The Beautiful and the Banned

Begin with Babar

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve been warned off books endorsing colonialism like—some say—Jean de Brunhoff’s six-book Babar series. Softening the blow, Adam Gopnik diagnoses Brunhoff’s work as “a self-conscious comedy about the French colonial imagination” If that’s not bad enough, the book includes racist pictures (his son, Laurent, who continued the series, withdrew one of his own, Babar’s Picnic, since black warriors in grass skirts appear on several pages). To top things off, The Story of Babar, in one popular view, is about “violent parental loss, shopping, poison, and incest.”

“Shopping?” A critic struggling to find something to complain about might include that.

            But me, I love shopping.

Yes, Babar’s mother dies when a “wicked hunter” shoots her.

Like Bambi’s mom. Shielding your child from the very idea of a wicked hunter shooting someone is a mistake. Any grade-schooler exposed to a school safety drill knows wicked hunters shoot people all the time in America. Yes, Babar goes shopping when “the old lady” hands him her purse; he comes back nattily clad in a green suit. She houses, clothes and feeds him, becoming his second mother.

Yes, there’s poison: the king of the elephants eats a bad mushroom and dies. Incest? Babar marries his cousin Celeste. They have three lovely children. The orphaned underling finds a new mother, happiness, and a great job—King. A family-oriented story.

Don’t assume your child will be upset by the shooting, the shopping, the poison mushroom or the marriage. My oldest, then four, sighed happily at the sight of Babar and Celeste holding hands and gazing at the stars. Now what? He wanted to know, not wanting the story to end, and I said they’d go on their honeymoon.

“They go home, take off their clothes, get under the covers and go to bed!” said he, grinning.

Prepare to answer questions, and you never know what those questions might be. I thought my kids would be upset when Charlotte, the spider heroine, dies at the end of E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web. Her death didn’t faze them. They wanted to know about the egg the goose can’t hatch. How come seven hatched and one didn’t, Mommy? “It’s a dud,” says the gander. My boys wanted to know whether “that ever happened to you, Mommy.” One of them was old enough to have a faint memory of Mom clutching her tummy, excusing herself, and not coming out of the bathroom for a long time. He probably overheard me talking to the doctor, even if he didn’t understand what I was saying. I was having a miscarriage, and the kid figured that out. I answered: yes, something like that did happen, in the sense that the egg stopped developing. Mom is okay now. If I’d lied, I’d have lost their trust.

The racism? Various writers  interpret the forest elephants in The Story of Babar, who walk on all fours, as Africans the citified Babar, walking on two legs, colonizes. (How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?) But there is, in The Travels of Babar, a scene in which “the inhabitants of the island, fierce and savage cannibals” capture and tie up Celeste while she’s napping. Babar arrives in the nick of time. The cannibals are black, wear grass skirts, and have large lips.

This is the moment where white moms fear these “stereotypical images” of black people will turn their children into racists. Moms of color think their children will feel demeaned by same. Experienced mothers know how unpredictable children are: don’t count on either reaction.

There really are tribes of black cannibals in remote places who still eat people, among them the Asmat of New Guinea island, who consumed Nelson Rockefeller’s son, Michael, in 1961, and the Korowai of Papua. Easily available online videos of the Asmat look like something Jean de Brunhoff might have seen, if only in a drawing or photo.

            And why would anyone think these images represent or demean most black people? I can imagine children asking some version of this question after their mothers fretted about stereotypes. Wait and see what your child says.