1
No matter how many times I heard this story as a child, I always expected Brer Fox to be able to use his considerable intelligence to help himself, rather than expend all his energy trying to harm Brer Rabbit. But my parents' point, and that of the story, was: This is the nature of Brer Fox, and a smart rabbit will never forget it.1
Alice Walker, "Uncle Remus, No Friend of Mine," The Georgia Review 66, no. 3 (2012): 635-637.
2 Ibid.
In the same essay, Walker describes the trauma of her experience of the appropriation of the Brer Rabbit stories by white people—in particular by Walt Disney's Song of the South: “As far as I'm concerned, [Joel Chandler Harris] stole a good part of my heritage. How did he steal it? By making me feel ashamed of it. In creating Uncle Remus, he placed an effective barrier between me and the stories that meant so much to me, the stories that could have meant so much to all of our children, the stories that they would have heard from us and not from Walt Disney.”2 We know that to reference the written form of these stories (which were inherently oral, and therefore inherently intimate) is to immediately misappropriate and perhaps misuse them. But the stories themselves have agency that pre-dates and in some sense transcends the racist caricature of Uncle Remus invented by Joel Chandler Harris to diminish and reduce them to ridicule. We want to re-surface, not ridicule, Brer Rabbit in all of his volatile power; we want to evoke not only the original power of the stories, but also the “slow violence” of their appropriation. In using the Brer Rabbit quotations, we realized we were treading a dangerous line; we decided among ourselves that the conversation that might arise from using the quotes was worth the risk. We are interested in your reaction to both our use of the quotation and possibly to the theme more generally. As it stands, you are one of the only people who has questioned or commented on our use of the quotes, which is surprising to us considering our initial hesitation. Thanks again for your email. Hope to hear from you. Maddie & the lunch 13 Editorial Board
gaming the system |
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