Steinbeck "is a racist, let's get him out of school". Threats to a 16-year-old black girl for her words in Men and mice - Corriere.it

Steinbeck "is a racist, let's get him out of school".  Threats to a 16-year-old black girl for her words in Men and mice - Corriere.it


In Northern Ireland, a 16-year-old student complains about the use of racist expressions and asks for the book to be removed from her course. After the threats, the police intervened

"I do not think Of Mice and Men is appropriate reading for school. In an interview with BBC On 25 May a 16-year-old Belfast student, Angel Mhande, raised a new debate on the classics of literature. This time it's up to the Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck and to this novel, dated 1937, which tells an American cross-section of the 1930s.

Angel Mhande explains her position thus: «I am concerned about the way in which this book speaks to black youth and white youth». Mhande, Northern Irish, Afro-descendant, refers to the use of N-wordsthe word "nigger", which can be translated as "negro", even if it does not have an exact correspondence in our language because in English it has an even more dramatic and abusive meaning.

According to Mhande reading of Of Mice and Men should be excluded from the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE), a school qualification recognized in the United Kingdom. Of Mice and Men it is one of seven novels that schools can draw from of Northern Ireland and Scotland for students of the Gcse in literature. So far it is the most chosen.

The protagonists of the novel are George Milton and Lennie Smalltwo migrants looking for work in California stormed by Americans fleeing the grip of the Great Depression (a theme that will return in Steinbeck's masterpiece, Furyof 1939). Among the protagonists of the book there is also the black Crookswhose literary "treatment" - is the victim of abuse and discrimination - ended up at the center of the complaints of the young student.

«It is a violent book. I am uncomfortable hearing the racial slurs in the novel read in class,” laments Angel Mhande.

A crucial theme: is it right to reread with today's eyes works daughters of their time, therefore testimonies of an era in which racial violence was a daily trauma for blacks? On the other hand: how can one teach to read those works to students accustomed to a more world politically correct?

After these words, the girl suffered threats. The police have been to her Belfast home where she lives with her parents to make her aware of her sensitive situation. "We are afraid," said her mother, Apolonia Mbondiya, al Guardian. «If we had known, we would never have spoken in these terms about the book alla BBC. Having different opinions is healthy but threatening a girl like this because she thinks so is terrible ».

The debate on the works of the past, on the "timeliness" of their language, is a very delicate subject. In 2011 Alan Gribben, scholar and enthusiast of Mark Twain, published a renewed version of Huck Finnreplacing the word niggerThat it appears 219 times in the text, with slave. Tom Sawyer (1876) also came under the scrutiny of Gribben, who changed the name of the Injun Joe character to Indian Joe (injun is a derogatory term for Native Americans). A limited operation, which however opened a debate destined to last within the cultural world.

June 3, 2023 (change June 3, 2023 | 21:16)



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