Political life sometimes resembles those board games that are all the rage at Christmas. These pastimes, traces of which can be found even in Mesopotamian tombs, derive their name from their ability to express the sociability and mores of their time. How not to see, for example, in Monopoly, a concentrate of the values that modern capitalism exalts? Or in Clue, the craze that developed throughout the XXe century for the detective novel? Haven’t video games also contributed to tilting our world into a virtual and technological universe?
The decision of toy manufacturer Mattel to modify the rules of Scrabble by banning words which the publisher claims “constitute incitement to hatred and discrimination” should not be taken lightly. If the magazine is to be believed The Express, after universities, numerous state corporations, museums and several big names in communication and cinema, the company that owns the rights to the game of Scrabble outside the United States has decided to comply with the new neo-puritan catechism that has courses in this country. Despite the opposition of the editorial board, more than sixty words should be banned from the next edition of The Scrabble Official, published by Larousse editions, the bible of the International Francophone Scrabble Federation, which has more than 20,000 members.
On the menu, insults of a sexual or ethnic nature and slang words such as “poufiasse”, “schleu”, “tarlouse”, “travoy”, “wimp” or “bamboula”. In his ideological delirium, Mattel even wanted to banish the word “bitch”, but not its masculine equivalent (“bitch”), men being able to suffer all the snubs in the world without the multinational taking offense. In the United States, where this new McCarthyism comes from, the manufacturer Hasbro had already amputated the dictionary of more than 400 words. Among them, we even find the words “Jesuit” (Jesuit) and “Jew” (Jew), which the English-language publisher considers pejorative.
We knew the cache-sex of the n-word. We just suddenly invented the words in P, S, T, B, J and I forget some. Strange paradox, the more the dictionary shrinks, the more letters will have to be added to the alphabet! We will say that it is only a game and that none of this has any consequences. This is also what we believed the first time a rumor raised the possibility of modifying the title of ten little niggersthe bestseller by Agatha Christie. Who would have thought, then, that one could lose one’s job today for simply mentioning white niggers of americaby Pierre Vallières, or theNegro anthologyby Blaise Cendrars?
It was to underestimate the spirit of submission that reigns among our elites. As a connoisseur of the United States, the writer Romain Gary was not mistaken. From 1970, in white dog, he remarked that “the hallmark of the American intellectual is guilt. To feel personally guilty is to bear witness to a high status moral and social, show your credentials, prove that you are part of the elite. To have “bad conscience” is to demonstrate that one has a good conscience in perfect working order and, to begin with, a conscience tout court”. However, the writer could not imagine that one day all the Western elites would take themselves for Americans.
A French publisher returning from the Salon du livre de Montréal confided to me that it had been suggested to him to do as in the United States and submit his books to ” sensitivity readers “. These self-proclaimed representatives of various ethnic or minority groups have the role of censoring what might offend them. “It’s the end of publishing,” he told me. You can’t publish books to suit everyone’s whims. »
With this fear of words, who would have published Michel Tremblay, whose vocabulary had until then been deemed filthy and therefore unworthy of the theater? And Michel Marc Bouchard, whose play The rolls bears a title that is ambiguous to say the least? We can’t imagine the number of films, like those whose dialogues Michel Audiard signed, that will have to be censored. This Puritan delirium almost makes us regret the old bans on blasphemy. At least, at that time, the censors were recognizable by their cassock.
From the censorship of words to that of books, there is only one step. We are surprised, however, at the few cases that these blacklistings arouse. As if our media and cultural elites had taken their side. There is something disconcerting about this that helps us understand how the most deleterious ideologies have been able to spread throughout history without lifting a finger.
Reading these lists of forbidden words from another age, one thinks of the time of Voltaire. In a prophetic text entitled Of the horrible danger of reading, the polemicist was ironic about the Grand Mufti of the Sublime Porte lending him a speech denouncing “the pernicious use of the printing press”. Above all, he said, it was important not to “dissipate ignorance” and that in all conversations one should only use “terms that mean nothing”.
Would he find a publisher today? In between games of Scrabble, this could be a healthy Christmas read.