Tomorrow, the big budget, big screen debut of C.S. Lewis’ book ‘The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe’ will hit theaters, probably becoming a blockbusting dynamo in the process.
Myself, I have never gotten around to reading Lewis’s stuff, mostly because I don’t read a whole lot of fiction. I understand the basic premise of the books and their underlying message. Whether that is a Christian message is neither here nor there to me. They sound like good stories and that is all that really matters. Hopefully the movies will please both the fans of Lewis and folks like me who’ve never read the books.
Folks are already looking to the future and the subsequent productions of the later books onto the silver screen. One of them is Kyrie O’Connor of the Houston Chonicle. She has gone on to read the series and finds something she doesn’t like in book five: The Horse and His Boy.
The book, first published in 1954, may never get to the screen, at least not in anything resembling its literary form. It’s just too dreadful. While the book’s storytelling virtues are enormous, you don’t have to be a bluestocking of political correctness to find some of this fantasy anti-Arab, or anti-Eastern or anti-Ottoman. With all its stereotypes, mostly played for belly laughs, there are moments you’d like to stuff this story back into its closet.
In its simplest form, the plot seems mild enough. A boy named Shasta, raised in the southern land of Calormen and sold into slavery by a simple fisherman who claims to be his father, runs off with a talking horse from the free northern kingdom of “Narnia”.
But the land of Calormen is not simply a bad place to be from. Worse, the people are bad — or most of them, anyway — and they’re bad in pretty predictable ways. Calormen is ruled by a despotic Tisroc and a band of swarthy lords with pointy beards, turbaned heads, long robes and nasty dispositions. Calormen is dirty, hot, dull, superstitious. In truth, it’s more Ali Baba than Osama, but it’s still pretty unsettling.
Actually, Mz. O’Connel, it is pretty truthful. If, as she is implying, that Lewis is hinting towards the Calormen as being the modern day Arabs and Persians, they are usually ruled by despots, a large number of the men in the majority of the countries, especially the ultra religious ones, wear turbans, robes and beards and have very little respect for anything that isn’t to their liking, especially their women learning.
The Middle East is usually either mountainous or sandy and the weather is pretty much like Arizona except without the cable TV, video games or other activities that children might like, making it ‘dull’ to them. They are also quite superstitious with an example being that a large number Iraqis believed the night vision that the US soldiers use was able to see through the clothes of their women. Even when the soldiers let the Iraqis wear the gear, they were accused of not hitting the right switch to make the x-ray vision work.
So now that we’ve established that Mz. O’Connell has a willful ignorance of the people she is trying to speak on behalf of, we must read a little further to see her actual motives here: To tell parents that they should be ultra PC or they aren’t good parents,
So what can you do, given that your kids will want to read “The Horse and His Boy” in its unfiltered book form long before Hollywood gets around to dealing with it?
Here is an idea for what to tell your children:
The man who wrote this book wrote a lot of great stories. But they were great when they were complicated and magical, when his imagination took him into places and stories that were close to his heart.
In his time, people thought it was amusing to make fun of other cultures. We don’t. Read the stories, ask questions, and remember that the person who wrote this story was altogether too human.
Or how about not worrying about it and letting the kids make up their own minds? If they want to associate Arabs and Persians with the Calormen, they will, no matter what someone tells them.
And in case Mz. O’Connell forgot, it is OK to make fun of other cultures; so long as those cultures contain a large number of white Christian males.