POLITCS AND WRITING

Recently I re-tweeted the link to Jonathan Coe’s November 2017 Guardian article on politics and kid's fiction, ‘Writing a children’s book for our turbulent times.’ A well known children’s author took me gently to task - was politics really a good thing in children's fiction? Although he admired Coe, an author well known for his political satires, he didn’t much like the description of Coe’s new book The Broken Mirror, ‘a fable about a girl’s developing political awareness’. I replied, rather tartly, that it was never too early to learn how nasty, vicious and scheming adults can be. Brexit fairy tales have their place. 

I have to confess a personal interest in this. The family in my current novel, set in the USA, is dependent on food stamps. So called SNAP benefits are currently subject to the political whims of the Republican party who seem to think all recipients are scroungers (not unlike our own Conservatives). So that twitter exchange did give me pause for thought – were the scenes in my novel where they go food stamp shopping and later visit a food bank a bit heavy handed? Could this all be just a bit too worthy?

Ken Loach’s recent film I, Daniel Blake focuses relentlessly on the very current issue of the British benefits system. Although I enjoyed the film, I preferred his earlier, wonderful film Kes, from Barry Hines’ book A Kestrel for a Knave. Kes is lighter in touch - we get to know about grinding poverty and prejudice in 1960’s Britain through a small slice of Billy’s life – there is no hint of didacticism. Kitchen sink dramas about British life from that period do a great job of showing us, rather than telling us, how tough life for the socially disadvantaged could be – Tony Richardson’s The Loneliness of A Long Distance Runner, A Taste of Honey, Look Back in Anger, This Sporting Life. Italian neo realism of the 1950’s does it even better - Sica’s The Bicycle Thieves, Pasolini’s Accatone.

I started thinking more widely about some of the books I have read recently in which politics is a vital part of the mix. Elena Ferrante’s Neopolitan Quartet is set in impoverished Naples in the 1970’s and has a strong theme of the social responsibility of the writer amidst social upheaval and protest. Coetzee’s novels are set in apartheid South Africa. Chimamanda Adiche Negozie’s novels admirably weave complex relationship stories around politics (Purple Hibiscus is set in a politically unstable post colonial Nigeria and Half of a Yellow Sun takes place during the Nigerian civil war).

Coming back to children’s fiction, the young adult book The Hate U Give is an up to date example of a novel that is politically relevant, dealing with racism and police brutality. My eighteen year old daughter is experiencing a ‘moment’ in British politics and has suddenly become very aware - she really appreciated The Hate U Give precisely because she felt it was so relevant to things happening right now, albeit in the United States. In my mind, this can only be a good thing.

Julia Eccleshare’s illuminating Book Doctor Guardian article  'What are the best politics books for kids' April 2015 quotes Jonathan Todres, professor of law at Georgia State University, writing in the New York Times on whether or not children’s books should be political:

‘Politics, or rather social issues that have been politicised, are an inherent part of the stories children read and have read to them. Children’s literature provides a safe, imaginative space for children to confront complex issues.’

Eccleshare’s article mentions well known dystopia such as Hunger Games and Orwell’s 1984 which warn against totalitarian politics and political misrule. Like Jonathan Coe, Orwell uses a fable, Animal Farm, to send a message to adults and children. Similarly in Lord of the Flies, Golding uses children’s fiction to write his parable on the politics of power. But, perhaps surprisingly, Eccleshare also mentions Dr Seuss. I for one had no idea that Dr Seuss’ books, which played a huge part in my reading world as a child, contained political messages.

Here is a fascinating and very recent article from the Atlantic on the on-going political relevance of Dr Seuss’ political cartoons among those opposed to Trump’s America First policies.

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/01/dr-seuss-protest-icon/515031/

To quote the Independent Lens website: ‘…this is a side of Dr. Seuss’s work that is rarely discussed. Most Americans don’t know, for example, that during World War II he drew editorial cartoons for the left-wing New York newspaper PM, or that he made army propaganda films with Frank Capra. Many readers didn’t know that The Sneetches was inspired by Seuss’s opposition to anti-Semitism, that Horton Hears a Who! was a political statement about democracy and isolationism, or that The Lorax and The Butter Battle Book were parables about the environment and the arms race. Dr. Seuss’s true genius may lie in the fact that all of this was done with such humor and finesse, that few realized he was being political at all.’

I can add to my reading list my very recent discovery of Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet, via the recent brilliant biopic Neruda directed by Pablo Larrain. The introduction to the 1970 Penguin edition of Neruda’s selected poems says:

‘…we cannot take Neruda’s poetry without the political nettle, without the vision of unalienated man, of justice and equality on earth…Neruda (as Chilean consul in Spain) found himself living with a community of poets who had a sense of their relationship with the people. His initial involvement in politics had much to do with his friendship with Raphael Alberti , whose home was destroyed by Fascists in 1934 and with Lorca, whose assassination soon after the outbreak of civil war in 1936 drew a passionate protest from Neruda together with the statement that he did not consider himself to be a political poet. Yet he lost his post as consul because of his involvement in the struggle and the sense of political outrage and the destruction flows into a political confrontation:’

I can’t read Spanish but I have a parallel translation.

Treacherous

generals:

see my dead house,

look at broken Spain:

from every house burning metal flows

instead of flowers

(‘I’m Explaining a Few Things’)

I agree it’s not easy to do art and politics, but when it’s done right it’s a wonderful thing.