The Lion, The Witch and The Cultural Appropriation of Narnia

This is a letter I am writing to Sally Cookson, the Director of the production of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in December 2017. I cannot find an email for her so I shall send this in a letter to her.

West Yorkshire Playhouse: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe directed by Sally Cookson

I have also made a video blog about this subject which can be seen here.

Dear Sally Cookson,

I wish to write to you about the current production of CS Lewis’s classic The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe.

It was in many ways beautifully realised, Aslan and Jadis being both extremely well represented.

However I was most disappointed to find that you had used the play for a crude piece of social indoctrination. I might not have found it so disappointing if I had not already seen exactly the same thing done at another classic tale of the post-War era earlier this year when I saw the Who’s rock opera Tommy at the Playhouse.

As you know, of course, the LWW was written by CS Lewis during the 1940s and published in 1950. The story is set during the evacuation of children from London. I will pass over the presentation of the children having Yorkshire (or what sounded more like Lancashire a lot of the time) accents coming from London, and the Professor’s house being set in Scotland (for which there is no evidence in the book) since these are minor embellishments that don’t affect the story.

However, the choice of casting of the children was clearly influenced, even should I say determined, by political considerations.

There have been several television, film and theatre productions of the LWW that I am aware of over the years, and all have presented the principle characters (the four children) as they were depicted in the book.  And that depiction is of four English children of the era.  The original illustrations by Pauline Baynes, which have been retained in all editions to my knowledge portray the children as English.

And yet in this production they were not four English children. Three of them were Afro-Caribbean, which is something of an anachronism, since there were no Afro-Caribbeans in London at the time, or if there were, there weren’t many, and given the ages of the children, about eight to fourteen, they must have been born in the early 1930s at the latest. The evidence for there being significant numbers of mixed race West Indians in the evacuation is surely slim, and so we should ask on what rationale this casting decision was made?

There are several unspoken messages here which I believe should be unpacked.

Firstly, this is clearly a story which is intended to appeal to children, and there were a large number of children in the audience. They cannot be expected to know that this is a non factual representation of the children as being of West Indian or mixed race ancestry, since there were few if any of that demographic in the evacuees, so they will be mislead into a false representation of the War years.

Doubtless by now you are saying ‘Why should it matter?’

The reason it matters is because it was clearly a politically motivated choice. It was clearly a political decision to deviate from an accurate representation of the actual characters that CS Lewis wrote, and indeed an accurate representation of England in 1940.

Any significant rewriting needs to be deconstructed and critiqued.  Interestingly one reviewer said “this is a daring adaptation which sets itself a number of challenges and finds creative and theatrically magical solutions to all of them” (British Theatre Guide) and one is left wondering if some of these 'challenges' referred to here were the multicultural rewriting of history to make it more 'inclusive' whilst writing out the actual participants.

The days of Olivier or Welles being criticised for blacking up to play a part are long past, and besides, their roles were intended to portray actual Black people in an era when suitable Black actors were scarce. These children were clearly not intended to be playing White people, or were they? In which case what would be the difference from White people playing Black? It seems to me that you have got yourself into a tangle of post modern deconstructions which cannot be congruently sustained through the implications of their contextual referents.

I should interject at this point that should a West Indian theatre group choose to do a version of the LWW with all black actors, I would have nothing to say, since the context would be clear. If Nigerians want to make a production of it in Nigeria, by all means let them.

The wolf Maugrim played by Ira Mandela Siobhan was not problematic in the way that the three children were because anyone can play the part of the wolf.

But it is the clearly political decision to misrepresent English children of the 1940s as being of West Indian or mixed race heritage in a popular mainstream version at a major theatre, with an audience that was overwhelmingly White that needs to be critiqued.

This is exactly what happened with the production of Tommy that I saw earlier this year.

Tommy’s mother was played by a West Indian woman, and thus Tommy himself was played by an actor of mixed race. One might say that if the ethnicity of the actors is irrelevant, then why was it necessary to have the son of the union of an English pilot and a West Indian woman to be obviously congruent with that union and played by someone of mixed race? This was not in Pete Townsend’s libretto, so why was this done?  An entirely new narrative was being introduced, something about race which had no place in the original was being overwritten for propaganda purposes.

A further subliminal that was included in your performance was the casting of the eldest boy, Peter, by a White boy, while the rest were West Indian or mixed heritage. So the implication here is that the parents separated after their first child and one of them had three more children by a West Indian. Regardless of race or ethnicity, divorce was extremely rare in the 1930s, and remarriage by an English person to a West Indian was surely unheard of. To seek to rewrite the possibilities of history in this way because British society in 1940 was ‘racist’ is dishonest. This is a modern interpretation of a situation which was entirely different from the present world in which we find ourselves. I think there would be outrage if you suggested that Lewis was a racist. There were few more moral men of that generation that he. And I don’t believe he would object to an entirely Afro-Caribbean reading of his story, because it would be clear that that is what it was. Although they would have a different mythic ancestral relation to long winters than the Northern peoples. (Lewis was preoccupied by what he called ‘Northernness’.) But I feel sure that he would have seen through your crude attempt at social engineering which seeks to turn his story to ends for which it was never intended, the deconstruction and displacement of the English people.

These are not how CS Lewis or Pete Townsend envisioned their stories, which were rather set in very English contexts and so we must ask the motivation for these changes?

When we have got past the deflection of ‘Why should it matter?’ it will be grudgingly admitted that this is because these productions are designed to be ‘inclusive’ or some such justification. Perhaps that we, as people of traditional English ancestry, should move over and make room for the ‘new British’.

But these, perhaps well motivated, intentions do not come without a price.

The displacement of English children from their story, and the misrepresentation of the historical context are facts which we should not ignore. This predictable trope has now become de rigueur in theatre and television these days. A queen of France from the fourteen century was recently played by an African woman in a BBC historical drama, which received quite a lot of criticism for its historical inaccuracy, and to my own complaint they replied that there this was a casting decision based on the available suitable actors, an explanation somewhat lacking in credibility.

The anti white racism of the BBC was also recently demonstrated in their advertising for an internship from which White people were excluded from applying for.

It seems that at every turn White English people are to be displaced, not only from the present, but even from our own past.  It has become quite the fashion with the liberal elite who seek to virtue signal that they have abandoned their people.

You may not know that Orwell’s 1984 was inspired as a response to CS Lewis’s That Hideous Strength, a book in which he demonstrates the insidious influence of Marxist ideology on education and society.

Orwell in his turn wrote in 1984 “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

So what you are engaged in is exactly what Orwell himself described. You are rewriting the past in order to control the future.

When you say again ‘What does it matter?’ I reply ‘Why shouldn’t it matter?’

If T’chaka Zulu and members of his tribe were represented by White actors in a theatre or screen production, I think there would probably be outrage, and quite rightly. The cultural appropriation of iconic figures from the past of any group by another if done without a suitable degree of acknowledgement of how it is being presented is indeed outrageous.

If Black historical and literary figures should be played properly in context, then why can’t White historical and literary figures be correctly portrayed too?

Yes, I know you want to make it accessible to other groups than those ‘privileged’ White people, but the vast majority of the audience, at least at the performance I attended last Saturday, were White. Thus the impact that will have been made was one in which the cultural and historical heritage of our people has been appropriated by you and given to another group. You cannot expect all the parents to explain to all the children that there were no West Indian children in the evacuation, the children will just see it and construct in their minds the idea that West Indian and people of mixed heritage were a part of the world of evacuees and of our society then, which they have not.

I have no animosity towards the three children whom you exploitatively used for this, they doubtless have no understanding of what you were doing, and may even have been indoctrinated themselves into believing that there were West Indian children in the evacuation.

Taking this in context with the production of Tommy I can only describe the casting decision made to include these children as an entirely predictable cookie cutter exercise mandated for the deconstruction ~ and the destruction ~ of our society.

It now seems that it is no longer acceptable to portray English people by, well, English people. The influence of cultural Marxism in which every past assumption of our society has to be mixed up and overturned has now become so pervasive that you probably don’t even realise that you are doing it. You just know that you cannot have a cast in which all the White characters are played by White actors. White people can no longer be permitted to occupy the cultural space which our ancestors actually created for us, their posterity.

An immensely successful and influential cultural myth which is a conflation of the Norse, Graeco-Roman and Christian influences that made European civilisation cannot be allowed to stand in its appropriate context with the people to whom these mythologies belong, is the message we are to be given.  The four Kings and Queens of Narnia who were always English (their surname is Pevensie, after a place in Sussex) and ruled over Narnia, which is a mythic version of a magical England, are now to be people of a mixed heritage, and the traditional owners of this mythology, our people, are to be displaced.

We hear repeatedly these days the absurd lie that White people, the English in particular, have ‘no culture’, a suggestion that CS Lewis would have contested vigorously.

However, we will certainly have none left before long if we allow it to be culturally appropriated from us in this way.

I will leave you with a reference to the Kalergi plan. Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi was a European aristocrat from the first part of the twentieth century who is considered the ‘spiritual father’ of the EU. He wrote that he envisioned a future in which the European peoples ceased to be identifiable and became mixed with African and Asian peoples.

The man of the future will be of mixed race. The races and classes of today will gradually disappear due to the elimination of space, time, and prejudice. The Eurasian-negroid race of the future, similar in appearance to the Ancient Egyptians, will replace the current diversity of peoples and the diversity of individuals. (Practical Idealism, 1925)

We should recognise that even if this insane plan is achieved, the Black peoples of Africa, and the Han people of China are so numerous in their own lands that such a plan would have little impact on their demographics, it is only Europeans who would be blended out, because we are a relatively small population which is receiving a massive influx of foreign peoples at this time.

So the social indoctrination in which you are participating is actually one of the early stages of the genocide of the European peoples, by seeking to socially program our children into having no ownership of their past, to not even know what that past was, that their ancestors built and occupied this land for thousands of years before West Indians came here, but rather to culturally appropriate our heritage and give it to others so that we have nothing and become no-one.

I am yours sincerely,

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CS Lewis, Islam and The Last Battle

CS Lewis, Islam 

and 

The Last Battle

I have been a reader of CS Lewis since I was introduced to them by my headmistress who read them to us at my boarding school on Sunday evenings before bedtime.  It is one of my fondest memories.

Of course at the time of I didn’t understand the allegorical significance of Aslan or the deeper meanings intended, but came back to the stories time and again, always finding new levels of meaning in them as I grew older.

Lewis was a convinced Christian, a conversion he reached in the years around 1930, partly influenced by JRR Tolkien, himself a devout Roman Catholic all his life since a child.  This was to come out a great deal more obviously in his works than in those of Tolkien, although both took it as a foundation of meaning in their sub-created worlds.

As I have grown older, and especially in more recent times when I have read and studied their writings in more depth, I have come to understand the historic archetypal forces which they describe in terms of the real world.

Tolkien said that he wanted to compose a mythology for the English, since so much had been lost after the Norman invasion.

This mythology would have to have some parallels or symbolic relations with the real world or else it wouldn’t stick.

His Middle Earth is quite clearly a representation of European peoples defending against barbarian invasion by hordes from the East.  This is a dynamic which Europe has experienced time and again with Attila, the Mongols, the Ottomans, even the USSR, although that had not spread its Iron Curtain across the continent at the time when Tolkien was conceiving Lord of the Rings.

We all know the literary forebears of Middle Earth ~ Beowulf, the Icelandic sagas, Finnish and Celtic influences, but scholars will shy away from the more difficult threads.  Who are the Orcs?

It seems to me to be dishonest to suggest that the geographical location of Mordor and the Orcs do not in some way correlate with Turkey, or the Middle East, or its inhabitants.

The Shire is the safety of northwestern Europe, Gondor is some version of Rome or Constantinople which stands as a bulwark against the barbarian hordes of the East.  Do we really need to argue this?  Are people so politically correct in their pretence that they cannot see the obvious correlations with the geopolitical world of, not only the past, but the present as well?  I recently found that the term 'orc' means 'foreigner, monster or demon'.  Perhaps our forebears made no great distinction between these things.

My previous blog post about Tolkien and Islam

[May I briefly interject here that it is my opinion, having recently read John Buchan’s superb Greenmantle that there is a literary root of the LOTR in that novel.  The journey across country to reach the great river Danube, going down it in a line of boats and reaching the great city of Constantinople (Minas Tirith in Gondor surely).  But the real bullseye was the nine riders who appear at one point, and there are others.  But I digress.]

It is my conviction that both Lewis and Tolkien knew that there were great threats to our civilisation, and that a decline of faith into agnosticism would lead to a vacuum which could be taken advantage of.

CS Lewis had a much more unconventional theological evolution than Tolkien and in the twenties had dabbled in theosophical and other ideas.  One of his closest friends, Charles Williams, is reputed to have been a member of the Order of the Golden Dawn. 

There is much written amongst certain groups about how Tolkien and Lewis were occultists who sought to infiltrate the Church with their heresies.  On the other hand, Marxists claim that they were racist nationalists and xenophobes.

I’m inclined to go with a middle way and accept that Lewis was probably the most influential and widely read Christian writer in English of the twentieth century, and Tolkien was probably the greatest scholar and writer in English of the century.  Whilst the modern cultural left approach them warily, recognising that they form a part of a serious backbone of English literary, religious and cultural national identity which persists to this day, they still take sidelong swipes at them whenever they can find, or invent, an opportunity.

Philip Pullman’s claim that Lewis exercises racist attitudes in The Last Battle for instance has been roundly dispelled, so I shan’t bother to detail that here, but it is that work, the final one in the Narnian Chronicles which I wish to address here.

It occurred to me this Good Friday just gone that there were certain parallels with the actual situation in which we find ourselves at this very time, so I embarked on a quick read of said book (at 165 pages it can be polished off in three or four hours) and found much to feed my curiosity.

The principal idea which had sparked this train of thought was that Tash, the god of the Calormenes had a head like a vulture.  The meaning of this suggests that the god only eats dead flesh.  Thus the followers of Tash are in themselves spiritually dead. 

Whilst Aslan is a lion.  Lion only seek living prey.  The meaning of this then is that the followers of Aslan are spiritually alive, they are vital and thus have the Holy Spirit.

Tash is the principle god of the Calormenes.  They do have some others, Azaroth and Zardeenah, but these seem like minor household deities while the ruling class of the Tisroc and his Tarkaans all claim descent from Tash.

It seems unavoidable to see some conflation between Islam and the worship of Tash, illustrated here by Pauline Baynes from The Last Battle.

On the superficial level, the Calormenes appear similar to Turkish Ottomans or nearby Middle Eastern people.  In itself only a casual association, but there is much more to flesh this out.

        The descent from Tash is reminiscent of the descent from Mahomet which the leaders of the two main branches of Islam claim.  And their society based on the worship of this creature which only seeks the spiritually dead is one which seems to be built on top down domination by the sword, not the high trust co-operation of the Narnians.

But we also find that there have been numerous wars between the Calormenes and Narnia and Archenland, its southern neighbour.  Which we cannot ignore is what has happened to Europe at the hands of the Turks numerous times over the centuries, as well as other incursions into Iberia and the Italian peninsula.  It is hard to be certain, as Lewis is frequently almost deliberately vague about dates and how often, but it seems clear that there have been numerous wars with Calormen, mostly instigated by the Calormene desire to take these free northern countries under its rule.  Also reminiscent of the constant pressure of the East on Gondor, if I may say ˡ.

The image of Tashbaan in Pauline Baynes’ charming illustrations in The Horse and His Boy clearly shows minarets in the Islamic style around what must be the Temple of Tash at the top and centre of the city, and to me is highly evocative of Istanbul, Constantinople as it was known for about 1600 years, while the very name of their lordly class Tarkaans sounds like a conflation of Turk and khan, a common name or ending in Islamic lands deriving from the Indo-European root word meaning king.

The language of the Calormenes is rich with the kind of sayings we associate with Islam and middle eastern potentates ~ May he live forever is reminiscent of the saying Peace be upon him.

We get into more detail with The Last Battle in which Calormenes have been infiltrating Narnia in twos and threes pretending to be merchants and diplomats.  Meanwhile they are assembling a military force at the very heart of Narnia while at the same time dominating the local Narnians.

And here we come to the crunch.  The Narnians are all saying that this is what Aslan has been instructing.  Indeed as the story progresses Tash and Aslan are quickly conflated into a ‘We Are All One’ scenario and the noble Talking Beasts of Narnia are to be caged up while the Speaking Trees are to be cut down and a more productive state of affairs is to be imposed.  (I love Lewis’s dig at communism!)

To my eyes, what we are seeing here is an almost literal account of what is actually happening today.  We hear that the God of Jesus and that of Mahomet are one and the same, although their commandments and their practices are entirely different.  We are told to invite them into our lands, and yet meanwhile they build up covert forces in enclaves which have already struck against us.  Mollenbeek is an obvious example.

What has been described by Dr Kevin McDonald as ‘pathological altruism’ leaves the Narnians vulnerable to foreign incursion because they trust the Calormenes at face value.  This is the vulnerable downside of the living spirit which the enemies exploit.  Many of the Talking Beasts are too timid to fight on the side of right and their own people, slinking off into the woods, or are cowed by the threat of Calormene punishment.  Is this not what we see in the face of Islamic rape gangs?  People too afraid to speak up?

Did Lewis realise what he was writing, or was he just using a convenient stereotype to get over a story?

The images in the works of CS Lewis were spontaneous creations of his imagination which tended to jump fully formed into consciousness, but he did not string them all together until he had understood them.

He was a literary historian.  He knew the story of the Crusades and the endless attrition of the Moors and the Ottomans on Christendom.  It is no coincidence that the God of the Calormenes is shaped like a vulture and has robes like an Aztec priest.  He knew that Islam was the ancient enemy which lurked on the borders of our entire historic awareness like a bogey man in a fairy story and so he represented it as such.  The more important story is of the children and the King and how they behaved with honour and loyalty, while we see that the Ape (whom I imagine as Tony Blair, the chief traitor of our nation) who has contrived this but also been the puppet of larger forces is gobbled up by the demon god.

What is it to be spiritually dead?  It is to wish to build your own life force on the domination of others, of taking their life energy from them, to have no conception of spiritual creativity yourself.

Islam promotes the idea to men that women are mere chattel, whilst Christianity (and some other faiths and creeds as well) believes in the concept of Romantic love, something Lewis himself wrote on extensively in several books.  It is a higher level of spiritual development engaged with a sense of humility before the divine, but also of generosity and forgiveness absent in the Religion of the Sword.

Some of the more politically correct of Lewis’s readers just dismiss The Last Battle as if it were some aberration.  Lewis getting senile, run out of ideas, returning to a second childhood, turning into some right wing bigot, racist, xenophobe. 

One thing I tremendously admire about Jack was his almost reckless disregard for social convention when it came to facing the truth.  And consequently I have absolutely no doubt whatsoever that the Islamic references in his final Narnian story are entirely intended.

While I am at it, may I briefly add that the speculation that some make that Lewis was running out of ideas and wanted to kill the Narnia series have entirely got it wrong.  Michael Ward in his excellent Planet Narnia demonstrates, to my full and complete satisfaction, that there was an underlying pattern behind the books of which he never explicitly spoke but which is clear nonetheless to those with eyes to see.  And I think many would agree that if Lewis had run out of ideas he was a sensible enough chap not to try and squeeze toothpaste out of a tube which had run dry.  It’s also my understanding that the books were not written like some penny dreadful serial with the publisher asking for the next best seller by a certain date, but that he had an organised, overarching plan which he evolved as a whole.  The very fact that there are seven in the Chronicles, the Holy Number, is surely no accident.

Yes, CS Lewis was very much more into the mystical side, at least in some of his works, than was his friend Tolkien.  And it’s my belief that he saw this as a genuine possibility which he felt would be better signalled and preserved in a work of fiction than in some prosaic political commentary that would be forgotten.

And lastly, I should say that it is my firm conviction that both Tolkien and Lewis saw the potential re-emergence of Islam as a danger which lurked always on the horizon.  These are two of the finest minds of twentieth century Christendom and to dismiss that they may have seen this afar off is for lesser minds to scoff at elders they fail to recognise.

It can be no coincidence that both of them produced major, mature works which seem to be themed around the invasion of Europe.  Tolkien at a more mythological level invoking the barbarian hordes of the East, yet nonetheless with certain Islamic resonances (see my blog Tolkien and Islam), and Lewis far more explicitly with The Last Battle.

Coming as they did in the 1950s, in the last wave of traditional Western culture before the Marxists got their teeth into it, the Narnian Chronicles and the Lord of the Rings can be seen as great signposts and warnings that have been left to tell us of the dangers we face, built before the leftist propaganda destroyed the rest of our culture.

Had they come later they might not have achieved the stature that they did.  Were they to be written today, they would be ridiculed, attacked as racist, imperialist, xenophobic.  We see how The Hobbit films were infected with political correctness that went entirely against what would have been true to the story and to Middle Earth.

The works of CS Lewis and Tolkien are edifices which we would do well to value and learn from.  They are voices from the past crying for us to remember who we are, to stand firm against chaos and barbarism, the cruel tyranny of Islam and attrition against the truth of our own spiritual nature and destiny.

ˡ  Gondor: in my recent researches and deliberation about Middle Earth, I came across a Cultural Marxist ‘analysis’ of Gondor.  It claimed that Gondor was an invading power which sought to dominate Middle Earth.  The writer of this piece (I have lost the link) has clearly not properly read the history of Numenor as it was the case that only Elendil, his sons and a few boats filled with survivors of the wreck of Numenor arrived on the western coast of Middle Earth.  This was hardly an invading force.  It was only by their intelligence and mighty works that they established themselves in the lands in which they arrived.  Where else should they go?  There were already Elves in the West of Middle Earth who were friendly to them, and that is where they set up, West of the River, and East of the Sea.  They had no other options.

By today’s standards they would undoubtedly qualify as refugees, but the Men of the West did not try to sponge off the local inhabitants, who were accustomed to a much lower standard of living than the Numenoreans.  Instead they set about building a new civilisation in as close an image to the one they had lost as possible.

So the builders of Gondor and Arnor were far more like entrepreneurs, explorers and inventors in that they brought trade and artisan skills to the West of Middle Earth, as well as building alliances of strength with their neighbours such as Rohan which maintained peace for long periods in the face of chaotic incursions from the tribes of the East.

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