Obscuring the Past (original) (raw)

Thomas Glave

Thomas Glave, a professor of English at Binghamton University, is the author of "The Torturer's Wife", "Whose Song? and Other Stories" and "Words to Our Now: Imagination and Dissent."

Updated October 18, 2011, 5:37 PM

In 2010 (and always), we must be brave and honest enough to face the hard facts: replacing the word “nigger” with the word “slave” in Twain’s masterpiece "Huckleberry Finn" will neither erase nor vanquish the ugly history out of which the novel and the offensive word emerged.

The fact is that Huck simply would not have referred to Jim as a “slave.”

Substituting one word in a novel cannot possibly redress the centuries of harm and viciousness visited upon black people by white people who for so long, and well into the present, considered us inferior, stupid, lazy, ignorant, dishonest, animal-like in the worst possible sense, and generally oversexed. Part of Huckleberry Finn’s power, irrespective of Twain’s intentions at the time, is that it unflinchingly discloses the very blitheness with which Huck addresses and talks about Jim (or any other black person) as a “nigger,” and thus the attitudes of many white people at the time about black people as well as blackness and whiteness. Huck is able to come of age as a white male partly because he does so in the presence of a (fully grown, adult) black male who for him will always be the racial “other,” though an “other” for whom he cares and who cares for him.

The reality is that, to Huck and many white people of the time, Jim would have been both a slave – that is, property to be owned and abused at the owner’s will – and a “nigger," the accepted way one referred to that particular property in the South at the time. The nuanced and particular differences between those two words, while connected in some ways, cannot, at least in the case of Huckleberry Finn, be blurred or muddied.

But perhaps even more urgently, it is precisely this abominable history – that of racism, slavery, and the violation and dehumanization of black people over centuries – which must be made clear to schoolchildren, high school students, and university students – to everyone -- if they and we are to become responsible, clear-thinking citizens who will ultimately be unafraid of confronting and grappling with the truth of this country’s bitter, byzantine history.

Great literature that reveals truths about a society can enable such learning and thinking: the fact is that Huck simply would not have referred to Jim as a “slave.”

What does this unfortunate reality say to us today as we reflect on a history many of us would rather not contemplate? But an even more disturbing question might be: what will it mean for our future as a nation, and our futures as compassionate, humane people, if we refuse to take into account the violence of this history and its paradoxes and counternarratives?

An insistence on obfuscating the past and obscuring the truth of real events is itself violent; such obfuscation does violence not only to the memories of those who suffered, but to our own potential as human beings to remember, and who must be charged, toward our own greater humanity, never to forget.

Topics: Culture, books