Just so stories Book

What an infuriating book. I don't know what infuriates me more: that Kipling was a racist imperialist colonizer who believed firmly in white superiority and conveyed that in every word of these stories; or that Kipling is such a marvelous writer of the English language.

Kipling the colonizer, imperialist, racist, supremicist, had no trouble at all mugging the oral traditions of the peoples his people colonized to tell his "Just So Stories" to his Best Beloved. No trouble at all mimicking their voices with disgusting condescension, rewriting origin tales, creating new origin tales, playfully interweaving the inevitability of England's rise as though fated (as he does so deftly in How the First Letter Was Written & How the Alphabet Was Made by making his generative tale appear to be something it isn't). Kipling's Just So Stories are propaganda at its most magical. They're friendly propaganda. They're propaganda of subtlety. And Kipling was a master.

And it works so well because Kipling was so talented. Love him or hate him, I think it would be difficult to make a case that he was an untalented writer. What Kipling could do and did do repeatedly with the English language was astounding. He was a master. And his gifts were such that even today countless people I know personally, who consider themselves enlightened folk, make excuses for Kipling. The most common excuse I hear is, "He's a product of his time." But in Kipling's lifetime were men like Richard Francis Burton, Mark Twain, Roger Casement, George Orwell, and countless others, who didn't see the world, or the "white man's" place in the world the way Kipling did. Many were anti-Colonial, anti-Imperial, and not racist at all. Many of Kipling's contemporaries saw colonized peoples as victims, human beings deserving of dignity, not "sullen peoples" to be brought "toward the light." So this main excuse really doesn't hold up, though it's easy to voice because Kipling's stuff is so well written and likeable in its nastiness.

I read this to my youngest daughter, my two year old, and she seemed to be dazzled by the sound Kipling's words made coming out of my mouth. I am hoping she's too young for any of his meaning to take seed in that fertile ground. Because the seeds of Kipling bear only ugly fruit.

One last scary thought: what would the world be like if someone like Hitler had had the literary talent of Kipling. It makes me shudder.