James Watson
December 2010
Says Shama in ‘Kids need to know they belong’ 9 November 2010, ‘even
during the toughest trials it’s our history that binds us together as a distinctive
community in an otherwise generically globalised culture’. The
‘understanding of the identity of us’ is ‘not the uncritical genealogy of the
Wonderfulness of Us’; quite the contrary, history is about inquiry which
resists and probes ‘national self-congratulation’.
Children, argues Shama, need history the most: ‘Unless they can be won to
history, their imagination will be held hostage in the cage of eternal Now: the
flickering instant that’s gone as soon as it arrives’.
In my own fiction I’ve attempted to carry readers out of ‘the country they
inhabit’, away from what Colin Jones refers to as ‘the Hitlerlisation and
Tudorisation of A-level teaching’ and in to journeys of exploration,
including self-exploration, beyond our shores.
The young characters in Sign of the Swallow, my first story, cross Europe
to Italy, meet the young Leonardo. Those in The Bull Leapers find
themselves in Minoan Crete, prisoners forced to entertain the crowds in the
sport of leaping the bulls.
In Legion of the White Tiger, the reader joins an expedition from the
middle east to the Great Walls of China, while in The Freedom Tree young
British volunteers experience the viciousness of civil war in Spain and
witness the horrific (and immensely symbolic) bombing of Guernica (the
famous tree of freedom, by the way, survived and survives).
‘Surprisingly absent’
Shama selects a few particular events which he believes young people
should be aware of and study. In some ways it is an odd choice. There is no
mention of Tom Paine and the 19th century struggle to establish a free press,
free speech and democracy in Britain; and this, surely, should be preceded
by a focus on the rise of the printed word and its impact on Britain and the
world.
In another Guardian letter Michael Leigh offers topics ‘surprisingly absent’
from Shama’s list – the Industrial Revolution, the Enclosure Acts ‘and the
formation of the working class’, a ‘story that is being repeated today in the
developing world, from South America to China and India, and it has never
been more important that it is told’.
Five days later, again in the Guardian, James Vernon, professor of history at
Berkeley, California, pitches in his dollar’s worth. First, his concern:
‘History, it appears, is not just in retreat in our schools, it is fast becoming a
privilege of the privileged’. Blame may be laid at the structures out of which
history teaching emerges or, connectedly, the ways in which it is taught, but
Vernon reminds us ‘that the way history is taught in schools is itself a
product of history’. He states that every generation ‘shapes the teaching of
history around its own preoccupations and sense of itself, but these are
always changing’.
Powers of analysis
Shama’s list is only a ‘for instance’ but along with others Vernon believes
there are ‘conspicious absences of some of the central staging posts of
modern European history – the Renaissance, the Reformation and the global
missions of European religions’.
There should be no conflict of interest here between study and story; rather
the two should be complementary and mutually supportive. Vernon fears
history being turned into pure entertainment.
Yet fiction rarely plays history for laughs, and serious stories are more likely
to prompt, rather than deflect, or get in the way of, the worthy aim of
encouraging people to ‘think critically and effectively about the world they
live in’.
To think critically
Vernon concludes with the warning that history is not for ‘turning
schoolchildren into Britons but by enabling them to analyse the present and
to think critically when we hear ministers and advisers offering populist
solutions to more complex structural problems’.
It follows that keeping history and history teaching out of the hands of
politicians is of paramount importance. When ministers talk of ‘our great
and glorious past’, they are not necessarily talking about my history but
theirs; one is mindful of Dr. Johnson’s comment about patriots and
scoundrels and such attitudes as My Country, Right or Wrong. They are for
the most part talking propaganda stirred with heaped spoonfuls of the
wishful; and propagandists, as Jan Vladislav has said, ‘rely on people having
short memories’, risking ‘new generations having no historical memory at
all’.
***
We might dimly remember the Congo of the 1960s, Katanga, the brutal
murder of the socialist prime minister Lumumba and other atrocities, all for
the sake of mineral exploitation and in no small measure orchestrated by the
CIA. If it is hazy to us, Barbara Kingsolver brings it all back in The
Poisonwood Bible, a fictionalised story of a Southern Baptist missionary
family transplanted to carry the word of a protestant Christian faith to a
previously happily catholicised jungle folk.
Cultural trespass
The author gives a tragically hilarious account of the total incapacity of the
preacher and his family to grasp what they had landed themselves into. This
is encapsulated in the title, the misplaced effort of the preacher to say
“Christ is Risen” in the local Kisanji language which is the same expression
for the poisonous root that spreads everywhere. One of the teenaged
daughters is totally at a loss, being suddenly wrenched from her school
Prom and dumped in a world without her accustomed Piggly Wigglies
stores. It all ends in horror and disaster for the preacher, his children and the
people of the Congo.
Trotsky laughs!
Try googling Bonus Army + Tiananmen Square and you will get 5000 hits
at last try. Then try Bonus Army Eisenhower Patten MacArthur. Better yet
read Barbara Kingsolver’s Lacuna where all will be made clear. This is
another of her semi-fictionalised historical accounts, this time set in the
Mexico and United States of the 1930s and 1940s. The young Mexican-US
hero finds himself in the household of Mexican socialist artist Diego Rivera
and his wife Frida Kahlo, at the time when they take in the Soviet
revolutionary Leo Trotsky, fleeing Stalin’s NKVD assassins. A heavy time
and a terrible topic, which does not prevent Kingsolver bringing all these
personages to life with great wit and light ascerbity.
Broken promises
One episode takes the hero to Washington D.C in 1932 where the Bonus
Army of US World War I veterans is encamped in a long and peaceful
protest to demand the wartime service bonuses they had been promised but
never paid. The disciplined protesters with their wives and children are
finally dispersed by the army led by General MacArthur, organised by
genial Major Eisenhower and slashed by the unsheathed sabres of the
cavalry spurred on by the eager Major Patten.
Thanks, Tony. I hope to receive more contributions from you and indeed
from any reader signing in to this blog.
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TextDisc Watsonworks:
A lifetime’s fascination with the early Renaissance artist PIERO DELLA FRANCESCA
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explanations of what still remains a riddle. Masterpiece and Mystery: The Flagellation
by Piero della Francesca is a 16-page study, on disc, of a painting that measures a modest
58 x 81centimetres, housed in the Ducal Palace in Urbino. Copies of this are available free
to readers (or as an Attachment); orders please through Watsonworks@hotmail.co.uk.
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