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Paddington – a postcolonial critical perspective, Ziad Azzam
Paddington – a postcolonial critical perspective
How a childhood favourite of Ziad Azzam returned with some challenging questions
I earned my International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma in 1987, at a school in Sharjah. I know that a deluge of questions may now be flooding the minds of many readers. Did the IB Diploma Programme even exist at that time? Yes, it did. Where in the world is Sharjah? Sharjah is one of seven Emirates that make up the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Did I ride a camel to school? No, I did not. It was much faster to catch Photo by Rod Long on Unsplash a ride on the wings of a peregrine falcon, and occasionally (only occasionally, mind you, because of the great expense involved in hiring it) I took a magic carpet to school.
Now that I have satiated your curiosity, I shall return to the topic at hand. The school I attended was international: the medium of instruction was English, many of my teachers in the primary years were either British or Irish, the student body
was a diverse mix of nationalities and, at the time, my school was the only one in the UAE offering the IB Diploma. Not to belabour the point, it even had the word ‘International’ in its name. Generally my teachers were caring and attentive, but some had the unfortunate habit of asking students for their ‘Christian’ names. Out of politeness, of course, I would respond, but it did bother me a bit. I wish I had had the courage then of saying to them: ‘I shall give you my Christian name, Sir/Miss, when you give me your Muslim one’.
As a youngster, I loved to read (I still do). My favourite character when I was about seven years of age was Paddington bear (Bond, 1958). I had all of his stories; posters of Paddington adorned the walls of my bedroom, and little stickers of him peppered my notebooks and school textbooks. It was puppy love in all its manifestations. In my teenage years I took to more serious novels, and one that captivated me was Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902), for here was a bold statement about the immorality of the presence of Europeans in Africa. Furthermore, in my eyes at least, it was and still is a beautifully crafted work of fiction, combining adventure in the physical sense (as the narrator journeys down the river Congo in search of his target, Mr Kurtz) with adventure in the conceptual sense (into the human mind).
Decades after first reading Heart of Darkness, I discovered the controversies surrounding the novella; in particular, Chinua Achebe’s critique in which he accuses Conrad of being a racist (Achebe, 1977), and Edward Said’s later defense of Conrad (Said, 1994). I shall not dwell further on this issue, other than to direct the attention of those who wish to learn more to Morgan Svensson’s 2010 essay. I shall say, though, that the experience opened up a new window for me through which I could critically engage with stories that I had long loved and cherished, including the tales of the little bear from Peru.
Not many nights ago I was reading Paddington – The Original Story of the Bear from Peru (the 2007 picture-book version) to my youngest son, who is four. It was probably the hundredth time he and I had read the story together at bedtime. And questions that, I am sure, had been bubbling away in the depths of my mind began to surface. Why, when asked, does the bear refer to his country as ‘Darkest Peru’? What is so dark about Peru? In the past I would have dismissed the adjective as a tool to inject a bit of mystery, or exoticism, into the narrative. Or perhaps I would have inferred that the author intended it as reference to a particularly dense forest from which the bear may have originated. But now I wonder if I can dismiss the use of the word with such innocent explanations. After all, Bond does not say ‘the darkest part of Peru’, but rather ‘Darkest Peru’, condemning the whole country to ‘Darkness’. Are we to interpret Bond’s ‘Darkness’ as the absence of light, or the absence of knowledge and reason (as in the Dark Ages)? Later on in the story, having decided to take the bear into their care, Mr and Mrs Brown decide to give him a name: ‘We’ll call him Paddington – after the station’ Mrs Brown pronounces after a moment’s thought. Significantly, and up to that point in the tale, the bear is referred to with the pronoun ‘it’. But as soon as an Anglo-Saxon-sounding name is assigned to ‘it’, the bear transforms into a ‘he’. And this is where I am completely baffled by the story. Why, when the bear had demonstrated perfect command of English from his very first verbal exchange with the Browns, did they never think to ask him his name? The Statue of Paddington bear by sculptor Marcus Cornish, at Paddington Station, London
only possible conclusion that I can draw is that the bear’s native name is insignificant, much like his past and the country that had brought him into the world. The bear only becomes worthy of our attention, and indeed humanized, once he takes the name, mannerism and way of thinking of his new English family.
The moral of this tale might seem to be: If you are a teacher of English language or the humanities, and your profession has led you to a country that is not where you were born or raised, then you owe it to the students in your charge to open their minds to the various agencies that may be at play, hidden under the surface of the written text.
I will end here with the following words directed at my old companion, the brave bear from Peru (with apologies for the poor translation): ‘Hola amigo viejo. Debo disculparme, ya que no es mi intención criticarte. Eres la víctima, como otros que han estado bajo la nube del colonialismo. Y si alguna vez leyó este artículo, escríbame y hágame saber su nombre peruano.’
References
Achebe C (1977) An Image of Africa, in Things Fall Apart: A Norton Critical Edition. London: Ed Francis. Bond M (1958) A Bear Called Paddington. London: William Collins & Sons (first publication). Bond M (2007) Paddington – The Original Story of the Bear from Peru. London: HarperCollins. Conrad J (1902) Youth: a Narrative, and Two Other Stories. William Blackwood. Said E W (1994) Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books. Svensson M (2010) Critical responses to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Accessed via http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:356589/ fulltext01.pdf
