Maus and fear of the dark

Illustration/Uday Mohite

A Tennessee school board voted to remove Art Spiegelman's graphic book Maus from its 8th grade syllabus, a couple of weeks before Holocaust Remembrance Day, an irony surely too heavy to be intentional.

Maus is a Pulitzer prize-winning graphic book about the writer's parents, who survived the Holocaust, lost a child and carried the scars forever. His mother died by suicide. The book depicts Jews as mice and Nazis as cats, a device that redirects your attentiveness to the meaning, not just the fact of a story, you think you already know. The apparent ordinariness of family dynamics - irritation, resentment - becomes stark, illuminated by a blaze of cruel history.

The board's rationale for removing the book was that it featured some ‘rough language' (yaniki words like goddamn) and a naked body (of an anthropomorhphic mouse in a non-sexual context). One board member said, "It shows people hanging, it shows them killing kids, why does the educational system promote this kind of stuff? It is not wise or healthy," according to the meeting minutes.

This position is stupid, not only because it is ridiculous to imagine that 13-14 year olds today are unaware of rough language or tragedy. But also, because in fact, there couldn't be a better way to understand the meaning of history than through such works of art. If anything, such deeply felt accounts can fill us with an understanding and compassion, and make us oppose violence and cruelty - from a human depth of emotion, not some rote political catechisms.

Some NRIs in the US recently opposed the inclusion of caste as a category of discrimination in the University of California. On Twitter some wept that their children who had been brought up to think that caste was dead would now be traumatised (by the truth?). If you bring your children up on a lie, you make them incapable of confronting the truth with openness and the capacity for change.

The marvellous British television series Flowers, too tackles issues of mental health, family dynamics, loss and holocausts. One of the characters, Maurice Flowers, writes children's books full of the terrors, featuring a character called Grubb. At one point the publishers object to the darkness. Flowers' Japanese assistant Shun defends Grubb, whom he read in Japan after losing his family to an earthquake. "I read this very strange book. [I think] Ah, Mr. Flowers, know how I'm feeling. Because, I need to see that miserable is happen you know? Difficulties happen. This is world. You can survive [sic]." ("It's still a no" say the publishers).

The literal-mindedness of our times seeks to excise darkness and contradiction; to create only a kind of self-flattery in art. We want to de-eroticise our myths, sanitise our books and films till they are stripped of all emotion and simply mechanical illustrations of political ideas. The images of fairy tales, stories, myths, cinema teach us that life is both dream and nightmare. They help us name our demons and our loves, help us see that we are each capable of darkness, but also perhaps capable of travelling into light. To protect ourselves from difficult truths is to make ourselves little children, perpetually afraid of the dark, incapable of coping with differences, disappointment or mistakes. Incapable then of seeing other people's vulnerabilities and our own strengths. Incapable of being anything but sternly lonely people in a lonely world.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com