Tag: Of Mice and Men

Classic book ‘Of Mice and Men’ under scrutiny in Turkey

The Turkish government recommends every student in the country read John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, but now a parent has complained it’s not appropriate, because of a few lines on a couple of pages in the book.

Turkey is no stranger to TV and Internet censorship. But recently, a controversy erupted over a call to censor a book on Turkey’s recommended reading list for students.

The book was John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men.”

Bilge Sanci, the head editor at a publishing house in Istanbul, says she still can’t quite understand the problem. Last month, she says, a parent complained that a book she published was inappropriate for his child. The book in question? The Turkish edition of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men.

But not the whole book — just pages 63 and 64. In fact, Bilge said, it’s just a couple of lines.

“They are playing cards in the village and they say let’s get to the town and hanging with the girls at a house, like Miss Suzie’s house, or something like that,” Bilge said. “That’s it. There is nothing else.”

Miss Suzie’s house is a brothel, though the book never uses the word. Still, the local school board urged Turkey’s Ministry of Education to delete the offending lines.

“They said it is not necessary for a child to know about the girls, about these kind of houses, and this kind of information,” Bilge said. “But the book is telling another story about friendship and many things, and this is only two pages.”

The complaint came as a surprise, because “Of Mice and Men’ is on the Education Ministry’s list of 100 books every Turkish child should read. The ministry quickly dismissed rumors that Steinbeck would be censored.

But some teachers say there’s a growing climate of intimidation. One Istanbul high school teacher who didn’t want to be identified by name out of fear of losing his job says that in 14 years of teaching, he’s never gotten in trouble for recommending a book.

“I believe it’s just chance that no one’s complained about me yet. It could happen anytime,” he said.

The man says he gives his students classic books — a far cry from “50 Shades of Grey,” he says. But recently, he’s noticed a change in the government’s recommended reading list. He says they used to be chosen on literary merit, but now, some make the list just because they have Islamic references.

He worries it’s part of a government effort to make Turkey’s schools more traditional and conservative. He points to a speech that Prime Minister Recep Erdogan gave last year, where he said his government “aims to raise religious youth.”

Osman Koca teaches literature at a religious public high school. These schools, the Imam Hatip schools, teach the standard curriculum, along with Islamic studies. Imam Hatip schools were restricted under Turkey’s secular governments, but they’ve become popular again thanks to the support of the conservative governing party.

Koca is a writer himself. Some of his favorite authors include Emile Zola, Leo Tolstoy and even John Steinbeck. He says he’s not worried about official censorship, and he thinks it’s wrong to question a book based on one page.

“You judge the writer according to this one page. I cannot agree with this,” Koca said.

Still, he doesn’t think 15-year-olds should read about brothels. When someone tells him he definitely knew what a brothel was when he was 15, Koca says this generation is different — they’re more innocent.

“We have to imagine their mental state, they do not know about these things. And they don’t need to,” Koca said. “We should have some norms for the books we assign to a 14- or 15-year-old kid.”

Koca says he will assign “Of Mice and Men” to older teens who can understand its content. For now the Ministry of Education seems to agree. But it’s trying to keep tabs on what teachers assign. Recently, it established a hotline where parents can call to complain about a teacher, a lesson or a book.

The complaints go directly to the head office, which investigates. Some teachers say it feels like a witch-hunt. Even Koca admits he’s been investigated for assigning an unapproved book.

“If you want to suggest something outside this list, you are on fire, you are on a cliff,” Koca said. “I personally suffered from it.”

Koca says he’s become more careful about the books he recommends.

As for “Of Mice and Men,” it’s still on Turkey’s reading list, and sales of the 20th century American classic have reportedly spiked in Istanbul.

via Classic book ‘Of Mice and Men’ under scrutiny in Turkey | PRI.ORG.

February 24, 2013
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.

via John Steinbeck attracts the wrath of parents in Turkey | Books | The Guardian.

January 12, 2013
Turkish writers’ group investigated for ‘insulting state’

PEN Turkey accused of breaking law by condemning musician’s prosecution as a ‘fascist development’

Alison Flood

The Guardian

PEN Turkey

Members of the PEN Turkey board outside the Istanbul Public Prosecutor’s Office

In a twist worthy of George Orwell, writers’ organisation and free speech campaigner PEN Turkey is under investigation in Turkey for “insulting the state” after condemning the prosecution of a musician as a “fascist development”. Ironically, the attack on free speech comes in a week when the Turkish government lifted the ban on many books that have been prohibited over the decades, including The Communist Manifesto.

According to AFP, the lifting of the ban follows the adoption of a bill by parliament in July declaring that the decision to prohibit any book before 2012 would become invalid if it was not confirmed by a court within six months. That date has now passed, and at least 1,000 books are now unbanned. The move, however, has been described as “largely symbolic”, as many of the books were still in circulation, and fresh bans have been sought already this year on titles including Of Mice and Men, which has drawn complaints over “immoral” passages according to Turkish paper Hurriyet.

“Turkey has been bringing a number of its laws into line with the EU and this is among a number of changes,” said Sara Whyatt, director of the Writers in Prison committee at PEN International. “They’re talking about going back as far as Ottoman times, so it is referring to books which have been banned over at least the last century. The problematic part is that they continue to consider new banning of books, including Of Mice and Men.”

Whyatt said that while the unbanning of books is a “positive change”, the case against PEN Turkey “contradicts any positive changes which have been made”. She pointed out that there are “still a large number of writers before the courts and imprisoned, so the situation remains problematic”.

Now the Turkish branch of PEN is also under attack. When the pianist and composer Fazıl Say was called to court in Turkey in June for insulting “religious values” on social media, PEN Turkey condemned the move in a statement on its website. “The international community has been put on alert in the face of fascist developments in Turkey,” it wrote at the time. A complaint believed to have been made by a private individual, under the controversial Article 301 of the Turkish penal code which is intended to prevent “public denigration” of Turkey, has now been lodged against PEN Turkey, and yesterday six members of the free speech organisation’s board were called in for questioning by Istanbul’s public prosecutor’s office.

The PEN members include president Tarık Günersel and the poet and critic Nihat Ate, and if the investigation goes forward, they could face a prison sentence of six months to two years under Article 301.

PEN Turkey said in a statement submitted to the court that its words in June were “an expression of thought and a criticism, that they were not intended as being aimed as an insult. We emphasised that the right to criticise, a constitutional and legal right, was being exercised. As a result, it was requested that a decision not to prosecute would be given.”

The investigation has been widely condemned by PEN Turkey’s sister organisations around the world. PEN International president and author John Ralston Saul described it as an “extraordinary attack”, and “a misuse of a law which, in the context of international freedom of expression standards, itself should not exist”. Jo Glanville, director of English PEN, urged justice minister Sadullah Ergin “to repeal Article 301 and to drop the investigation against PEN Turkey at the earliest opportunity”.

“This and other cases highlight the fact that Turkey has a free expression problem,” said English PEN spokesperson Robert Sharp. “When ill-advised laws are put in place, then those with an ideological agenda will seek to use them to censor words or writing they do not like. This is why we campaign against ‘insult laws’ all over the world – including the UK. Censorship does not begin with the state instantly imprisoning authors and burning books. It begins with individuals using bad laws as weapons against each other.”

The PEN Turkey board members, if prosecuted, would join a large number of writers and journalists in prison and on trial in Turkey. In December, PEN International put the number at 30 writers in prison and 70 more on trial, including publisher and free speech activist Ragip Zarakolu, and Sel Publishing House, on trial for releasing a translation of William Burroughs’ The Soft Machine, and accused of furthering “attitudes that were permissive to crime by concentrating on the banal, vulgar and weak attributes of humanity”.

via Turkish writers’ group investigated for ‘insulting state’ | Books | The Guardian.

January 12, 2013