Jasper the terror Book

Hm. I have...mixed feelings about how to interpret this one. On the surface, it's a nice story about encountering other cultures and learning their languages and/or traditions in order to better understand them. However, as something written by an American, published in a country where most people really don't speak anything other than English fluently (or at all), phrases like "hiding behind your language" seem negatively targeted at the Other, the people who don't speak our language.

Cosgrove's dedication is to "Ruben Rizo and Asedro, two men who served with me well and with whom, sadly, I couldn't speak. Their spirits will always sing in my heart." This seems like a positive: a memory of men whom Cosgrove admired and would have liked to have communicated with. So why didn't he try to learn their language? Did they know any of his, which is something Americans often expect to happen by default?

And why were the pig-Latin-speaking pigs so negatively portrayed in this book, if it was supposed to be a story about overcoming language barriers?

It reminds me, a little, of Buttermilk Bear, where the bears' and the bunnies' distrust in each other ran too deeply for their children to instantly overcome with their friendship. In that case, it was balanced: the bear and bunny parents were both in the wrong and both needed to open their minds and start to see each other differently. And because their children saw past the stereotypes and actively tried to convince their parents to speak with each other, there's a sense that things might change in the future. (That's what I love about Serendipity books, when the stories are handled well.)

However, here we have Jalopy, an aging (I think?) burro who treks from the desert to a lush valley filled with pigs who initially want him to stay out and stop eating all their grass. Once a small piglet takes pity on him and begins to teach him their language, Jalopy begins to fit in and is eventually welcomed into the community - at which point he rudely rejects them, telling them, "Now that you can't hide [behind your language], you really have nothing to say that I want to hear."

This makes the pigs into villains, which doesn't sit as well with me now as it did when I was a kid. He invaded their territory, didn't initially attempt to speak their language (and thus pay attention to their signs warning outsiders to stay out), and greedily took their resources without offering anything in return. Once he learned their language and seemed like he might settle into their way of life, he was welcome.

What's so bad about this? Why is it a good thing for him to insult them, then return to the others in the desert, his "true friends" (who'd probably never talked about him behind his back, sure), whom he would teach "to speak pig latin, because if they ever traveled north, they would need this shield of language for protection."

Note the word "protection" here. It's a defensive move that continues to make the pigs the "Other" and assumes those from the desert will always need to distrust them in some way.

I think part of my reading of this book comes from Jalopy speaking both in pig latin and in his native language at the end, which implies that the pigs spoke both. Perhaps that's just for the ease of the readers, and we're meant to think that the pigs (other than that one kind piglet) refused to learn Jalopy's language while he was learning theirs. In which case, they're intended to be seen as close-minded and unwilling to learn or change.

The problem for me is that it's unclear, so this book and its message ("Language can sometimes be used as a barrier") doesn't quite work for me.