Black Kids Should Study Larkin
Unherd | TOMIWA OWOLADE
In this excellent piece, Tomiwa Owolade argues that efforts to “decolonize” curriculum are patronizing. It is “based on the assumption that black students resonate most with poetry written by black poets. That is nonsense… Race is not the only thing that defines the life and experiences of a person; I used to think only avowed racists believed it does…This is not inclusion; it is division.”
While Owolade taught the works of Seamus Heaney and Philip Larkin in 2020, constituting, as he says, “one of the best periods of my life,” one of the main exam boards in England will remove both poets, among others, from its syllabus this coming year. “Their justification is simple: the syllabus needs to be more inclusive and exciting. Heaney and Larkin are male and stale. They reflect a bygone era that doesn’t speak to an increasingly diverse classroom.”
The effort is “part of a wider movement to decolonise the curriculum… decentr[ing] white, male authors [and] replacing them with writers who fall into other categories.”
Owolade argues that filtering literature through a “rigidly ideological lens…disables the fundamental quality of any devoted lover of literature: curiosity. It stops us from reflecting on the particular cultural context of a poet or his poetry, and instead takes a reductive view of writers… The fact that great poets from non-white backgrounds are excluded from study is bad. But it is bad not because the identities of such poets are not being “centred”; it is bad because students are missing out on great poetry.”
Assessing writers “on a tokenistic or ideological basis is another form of blindness,” Owolade goes on to explain. “In both cases, the poetic merits of their work are ignored.”
“Those who support decolonising the curriculum see the relationship between non-white and white authors only in terms of conflict,” he says. “They see it as a zero-sum game: we need to decentre white and male writers to empower writers from marginalised communities. But this underestimates the debt that many non-white authors owe to the traditions of Western literature. Writers are always in conversation with each other.”
Owolade then quotes W.E.B. Du Bois: “I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the colour line, I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas. From out of the caves of evening that swing between strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension.”
As for Owolade’s own experience, “The traditions of Western literature and culture belong just as much to black people as white people. It is part of my inheritance… [when teaching], I never felt the need to ‘decentre’ white, male authors or slap on diverse voices for the sake of it. I was simply guided by what has moved me since I was a boy and continues to move me now: the transcendent beauty of great art.”
