Years ago when I was either four or five years old my parents familiarised me with A. A. Milne’s book, Winnie-the-Pooh. During a recent discussion with my older brother about our memories of the Pooh stories and the setting(s) in which those stories took place he mentioned that my parents also had a 78 rpm record of the ‘Hums of Pooh’. But for our conversation, I would not have recalled this. I still have the original copy of ‘Winnie-the-Pooh‘ that was read to me: it has a bleached and faded red cover, is very worn and the spine has fallen by the wayside. The book itself is the ‘forty-second’ reprint and dates from 1952. So, the book is 72 years old. (I must make absolutely sure that my grandchildren, the twins Anais and Raphaella, take possession of it when I am no longer in the land of the living!)
It may seem strange but, in fact, my parents read me the book when our family was living in Singapore. So, far from the British Isles, Pooh and the ‘Hums of Pooh’ were with us. The geographical settings in which the Pooh stories took place were very different from those distant eastern landscapes that I experienced many decades ago. My brother Christopher, who was a year and a half older than me, may well have made more sense of the stories than I was able to achieve. I was, as I mentioned, only four or five years old. I did, however, remember the map at the front of the book: I liked maps and, somehow, I already knew how to ‘read’ them. The actual drawings (referred to as ‘decorations’) which accompanied the text helped me (very) considerably to get some sort of idea of what was going on: some of the drawings left an indelible mark on me: for example, I do remember being frightened and disturbed by what seemed like the terrifying presence of the angry ‘Heffalump’ hovering so menacingly above Pooh bear whilst he, Pooh, was in bed trying to get to sleep – and then again, hovering above Piglet’s bed when he, too, was also trying to sleep; the drawings vividly represented the fact that Pooh had fallen out of a huge tree and into a gorse bush which had left him covered in what must have been painful prickles. Pooh was also shown stuck in a burrow – and I knew that being stuck like that must have been awful. Things could easily go wrong for Pooh and his chums.
It is conceivable that, since we lived next door to what my parents had described as ‘a jungle’ – a place of relatively untouched ‘nature’ – which had columns of large marching ants, the ever-present threat of snakes and all sorts of worrisome ‘creepy crawlies’ – and the fact that we had to sleep under mosquito nets in order to be protected from the dangerous bites of the mosquitos – and avoid the spikes of lurking catfish at low tide or the stings of jellyfish that drifted in the warm seas – that I knew very well how dangerous ‘place’ could be; I could ‘see’ similarly that the situations in which Pooh and the other characters found themselves had real if seemingly lesser dangers too: there, in addition to the moments I have mentioned, one could get lost (in a mist) or get one’s head stuck in a pot, or get pushed into a stream or fall over and break (or spoil) whatever it was one was carrying. What’s more, the animals in the stories were not always very pleasant; Rabbit was a case in point; but even Piglet told lies and invented stories and Owl was pompous, pretentious and thoughtless and Eeyore was such dismal, miserable company. Since I had these perceptions – perceptions that were probably enhanced by the reading of the text that was transmitted to me by my parents (and their use of what Kristeva calls, the ‘semiotic dimension’) I somehow knew that the environment in which the Pooh stories took place was not exactly a paradise, was not a perfect ‘garden of eden’ – and I also knew that the characters in it were not more appealing to me compared to the boys and girls with whom I played in Singapore. (The boys and girls that I knew in Singapore were, as far, as I could tell, fun and convivial and I always enjoyed their company. (There are one or two photographs of us having the time of our lives with a huge canoe or simply swimming happily together or going to fancy-dress parties and so on.)
Nonetheless I really liked the Pooh stories. I liked the fact that the animals could pass the time without too many obvious constraints: like me, they could get out-and-about and find ways of doing interesting things. (I liked being able to do interesting things in Singapore – such as canoe-ing or swimming or fishing or tracking or larking about generally.) I liked the way the cocksure domineering know-all Rabbit got his come-uppance; I liked the whole idea of an enchanted place – even if there was something mysterious and disturbingly ecclesiastical about it. I loved the prospect of having a pencil case; and, I was amused by the playfulness of the puzzling, funny rhythmic rhymes and songs that Pooh generated. I also had the idea that sometimes it was really good to lie in the sun and do nothing or play skittles with pine cones or compete with others – especially my older brother – during games of Pooh sticks. I think the stories may have supported the obvious truth that a boy or girl can (provided they have not been too traumatised) create wonderful games by using the natural or not-so-natural materials around them. (After all, that is what I was able to do.)
Around thirty years later I read the stories to my two daughters. Reading stories to children can be something of an art. Whether or not I have that skill I do not know – but I would try to enhance the stories by making observations, pointing out details in the pictures or passing judgments as each of the stories unfolded. I remember my daughters being quite ‘taken’ by the experience: they would stare upwards or about them in a defocused kind of way and I could tell that they were following trains of thought and experiencing the pleasures yielded by their imaginations. They were to go on and read all sorts of books – as well as spending a large amount of time absorbing television programmes and films and all the media stuff. (I had a large Panasonic video camera and so, in the early 1980s, they used it to make films on VHS tapes.)
The years passed by. Both my daughters did creative things in the theatre. Both did creative things in Fine Art. Both are feminists. Both, partly as a result of their excellent schooling at Weydon School in Farnham, Surrey and then at Alton College in Alton, Hampshire, also developed a ‘postcolonial sensibility’ of sorts.
I now also have grand-daughters, the twins Anais and Rapahella, who are, at the time of writing, two years and eight months old; I could easily foresee that one day I would be reading ‘Winnie the Pooh’ to them. Part of the reason I had such a clear idea of this is because I would take them to a place where there are six distinct pine trees arranged in a very similar way to the ones depicted on the map at the very front of my (our) old Winnie the Pooh book. And this particular place has many of the ecological features that are profiled in the Pooh stories: in addition to the six pine trees, there are sandy paths, heather and gorse bushes – any number of ‘enchanted places’ – and so on. There are no oak trees, nor is there a stream – but there are Chestnut trees and boggy places. When I am in this heath and woodland setting the twins and I draw this and that in the sand, climb into pits made (presumably) by badgers, follow the tracks of dogs or deer or horses, play with fircones and collect berries and chestnuts. We play hide-and seek amongst the tall ferns and we don’t get lost. (We even collected enough chestnuts to be able to cook them and freeze them in readiness for our Christmas dinner.)
Then something happened: I was given the book ‘Positioning Pooh’ – a collection of academic papers edited by Jennifer Harrison – for Christmas – that is for Christmas 2023. The twins gave me a Christmas card that they had decorated – a card featuring two psychedelic fish and some surrounding red wires. (I was also given a pair of beautiful alizarine-crimson-and-black ‘Burlington’ woollen socks, and two lacquer boxes in which to put things; now that I’m thinking about the mood and ethos of the Pooh stories and the way they play with language and narrative these latter are completely unnecessary and peripheral details … but it’s fun to include them.)
The book, ‘Positioning Pooh’ has turned out to be full of highly stimulating literary criticism and very impressive levels of scholarship; it is provocative, disturbing and illuminating. It has made me think far more carefully about the ways in which children’s literature socialises, programmes and influences youngsters. In one of the chapters, a chapter authored by the PhD scholar Sarah Jackson, the question of ‘colonisation’ and ‘anti-colonisation’ is addressed as it features in the Pooh books. In truth, this was rather a surprise to me. I had not thought to uncover the residues of – or inclusion of – something as potentially unsettling as colonialist ideology that is, according to her, obviously reflected in the Pooh books. I had not really thought of the stories in these terms. So I revisited my understanding of postcolonial theory. The theory itself was partly derived from the study of colonialist culture and ideology – from its origins to its remarkable spread across the globe. It was sobering to be reminded that there is no getting away from the fact that colonial ideology plainly was (and is), highly oppressive; through all manner of means, it was and is profoundly controlling; it has subjugated and continues to subjugate indigenous people; it derogated (and still derogates) their culture(s) and, through various operations (political, economic, social and cultural) it turned (and turns) them into colonial subjects; as a result such subjects often turn to ‘mimicry’ as they try to internalise the ‘superior’ colonial culture – or feel degrees of ‘unhomeliness’ – because they belong to neither the colonists’ oppressor-culture nor to their own native culture. (They do not feel at home even in their own homes). Central and basic to colonial ideology is the practice of ‘othering’; ‘othering’ inevitably takes place in relation to the entrenched colonisers’ belief that they were (and are) the embodiment of what a human should be; and therefore, at its simplest, ‘othering’ divides the world into ‘us’ (the civilised, the superior type) and ‘them’ (the ‘others’, the less civilised, the backward or the savage.)
As I reacquainted myself with postcolonial theory I could see that, in many ways, it is the most helpful theory today for making sense of the social and cultural developments, the creation of identities and the struggles across the globe. (It also explains why the institution, a place referred to as ‘Bramshill’, in which I once worked, had to be abandoned because it had come to symbolise the deeper aspects of colonialism and colonisation.) Everywhere is having to respond to the rejection of colonialism and the reclamation of a pre-colonial past. However, quite how to reject something that is so deeply installed is difficult enough – but trying to ‘reclaim’ a cultural past – since cultures never stand still – is even more problematic.
Yet how does Sarah Jackson (and contributors to the book, ‘Positioning Pooh‘) illustrate the thesis that as, she says, ‘the Pooh stories are not immune from the influence of colonialism’ and ‘clearly reflect their nature as products of the British empire.’ She does this by identifying a number of episodes in the text in which the author parodies the colonising adventure-stories that were once so common in the 19th century literature for boys – such as the ‘expotition to the north pole’ or ‘the hunt for the woozle’; she finds plenty of evidence of ‘othering’ – especially by Rabbit, by Pooh himself as well as by Piglet; there are the colonising actions of Pooh – actions which mirror the appropriations of the colonisers – when he, for example, sought to take the bees’ honey for himself. And so it goes on. In other words, Jackson looks for forms of conduct in the stories that, in form and essence, parallel or replicate the controlling, exploitative and hierarchical beliefs and actions of colonisers. (There is even a hierarchy of Milne-the-author, then Christopher Robin, his son, then the animals in the landscapes – and then hierarchies of control within the animals themselves.)
On top of this, other students of the Pooh books such as Kutzner have asserted that all children are ‘colonised’ – and that earlier pre-Second World War children’s literature (including the Pooh books) is pervaded by the colonialist ideology – an ideology that was ‘everywhere’ in the UK when the books were written. Overall the classics of children’s literature are never immune from the cultural world in which they were produced.
So, in the light of all this, and given my affection for the stories in Winnie-the-Pooh, how was I to respond? How do I now ‘see’ the books. First, I am not entirely convinced that the setting in which the action takes place is as ‘arcadian’ as some critics suggest. It is more dangerous than it is assumed to be. And this raises the possibility that it comes rather closer to mirroring the dangers of the ‘jungle’ – the jungle, for example, that was adjacent to where my family was living in Singapore. It rather suggests that we have to be alert, wherever we are, to the powers intrinsic to nature and the folly of seeing it either as something to be exploited or as a place in which, safely, to escape. Second, I think the brilliant analyses in the book ‘Positioning Pooh’ may well underplay or ignore the dynamic relationship between the text, the reader and the listener. The reader may wittingly or unwittingly accentuate the colonist ideology (often by being unaware of its ‘presence’) or actually emphasise, in one way or another, anti-colonialist criticism. The reader may underline the wrongness or pitfalls of ‘stealing’ someone else’s honey or co-opting others to execute a nasty oppressive plan or even highlight the need to work with nature, wherever we may find ourselves, rather than against it. The ‘enchanted place(s)’ may be presented as sites in which marvellous transformations of being can occur – and so on. Even if significant traces of colonialism are reflected in the stories there is also plenty of evidence that the colonial aspects are held ups for ridicule; and if, as Jackson suggests, newcomers to the heathland and the woods, are obliged to live in some kind of ghetto the rest of the inhabitants are denied something – they are diminished in some way: they miss out on the vitality of Tigger or the assiduity of Kanga.
I am also not convinced that the texts are ‘syrupy’ sweet and overly sentimental as some critics seem to think. They suggest a ‘place – a world or a community – where things go right and things go wrong, where just about everybody has shortcomings, weaknesses and liabilities to which they (we) are susceptible. The controlling and apparently knowledgeable ‘beings’ are fallible, dangerous – and ‘all too human.’ Love matters – even if (sadly) it is not shared equally.
The overall idea that we are all more or less colonised and cannot ever escape the particular way we have been socially programmed is worth taking very seriously. And the great thing about books such as ‘Positioning Pooh’ or even Daphne Kutzner’s ‘Empire’s children’ is that they oblige us to be acutely sensitive to the hidden and very negative aspects of colonialism that are embedded in seemingly innocent children’s literature.
So, I shall read the stories to Anais and Raphaella as a sensitively as I can – and when we next see those six pine trees in the Bourne Woods, close to Farnham in Surrey, we can scurry around looking for pine cones and then we can ….
Go Ask Alice 