I’m not cancelling my favourite books, despite my dark skin troubling their authors

I spent my childhood reading stories by authors who had unpleasant things to say about my race – but this doesn’t mean I have to throw away every precious moment I spent with their characters.

From my earliest days, I remember my mother enchanting me with stories of Enid Blyton’s Magic Faraway Tree. Through her words, we climbed the towering tree together, meeting characters like Moon-Face, The Saucepan Man and Dame Washalot among the branches. I remember being introduced by my father to the mysterious beauty of C.S. Lewis’ hidden forests of Narnia and giggling with my friends under the covers at the ridiculousness of Farmers Boggis, Bunce and Bean in Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr Fox.

The stories are timeless, even if the authors are of another time.

Through these stories, I was transported to other worlds, intoxicated by the sense of escapism they provided. I was transformed into an adventurer, pirate, snake-charmer or astronaut at the command of a page turn, giving me a sense that anything was possible. My love for literature saw me take up English at university, determined to immerse myself even more in diverse, creative worlds.

But I was in for a shock.

My tertiary studies cast a different lens on these worlds, applying critical and post-colonial perspectives to reveal the racism, sexism and bigotry of many of the authors I’d grown up with. I was horrified by antisemitic comments made by Roald Dahl. Many theorists argued the stories of C.S. Lewis were, in fact, inherently sexist. But perhaps most distressing was reading a story by Enid Blyton about a little black doll washing its “darkness” away.

The level of pain this caused was indescribable. For me, it wasn’t simply a matter of reading these authors and stories with a detached, analytical lens. These were individuals who I had grown up with – so intensely connected with my childhood. They were linked with memories of my introduction to language and the feelings of immense love and comfort exuded by my mother and father as they read to me.

I was shaped by the core message of Fantastic Mr Fox, which emphasised the importance of not being greedy, the Magic Faraway Tree and its lessons of friendship, and The Chronicles of Narnia, which taught me to love above all else. How could it be that by virtue of their stories, these individuals – seemingly so intolerant of someone like me, a Sri Lankan woman with very noticeably dark skin – were incredibly formative in making me who I am today?

Beyond my lecture rooms was a wider debate, as the trend of revising certain novels to be politically correct emerged, including Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Agatha Christie’s detective mysteries and even Ian Fleming’s James Bond series. The politicisation of these works coupled with the rise of cancel culture meant I felt obliged to break ties with such books to stay true to my moral beliefs.

How could I reconcile integral parts of my childhood identity with such ugly truths?

A university course on the “Death of the Author” helped me make sense of this dilemma. Coined by French philosopher Roland Barthes in 1967, this theory highlights that the meaning of a text is not determined by the author’s intention, but rather by the reader’s interpretation. I liked this approach to literature. I could interpret and remember these stories in the ways which had always been meaningful to me.

Perhaps it was OK to sometimes take and leave parts of the story. I didn’t always have to see a piece of fiction and the views held by its writer as a “package deal” – something to wholly commit to.

After all, to avoid and ignore these books that I had grown up with was to reject a part of myself. To reject memories of a freeing liberation which came with escaping into my first fictional world. To reject the love that had been poured into the act of my parents reading me books from their own childhood, sharing the magical worlds that they had stepped into at my age.

As one of my favourite authors, who writes under the pseudonym Elena Ferrante, says: “I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors … [they] have had and continue to have an intense life of their own.”

Whether right or wrong, I believe books and their readers have the right to retain their own intense love affairs – independent of the author or anyone else. So, I’ll continue to climb The Magic Faraway Tree with my mother, and explore the hidden forests of Narnia with my father. I’ll laugh with my friends at the tricks played by Fantastic Mr Fox and, most importantly, I’ll share my memories of these stories with my own children one day, so they get the chance to form their own relationships with the words, bringing new meaning and interpretation to these timeless tales.

Satara Uthayakumaran is a writer and student at the Australian National University.