Welcome to Poetry Friday this week hosted by Heidi at My Juicy Little Universe. Thank you, Heidi for hosting.
I’ve been rereading Roald Dahl’s novel, Matilda, today and thinking about how several of his books have apparently been re-written to make the language more polite. I don’t think novels should be rewritten and I’m not the only one. Salmon Rushdie apparently agrees and wrote on twitter, “Roald Dahl is no angel but this is absurd censorship.” We should be able to look back and learn from the classics as a reflection of the time in which they were written. We can learn where we came from, in my opinion.
I LOVE Roald Dahl’s books and I think Matilda is brilliant and one of the funniest books I have ever read.
I can relate to this little girl because I discovered reading through librarians and a school teacher. Parents when I grew up were busy working and hands off in the reading department. They were happy to let teachers teach.
Matilda had worse problems. She had mean parents, but that’s what I love about Dahl, his use of exaggeration is a huge part of his humor. Matilda’s parents were the worst parents imaginable and blind to Matilda’s also exaggerated and brilliant intellectual life.
But Matilda survives her parents idiocy, the TV dinners her mother serves every night after bingo by the television, and her father’s self importance and constant lies. She survives by playing tricks on them, hilarious tricks that her parents never catch on to, like putting hair bleach in her father’s hair dressing and glue in his hat. They deserve every trick!
Matilda, for me, is a celebration of children, teachers and librarians and the magic of school and how it helps young people learn to think for themselves.
So it has discouraged me lately to see the discord and disrespect on TV at school board meetings. Are we simply to assume that all parents know more about education and books than teachers and librarians?
So here’s a limerick for Matilda, who survives her nasty parents and saved, actually adopted, by her teacher:
Matilda Matilda’s mother and dad were selfish, mean and just bad. But Matilda was smart had courage and heart and ended up happy not sad. © Janice Scully
