John Steinbeck attracts the wrath of parents in Turkey

John Steinbeck attracts the wrath of parents in Turkey

Both Of Mice and Men and José Mauro de Vasconcelos’s My Sweet Orange Tree were declared unfit for educational use – though luckily the culture minister had other ideas

Kaya Genç

The Guardian

East of Sweden … John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men faced isolated calls for censorship in Turkey. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis

A few months into my secondary school in Turkey I was assigned to read three books that changed my life for ever: Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck, My Sweet Orange Tree by José Mauro de Vasconcelos and The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger. Their sexuality, slang and angst were hardly news to those of us already familiar with such matters. What impressed us were the adult minds who had the ability to put our childhood problems into perspective.

Last week, the first two of these books were in the headlines of Turkish newspapers for all the wrong reasons. A parent in Istanbul had complained about Vasconcelos’s tale on the grounds that it was obscene, and called for the teacher who assigned it to face an investigation; another in Izmir found Steinbeck’s work unfit for educational use and wanted parts of the text removed.

The culture minister condemned the censorship calls as tactless (both books are on the education ministry’s list of recommendations). His choice of words seemed perfect: the complaints showed a lack of sensitivity in dealing with children and their issues. Zezé, the protagonist of My Sweet Orange Tree, is the five-year-old son of an impoverished Brazilian family who wants to grow up to become “a poet with a bow tie”. In Of Mice and Men, two men working in a ranch visit some prostitutes. I am yet to be convinced that any reader of Steinbeck will end up at the local brothel after reaching the devastating finale of that short novel. Nor can I believe Zezé’s use of slang will make eccentric poets out of readers (although I sometimes wish it did).

Perhaps the problem has partly to do with etymology. In Turkish the word for literature, edebiyat, comes from the word edep, which may be translated as decorum or manners. In secondary school, it is precisely those works that question decorum that become favourites with pupils. These titles make adults out of them; attempts to ban such books would constitute banning adulthood, which is absurd. Now all I hope is that nobody thinks of filing a complaint against Holden, the true teenage rebel.

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