I was ok with Animal Farm, but...

[intertribal]

Yann Martel:  I needed to find two animals that might represent the Jews. So trading on positive stereotypes, donkeys are held to be stubborn, they’ve endured, in a sense. Jews are historically have been stubborn in a sense, they’ve held onto their culture, to their religion, despite centuries of discrimination. At the same time, we hold monkeys to be clever, to be nimble. Well, historically, Jews have proven themselves to be exceptionally nimble and clever, they’ve adapted to all different kinds of circumstances, all kinds of different countries, cultures, and also historically, they’ve contributed enormously, disproportionately to the arts and sciences.  So trading on those positive stereotypes, I chose, well, here, how can I represent Jews? Well, here, I’ll represent them as this combination, these two animals, monkeys and donkeys. It could also be that the donkey is sort of a representation of the body and monkey the representation of the mind of Jews.

David Sexton:  What is one to say? Perhaps, to be kind, that Martel, not Jewish himself incidentally, is just not very bright.

Yann Martel:  If he says that of me, I wonder what he feels about Art Spiegelman in Maus. In Maus the Jews are characterised as mice. But were the Jews mouse-like in the Warsaw ghetto uprising? I wonder how he feels about that characterisation.

Hey hey hey hey,or: we could not use different animal species to symbolize different groups of people, especially when you're using stereotypical animal traits to match up with stereotypical human group traits.  We could not reduce huge groups of God's creatures to one or two sweeping adjectives.

Just a thought!

Comments

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

I mean that the pressure is to respond to people thinking that if anything is chosen to represent Nazis, that thing must be evil. Cats can't represent Nazis because then cats must be evil because Nazis are evil, etc.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

Ohhh... hmm. Yeah, you're right about that. I would still worry about how other people react to it, but you're right that it's kind of a shame thing that doesn't necessarily need to be there. Huh. I had not thought about it that way.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I agree that it's a tricky situation. Btw, I'm...glad you handled my response the way you did. I don't mean that to be patronizing. I just think this conversation could have turned out ugly if you'd been offended instead. And I tried not to be too offensive, but I did have some kind of strong reactions to your initial post.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

I wrote some heady things in the comment box at first, but then deleted them. I was like, no, you know, that's not gonna accomplish anything, we need to just get to the bottom of this and move on. It makes me uncomfortable, but if you have a strong reaction like that, I want to know, because that means I'm probably communicating something I don't mean to be communicating, or should be thinking more about, or whatever.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

I'm grateful you did, because I really don't want to fight. I usually just let posts like this go for that reason, but I thought I'd voice my reaction tonight.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

Yeah, me neither (want to fight).

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

Maybe I appreciate it all the more b/c it's very much not the sort of convo I can have with Jason right now.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

Ok, this is tripping me out right now, because you're totally right, and I would have thought that that would have occurred to me these days (maybe not in HS, but these days). I mean I listen to fucking Death in June. Wow. That tells you something about how insanely defensive I am of cats. I'm just staggered right now by how un-like me my response to Nazi cats is.