By Francis Moran

I really don’t know what I think about the recent editing of Mark Twain’s classic American novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to replace the offensive word “nigger” with the more prosaic “slave.” The objectionable word was common parlance when Twain wrote this masterpiece of life along the Mississippi River in the southern United States in the mid-1880s and I am loath to see anyone tamper with an original work of such brilliance.

I do know that when I shared Huck with my then-tweenaged boys as part of our long-standing nighttime story-reading ritual, that I felt just as uncomfortable as Michael Chabon, although, unlike Chabon, I opted not to substitute something softer. I had ploughed through the far fewer iterations of the word in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, albeit with some trepidation, and I saw no reason to do otherwise with the sequel. Equally difficult were references to the character “Injun Joe” and the persistent use of vernacular speech that made Jim sound very much like the social and intellectual inferior he was held to be at the time. But I read aloud every word that Twain wrote.

I did explain to my lads that Twain was writing the way people spoke in his time, that he was a critic and satirist who was exposing the hypocrisies of his day, and that some of his words would be very hurtful if they were to use them today. I believe they understood, and I believe our experience of the book, a cracking great yarn of wit, adventure and wisdom that I have read a handful of times, was what Twain intended it to be.

Still, if I was uncomfortable reading that racial slur aloud, imagine the distress felt by junior and high school students who are obliged to speak such a profanity, especially those in classrooms comprising both blacks and whites. While many prominent black writers, politicians and entertainers insist they have the right to co-opt the word — a right I would not dispute — even they are wary when, how and in whose company they use it. So I have some sympathy for the motives of Alan Gribben, the Auburn University professor who edited the new single-volume edition of Twain’s two best-loved novels and made the controversial substitution, insofar as it will make the shared enjoyment that comes from reading this book aloud a more comfortable experience for many.

Then, yesterday morning, came news that the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council, acting on a complaint filed by a radio listener in St. John’s, Newfoundland, had ruled that the use of the word “faggot” in the Dire Straits song “Money for Nothing” contravened the human rights clauses of the Canadian Association of Broadcasters Code of Ethics and was discriminatory to gays. The song, the CBSC ruled, may not be played by private radio stations in this country unless the word is replaced.

Unlike the many black people who claim the right to use “nigger” and thereby reclaim its power for themselves, most gay people do not seem to feel the same way about the word “faggot.” Indeed, Egale Canada, this country’s national gay rights organisation, cheered the CBSC’s decision, saying it was time such a hateful word was removed from common usage.

While many commentators scorned the perceived political correctness of the move, I have always been of the view that if the subject of a word or an action or a depiction finds it offensive, then it is offensive. As a straight male of European heritage, I have never been the target of discrimination or harassment and so I must cede to those who face such conditions every day the discretion to name what they find objectionable.

Picture: Huckleberry Finn, as depicted by E. W. Kemble in the original 1884 edition of the book. From the Wikimedia Commons.

Postscript: The headline I originally wrote for this post used both of these controversial words, a move that caused me sufficient angst overnight that I polled the rest of inmedialog’s regular contributors this morning to get their input. The detailed, considered and thoughtful response of all them — hell, it sparked an hour-long debate back and forth by email — revealed that I work with a sensitive and caring bunch of people who are personally and professionally committed both to the sanctity of the language tools we use every day and to the power of words to heal, to harm, to persuade and to inform. It also revealed just how tough it is to find any context in which the use of either of these words would be considered appropriate, let alone inoffensive. In the end, I bowed to the majority and to my own unease and did with my headline what I was unwilling to do with Twain’s words — I censored it.

Technorati Tags: Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, Alan Gribben, Canadian Broadcast Standards Council, Egale, human rights, censorship