A school board in Tennessee has banned the graphic novel, Maus, because it would make students “uncomfortable.” It has nudity and bad language.
Well, yeah. So I pulled out my copy of the two-volume set and started reading it again, for the fourth or fifth time. It is an uncomfortable read, but not necessarily so much because of language and nudity.
The nudity is found in piles of dead naked Jews, skeletal bodies of men (Jews were segregated by gender in the camps). So yeah, dead people who were starving before they died, and on some of them you can see their sad little dead penises. I have noticed that male nudity is considered much more shocking than female nudity. Naked women? You betcha! Bring ‘em on! Naked men? That’s obscene! But I digress.
I do not think the language is anything that kids haven’t heard by the time they are ten, or younger.
The school board did not mention violence, did it? Only nudity and language as the reasons for banning the book. They say nothing, for example, about where a German soldier picks up a child by the legs and smashes his head against a wall, or other atrocities that are mentioned or illustrated, like a kapo grabbing a prisoner’s cap and tossing it and saying, “Go get the cap.” When the prisoner goes to pick up the cap, the kapo shoots him, reports that the prisoner was trying to escape, and is rewarded with a bonus and some time off. The school board didn’t say a word about those things. Nope. Language and nudity. So American.
The Jews and dissidents and those otherwise considered to be unfit to be pure Aryans were imprisoned, tortured, and slaughtered by the millions, then sent up the chimneys or bulldozed into open trenches. In Kiev, the Nazis had the foresight to dig the trench, send the living Jews into the trench and then kill them, saving the step of pushing dead bodies into a trench. The Nazis were nothing if not efficient.
I think the reality of the Holocaust would be a lot more traumatizing to children than mere “nudity and language.” But what the hell do I know?
Come on – the Holocaust was beyond traumatizing. When you read Maus, you cannot deny that it happened, and if your eyes are open you cannot help but draw the parallel with the dehumanization by one group of people in our country of other people.
Reading Maus this time my breath is taken away by the honesty and artistry of the way Art Spiegelman told his tale. The two volumes are such works of art, both visual and written. It took him eight years to write them, or maybe eight years to write the first volume. I’m not sure. But you can see why it took years to write and illustrate his father’s story. He tried to get his father to tell him as many details as possible, and then he illustrated those details.
What it is to be the child of a death camp survivor, or to be a death camp survivor, is such a deep and lasting wound to the body and soul and the universe. I can witness that in Maus, but I am incapable of imagining it. There is nothing in my life that compares. It is a whole other horrible level of atrocity, treating Jews (Blacks, Latinx, Asians) as the feared “other” who must be eradicated.
Which is why students should be able to read Maus. So they can see what they cannot imagine; yes, be traumatized; and, I hope, become determined that the holocaust will never happen again. That is pertinent to present circumstances – the rising tide of anti-Semitism is full of the mindset of “kill all the Jews.” Many of these people have the same attitude toward Jews and black people – they are not human beings.
Of course there have been other mass murders, murderers of innocents – Stalin comes to mind. Pol Pot, in Cambodia. Vladimir Putin is bucking to get into that club. Maybe he already is.
Us, in our undeclared wars.
We are too far down the slippery slope of fascism and racial hatred here. I keep hoping that the kids are all right and will be so fed up with the mess their elders have made of the world that they will turn it around.
So, Maus. My hat is off, once again, to Art Spiegelman, and all the people who made his graphic novel a reality.
The banning of the book has led to a rise in sales of Maus, which makes me happy. So yay for that. Nothing like a good book banning to increase a book’s sales.
