Blacklisted

Can books have a moral influence on our lives? I have long thought so, though it’s an opinion that nowadays I tend to keep to myself. Confess it to any of the multitudinous practitioners of contemporary crit-theory-speak who have hijacked the humanities and you’ll be laughed to scorn. “Bravo! Matthew Arnold, I presume?”—“Oh, come on! This is the twenty-first century, not the nineteenth. You can’t still believe that old liberal humanist crap?”—“Use your eyes, man. Are you seriously suggesting that reading literature has made us any better than anyone else? You must be joking.”

The scoffers have a point, of course. And perhaps it’s not surprising that academics rarely get beyond their intellectual games-playing when their careers depend on proving how much cleverer they are than other people, and when the accepted way of doing that (for those in the humanities) has been for at least the last twenty years to show that a piece of writing means just the opposite of what it seems to be saying, or that it can’t actually mean anything at all. But I go on believing, in the teeth of the evidence, that books can make a difference to how people behave—if they have ears to hear.

It was Shakespeare who clinched this belief, at the outset of my teaching career nearly forty years ago, in the school I’d been posted to in the north of Uganda, not far south of the border with Sudan. It was only a few years after independence; the jubilation at having thrown off the shackles of colonialism was still strong. But English itself—the language—remained in Uganda and Kenya the official language, the language of education and government. All other subjects were taught at secondary school through the medium of English, and English remained the most important subject on the syllabus from the point of view of a pupil’s employment prospects. The pupils were under enormous pressure to succeed: in many instances, perhaps most, a family could afford to send only one son or daughter (or niece or nephew) to be educated. The chosen ones carried the expectations of whole extended families on their backs: success at school, it was assumed, would lead to a well-paid job; the earnings from that job would repay the family that had provided the fees, and would enable other siblings to be educated. Education meant prosperity and prestige. Those sent to be educated were relied on to bring these things to their families.

But English was the key to success, and English was the language of the whites. The more politically-minded of the students regarded it as the last vestige of colonialism, and it was fiercely—and understandably—resented. What sort of a triumph is it to get rid of the colonial oppressors if you are stuck with their language? And if you still have to rely on them to come and teach it to you? Is this independence? Thus native English speakers, though much in demand as teachers, were seen as a necessary evil. If they were Australian, say, or even (back then) American, they were at least absolved of any part in colonialism; if they taught science or maths, at least the subject matter was reasonably neutral. If they were obviously British (as I then was), and taught English, they were the living embodiment of the oppression that the country had fought so hard to get rid of. If they happened, moreover, to have been sent to a remote school where most of the pupils had never previously been taught by a native English speaker; if they labelled as errors turns of phrase that had not drawn comment from any former teachers; and if, as a result, their teaching could lead people to think that they cared more about the suppression of the non-English than about the encouragement of a home-grown style—well, is it any wonder that they were headed for trouble?

I have never been any good as a teacher of language, and the chief reason for this is that I’m impatient with errors. (This will of course be an invitation to readers to write triumphant letters pointing out all the mistakes I make myself—and I hope I shall have the grace to accept their comments with humility.) I admit that apostrophes (to take the most obvious and mechanical example) are an artificial, fairly recent, and relatively unimportant convention. If Chaucer and Shakespeare got by without them, why shouldn’t we? If we don’t need them in speech, why must we put them in writing? Since the possessive apostrophe may well have originated from the mistaken belief that the king’s crown is an abbreviation of the king his crown, can it really be a crime to leave it out? Robert Burchfield is surely right when he claims that “the time is close at hand when this moderately useful device should be abandoned” (and if anyone is qualified to pronounce on such matters, surely it’s the former editor of the Oxford English Dictionary and reviser of Fowler’s Modern English Usage). But if your job is to teach people how to write in a form of language that won’t get them derided for their ignorance and won’t cause their job applications to be thrown into the waste-paper basket before the reader has reached the end of the first paragraph, do you not have an obligation to teach them the difference between its and it’s, to write hers not her’s (albeit that Jane Austen wrote the latter), and the pupils’ mothers but the children’s games?

I would go further than this. I’d say that if you fail to teach your pupils the basic skills of literacy in a society in which literacy is prized, or in one in which illiteracy is scorned, you disadvantage them for life. And I do not believe you can teach these skills by letting them write whatever they want, without correction, for fear that correcting them inhibits their freedom of expression. When errors go uncorrected, they are assumed to be acceptable; they become ingrained; they are fixed.

The majority of school leavers since the 1970s (to judge from the poor literacy of most of those who go on to university, whether in developing countries or in the West) are the victims of an educational system that has worked for the last thirty or forty years on the principle that to correct errors is to inhibit learners and to suppress their individuality. The motive is impeccable, the result catastrophic. Pupils from schools where English continues to be taught traditionally come out with a lifelong advantage. They can express themselves with clarity and precision. They have power.

It follows that, as a teacher, I make a practice of correcting errors in written English and of deducting marks for poor expression. Of course there’s a conflict here: you can’t study the history of the language without coming to recognise that linguistic change is inevitable, that today’s error is tomorrow’s accepted form. Children is historically wrong: it would have been childer in the Middle Ages, which was already historically wrong, since before the Norman Conquest it had been cildru, and before that cild (the same form as the singular). The plural of cow (Old English cu) is correctly cy: the biblical kine is an error (by analogy with oxen); cows is a further error (by analogy with most other plurals in -s). But cows is now right: the other forms are wrong. Historians of the language are necessarily descriptivists when it comes to the past, since what they show is that language is always changing; but (like me) they tend to be prescriptivists in the present, because they feel they’ll be failing in their obligations to their students if they don’t point out those errors that have not yet become acceptable.

This prescriptivism made me unpopular in East Africa—particularly amongst the boys. Some of them reacted as if their masculinity were being threatened, or as if the low marks they got from me were causing them to fail, whereas the aim was to help them pass by curing them of those errors that would otherwise make them fail. When one of the boys told me one day—after getting his essay back covered in red ink—that I looked like Ian Smith (this was not long after the Unilateral Declaration of Independence in what was then Southern Rhodesia, in the days when Robert Mugabe was regarded throughout Africa as a hero), I began to feel distinctly edgy.

But I continued to believe that I owed it to them to correct their errors, and I thought I’d try to target the most frequent: I’d make a hit list of these recurring errors, give all the pupils a copy, make them go through their work carefully before handing it in, looking for those errors in particular—errors that would be seized on by the predominantly native-English-speaking examiners as evidence of interference from the mother tongue (“We reached at home”; “He made her cried”; “All what they say”; and so on)—and would deduct a double penalty for any that got through the net. This was in direct contravention of one of the popular linguistic theories at the time—that you shouldn’t write errors down, because seeing a thing in writing makes it look acceptable (though how the theorists managed to square this with the notion that you should leave those same errors uncorrected in the pupils’ own work I was, like Gulliver in the Academy of Projectors, “not skilful enough to comprehend”)—but the pupils supported the idea when I talked to them about it before drawing up the list. They thought it would be helpful to have a list of the things to be avoided.

The trouble was that I called the wretched thing “The Blacklist”. Criminal stupidity? In retrospect it looks like it. But since I meant no offence by it, I did not foresee the offence it would cause. Blacklist is a term that has been in use in English for nearly 400 years; it has nothing to do with skin colour. The figurative uses of colours are notoriously elastic. Green is generally considered a soothing colour (as in vegetation), yet it is also (figuratively) the colour of jealousy, of rotten meat, of inexperience, and of nausea. White may be the colour of purity, but it is equally the colour of surrender, of cowardice, of deception, and of hypocrisy (“There must be no whitewash in the White House”). If you use white in any of these senses you do not thereby imply that you think people with “white” skin are virtuous or are cowards or deceivers: it has nothing to do with them. One may say one is in a black mood without casting aspersions at people with “black” skin. And one can put something on a blacklist with equal innocence.

But on the afternoon of the day on which I distributed the list, Jackson Odur came to see me. He was a gentle and friendly boy. He was also in the literature class, a small group of highly motivated students who had chosen a voluntary subject that was regarded as difficult. One of the set texts was The Merchant of Venice—a text that was instantly comprehensible, in spite of the difficulties of the language, because the two Asian boys in the class (sons of the local Pakistani shopkeepers) were in precisely the situation of Shylock in the play: they were of a different race from the rest of the class, and from the community at large; they practised a different religion; they had the money; and they were hated. (When Idi Amin came to power shortly after I’d gone back to England, he earned instant adulation amongst the indigenous population by expelling the Asians from Uganda—just as Edward I had expelled the Jews from England nearly 700 years previously.) That class knew what the play was about; they understood why it mattered.

“I hope you will not mind me coming to see you,” said Jackson. “Some of the boys are upset about that list you gave us this morning. They do not mind you making a list of mistakes. They think it is a good idea. But they do not like you calling it ‘The Blacklist’. They are insulted. They think you are despising them.”

“Is that what you think, Jackson? Are you insulted?”

“Ah, no. I understand you do not mean to be insulting. But I also understand why they are upset.” (He might have said, in today’s idiom, “I know where they’re coming from.”) “Some of them are very angry. There may be difficulty when you come into class tomorrow. I thought it best that you should know.”

I was deeply touched that Jackson had taken the trouble to come and talk to me. If the boys were as angry as he said (and I had no reason to doubt him), he was risking at the very least unpopularity, and quite possibly physical violence, if he’d been seen coming to the house I lived in on the edge of the school grounds.

“Do you think I should raise the subject tomorrow, myself? Maybe I should say (without mentioning you) that I understand I’ve unintentionally caused offence, and offer an apology? Would that clear the air?”

“I think that is a good idea. But it will not be easy. Some of them may still be angry.”

And so indeed they were. I explained that I had not intended to be offensive. I pointed out the elasticity of terms for colour. I apologised for having caused offence inadvertently. It was to no avail.

“In our culture we do not accept apologies.” (This from a boy who had always struck me as friendly.)

Impasse.

At this point Jack Okello stood up to speak: a tall, thoughtful, dignified young man, very good at English; like Jackson, he was in the literature class. He spoke slowly, and with care.

“This is a complex matter,” he said. “It is difficult to be calm and reasonable when you are upset. I am sure you did not mean to insult us. I have talked to others who agree with me. But we feel insulted. I accept your apology—even though it is against our culture. But apologies do not solve things. I think you must accept that this word blacklist is hateful to us, even though you have explained why it should not be. Let us destroy this copy that you have given us. You can show your goodwill by giving us another copy, with a different name.”

It seemed a fair and an honourable proposal, and I said so. But now I was worried about the name. What could I call it that would not cause offence, but that was distinctive and memorable? Suddenly it came to me.

“Let’s call it ‘Howlers’: that’s what my Latin teacher used to call our bad mistakes when I was learning Latin.”

“What does it mean, ‘Howlers’?”

“A howler is a glaring mistake, a mistake that cries out to be noticed—like the ones on the list. These are the mistakes that are going to jump out from the page and hit the examiner in the eye—mistakes that will show you are translating an idiom from your mother tongue into English instead of using a native English idiom. The point of the list, remember, is to help you notice these mistakes, so that you can correct them and not lose marks for them in the exam.”

But one of the boys had his finger in his dictionary.

“The dictionary says a howler is an animal that howls, especially a kind of monkey.”

“Well, that’s one of its meanings, yes; but in a linguistic or an educational context like this it means a bad mistake: sense three in your dictionary—‘a blunder’.”

“You are calling us animals.”

“No, of course I’m not.”

“First you insult us by putting us on a blacklist; now you are calling us monkeys.”

“That is not my intention at all. But if you truly believe it is, then obviously we shall have to call the list something else.”

And so we did, though what we called it now escapes me. But what made me saddest about this incident was the realisation, from the reaction to howlers, that for some of the boys the damage was irreparable. Because some of them interpreted my use of blacklist as a calculated insult, they wrote me down as a white supremacist. From that moment on, for those boys, my every action was suspect. Give a dog a bad name and hang him? I got myself one; and from that there was no recovery.

Naive I undoubtedly was, and probably still am; yet I cannot help thinking it more than mere coincidence that the two young men who put their own safety at risk to prevent this ugly situation from turning into a full-scale race riot had been reading The Merchant of Venice.