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Washington (AFP) – Southern US county school board bans acclaimed Holocaust graphic novel ‘Maus’ for content deemed ‘inappropriate’, new installment in states’ curriculum war American conservatives.
In this book, the cartoonist Art Spiegelman recounts the moving memories of his Holocaust survivor father, in which the Jews are represented by mice, the Nazis by cats.
Winner of a Pulitzer Prize in 1992, a first for a comic, “Maus” has been translated into more than 20 languages.
But its content is “vulgar and inappropriate” for 13-year-old middle schoolers, said the McMinn County School Board in Tennessee, which voted on Jan. 10 to remove it from the curriculum until another book is found. on the Holocaust. According to the minutes of the meeting, eight vulgar words and a picture of a naked woman were involved.
Interviewed by CNN on Thursday, Art Spiegelman said he was thrown into “total confusion” before “trying to be tolerant with these people who might not be Nazis” but “who focused on a few rude words “.
Faced with the controversy, the school board justified the withdrawal by deeming the book “not appropriate for study by our students” because of its “unnecessary use of rude language and nudity, and its description of violence and suicides “.
The board said it does not minimize the educational value of “Maus”, nor dispute the importance of teaching “the historical and moral lessons as well as the realities of the Holocaust”.
“We have a duty to ensure that younger generations learn from these horrors to ensure that an event of this nature is never repeated,” its members added in a statement.
The Washington Holocaust Museum, however, stressed on Twitter that “Maus” played “a vital role” for Holocaust education “by sharing detailed and personal experiences of victims and survivors”.
Questioning of teaching
“Given the pronounced lack of knowledge of the Holocaust in the United States, particularly among young Americans, the decision (of the McMinn school board, editor’s note) is beyond comprehension,” reacted in a press release to AFP David Harris, the executive director of the American Jewish Committee (AJC), one of America’s oldest Jewish advocacy organizations.
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The book “explains what happened to millions of European Jews at the hands of the genocidal regime of Nazi Germany,” he added, as Thursday marked the 77th anniversary of the liberation of the German extermination camp. ‘Auschwitz-Birkenau, where Art Spiegelman’s parents were interned. This date has since become Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The removal of “Maus” comes amid challenges to education in conservative US states, which are attacking books dealing with topics ranging from racism to gender identity.
According to their critics, these works in particular encourage white children to see themselves as oppressors of minorities. These conservative activists denounce “critical race theory”, a current of thought which analyzes racism as a system, with its laws and logics of power, rather than at the level of individual prejudices.
Some states, such as Florida or Wisconsin, have thus introduced laws prohibiting schools from teaching that an individual, regardless of “their skin color, sex or origin”, is “by nature racist, sexist or oppressor, consciously or unconsciously”.
Another literary classic, the novel “Beloved” by African-American Toni Morrison, has also recently been the subject of controversy. A college mom from southern Virginia has claimed her high school son had nightmares after reading the book, which tells the story of a former slave girl choosing to kill her child to prevent him from suffering the atrocities of slavery.
But these assaults on cultural works are not the prerogative of conservatives. “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee or “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” by Mark Twain, landmarks of American letters, have been removed from required reading lists by several school boards in recent years for being considered insulting for African Americans.
© 2022 AFP
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