirl: How great to hear from another fan of the Just So Stories! That is some of the earliest memories of my father reading to me. Loved them so much that in high school, for an assignment to write our own mythical story, I used Kipling’s storytelling style for mine. “In the High and Far-Off Times, O my Best Beloved…”

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Actually, it is highly unlikely that you could force your child to read the original Gulliver’s Travels before that child was old enough to appreciate it. Swift is very much an adult author, and his prose is set firmly in the early eighteenth century. It was written as a satire of English and Irish society and politics and there are a lot of references that appear meaningless without a key.

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You got me pondering,

is there such a thing as an 18th century childrens book?

I allways asumed there is, but if this is not the case many of the arguments(well, mine anyway) for rewriting childrens lit sort of go out the window.

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Can anyone explain anything in the Oz books that was offensive and needed to be changed for moral/PC reasons? It was difficult to find the originals last year. At first, all I could find was abridged editions. Not picture book additions to whet the appetite of younger readers or readers-to-be, but books still targeted to the same age group and yet made simpler, blander, and altogether less in every way. I buy my nieces and nephews books for Christmas. It is difficult to find unaltered versions of many books, not just the Oz books. I refuse to buy altered versions. I find them generally pale imitations without merit. If the author herself revised a book, I would consider buying it. If another did so, I would not. While I accept that some have the most prudish/PC/moral reasons for wanting to revise books, it angers me far more when revisions are done for less clear reasons.

If people wish to give their kids sanitized versions of children’s literature, let them. I suppose these are the moral counterparts to the parents that won’t let their children have sugar. Personally, I think that they are wrongheaded. Parents must teach children their own values. Part of that is exposing them to other points of view and explaining that, “This is not what we believe, and here is why.” How else can one expect the next generation to hold thier values in the face of a diverse culture?

However, those that dumb down and cutesify children’s literature are the counterparts of the parents that put their children on low-fat diets. Low-fat diets can permanently and adversely affect the brain. Children that had the potential to grow up with at least normal intelligent adults can be left with profound learning disabilities and worse. Changing wonderful children’s literature into pap can leave the child with no desire to read, or worse, impair their ability to read.

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I’m a published children’s writer and I am married ot a children’s writer. This week I just finished editing my SO’s latest YA novel. Part of the editing was to make sure that the book conformed to prevailing community standards. ;). That meant that the sex scene got diluted waaaaaaay down. I checked what other writers were getting away with and I looked at books published by the same publishing house we’re submitting to.

Given that many classic novels if they were published today would go through this process, as long as it is sensitively done, I’m kinda wondering if there is a middle ground. Gullliver’s Tales was never intended for kids and the version we know has been bowdlerised.

I’m not advocating for the removal of all sexism and the updating of all books but I guess I wouldn’t have a serious issue with a book with racist tones or racist terms being edited in light of current values. As long as the original is still around though.

It’s a minefield though and as I write this, I am reminded of the horrors of Little House on the Prairie as done on TV. It has so little to do with the original books that it is a farce.

::sigh:: Damned if I know really. I don’t know how I would feel if I were asked to re-edit a book twenty years in the future because it offended some community group. I do know that before my/our books go into print we do make sure we are as PC as possible. That’s a personal decision though which is in line with our personal values.