Carolyn Cooper, Contributor
Cooper
Should mature third-formers suffer because of the immaturity of their classmates? And should we always teach to the lowest common denominator?
Education Minister Andrew Holness is repeating history, sort of. Not because he failed his history exam the first time round, but because he doesn't seem to have learned the lessons of the past. In 1968, 40 years ago, another Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) administration banned bad words. But it wasn't just your everyday four-letter, forty-shilling bad word. It was a whole body of ideas. For a fearful JLP government, the word 'black' became a very bad word, especially in combination with 'power'. So 'black power' books were banned.
It was illegal to bring into Jamaica The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Black Power (co-authored by Stokeley Carmichael and Charles Hamilton), all of the writings of Elijah Muhammed, the Black Panther Party newspaper and, believe it or not, the perfectly harmless novel, Black Beauty. Now, this black beauty was a horse, not a radical Black Power activist. The banning of the book clearly was the decision of a distant relative who hadn't even read it.
If you were caught with Black Power books, you could be sent to prison. So, anybody who wanted to understand the fundamental changes taking place in America had to hide and read. Books had to be wrapped in newspaper to conceal their identity. Books had to be hidden under mattresses. You couldn't freely read any of the books and newspapers that the government of the day arbitrarily decided were illegal.
Not only were books banned, but people too. In October 1968, Guyanese historian Walter Rodney was banned from returning to work in Jamaica after attending a Black Writers' conference in Montreal. The government declared him persona non grata, in Latin. In Jamaican, 'smaddy wi no waan ya so'. Rodney, who had been grounding with his brothers and sisters in Kingston's inner city, was the living black power. So he had to be banned.
ATMOSPHERE OF TERROR
These students from Bridgeport High School read a literature book after school. - File
Free movement of other supposedly dangerous intellectuals was restricted. The passport of the distinguished economist, George Beckford, was seized when he returned to Jamaica from a meeting in Cuba. The conservative government succeeded in creating an atmosphere of terror in which perfectly respectable intellectual activity became absolutely dangerous. Thank God those days are over. Or are they?
Fast-forward to 2008. The decision of Mr. Holness to ban books with "expletives" from the CXC literature syllabus stirs up very bad memories and is likely to provoke quite a few 'bad' words. It's a slippery slope: first it's 'bad' words, then 'bad' ideas. If we're not careful, we'll be heading right back to those terrible days of widespread repression.
The education minister seems to be flexing his muscles as a sign of his power. Not black power, of course. Something far more sinister, with apologies to all left-handed people: the abuse of state power. The negative meaning of sinister is a good example of how majority rule can foster prejudice. 'Sinister' is Latin for 'left-hand.' And since most people are 'right-handed,' something must be wrong with 'left-handed' people. Even worse, left politics is definitely sinister.
IS PROTECTING THE INNOCENT A GOOD REASON?
But let us suppose that there is nothing at all sinister about Minister Holness' policing of literature books; he is simply protecting innocent children. Is this really a good reason to ban books across the board? Should mature third-formers suffer because of the immaturity of their classmates? And should we always teach to the lowest common denominator?
Furthermore, in his haste to be politically correct, Minister Holness seems to have forgotten that banning books immediately makes them more attractive to the very students he wants to protect. Children instinctively know that anything big people want to hide from them is exciting.
When a former Education Minister, Edwin Allen, tried to remove the novel To Sir, With Love from the shelves of the Jamaica Library Service, a literature teacher who had been having a hard time getting her students to read the book found that her problem was instantly solved. The students couldn't get their hands on the book fast enough.
So, what's so bad about expletives anyhow? The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that the word 'expletive' comes from the Latin expletivus, meaning "serving to fill out." Expletives are fillers that we use in everyday speech and in literature books to keep conversations going. Most of them are quite innocent: words like "ahm" and "you know" and "you see mi".
Then, there are the fillers that are oaths. Now, oaths have a quite respectable history. To cite, again, the Oxford English Dictionary: An oath is "a solemn appeal to God (or to something sacred) in witness that a statement is true." But, over time, people started to take the name of God in vain, swearing left, right and centre in circumstances that didn't seem to warrant it. You hit your thumb with a hammer and you call on God Almighty. So the respectable oath became the disreputable swear word.
The transformation of the oath into the swear word is, obviously, a process of secularisation: the sacred name of the divine applied to all kinds of ordinary problems. But, I believe, these secular swear words retain some of the original sanction of the oath. That's why we use them. They fulfill a powerful function. They intensify our emotional responses, both anger and pleasure. In certain situations, nothing but a 'mampi' expletive will do: winning the lottery; or bad dog rushing you on your morning walk.
Of course, some of these fillers tend to get rather colourful. In our Jamaican mother tongue they can become very bloody, a vivid reference to femstruation. That's why Jamaican men swear in blood: out of dread respect for the reproductive power of women. In English, too, 'bloody' is a most fulfilling expletive, especially in combination with 'hell.'
Some of our Jamaican expletives get a little too full for the comfort of the squeamish. So it becomes a 'bad' word and has to be taken out of literature books to protect the innocent.
ILLITERATE GRADUATES
As a teacher of English - both literature and language - I am appalled that the West Indian classic, Beka Lamb, will now be cut from the CXC literature syllabus because of 'expletives'. I urge Minister Holness to read the novel for himself and feel its power. Instead of banning the book, he should ask offended parents to blot out the 'bad' words. Of course, this will highlight the forbidden words and thus defeat the purpose of the ban. Or, he could ask the author, Zee Edgell, to approve an edited version for immature Jamaican students.
Given all of the urgent problems in our education system, attacking 'expletives' cannot possibly be the highest priority of the minister of education. Overcrowding and under-funding are some of the much more pressing matters. Poorly paid teachers, especially at the lower levels of the system, are struggling to motivate students to learn. The outcome of all of this is our failure, over several generations, to produce graduates at the highest level of the education pyramid who are fully literate and numerate. But it's so easy to ban books. That is the real obscenity.
Carolyn Cooper is a professor of literary and cultural studies and director of the Institute of Caribbean Studies, at UWI, Mona.
