Children's Oral Poetry: Identity and Obscenity

Abstract

We were all children once, and according to children’s folklorist Jay Mechling, that might pose a problem for collectors of children’s folklore. In an essay entitled “Children’s Folklore,” in Elliott Oring’s collection, Folk Groups and Folklore Genres, Mechling begins his argument by saying, “The white, male folklorist recognizes that he will never really know what it means to be a black woman, but we all think we know what it means to be a child” (1986, 91). But our knowledge of what it means to be a child is filtered through a lens that is thick with the years that have passed since we were children, years during which we have forgotten or glossed over much, years during which selective memory has compressed some experiences and expanded others, years during which we have developed our own “presumptions and emotional responses” to the very subject that we think we are treating objectively (91). In fact, some adults, when confronted with certain materials collected by children’s folklorists, deny the reality of those materials or, worse, accuse folklorists of unethical behavior. I, as editor of Children’s Folklore Review, was accused of providing children with obscene materials when I published a series of articles by sociologist Gary Alan Fine on pre-adolescent male slang. My accuser, a local high school principal, neither recognized that the publication was for adults, not children, nor remembered that children of that age, especially perhaps boys, were capable of such language. Thanks to an understanding department chair and dean who defended me and the journal, I suffered no professional ill effects from the situation and CFR has continued on as a successful and, I hope, a well-repescted journal of children’s folklore research.