OFFENSIVE OINKS?

Let's take a break from all things fluffy, frothy & tasty and talk about something more substantial, shall we? Haha, yeah like the coming election perhaps? Nope, not gonna go there, but something less puke inducing - pigs. Or more specifically, porcine and other related offensive images (at least to us Muslims and prolly Jews) on your child's everyday things.

I've always been a little careful when purchasing stuff for Nunu, especially her reading materials for these images, after the incident when I had to remove this offensive lil feller from Old MacDonald's farm yard. But there has been occasions when I fail to recheck my purchases and we still end up with several books like these.



It's really difficult to get appropriate materials with the of onslaught these iconic pink figures on almost every single INTERESTING children's' book that I see on the shelves. And I can't always screen them all since they're always so carefully cling wrapped. I've asked those assistants in bookstores to help me open the wrap so that I can look inside and I get this total annoyed looks from them! And online sites don't always feature the whole pages so I can screen, but that should not be a problem coz we can always ask them whether there are offensive images in the books (which I should have done for the books above I got from this site, but that's my big fat gundu fault for not doing so)

By the way, why do they always have to put a PINK coloured pig in the book? Can't they think out of the box and use a flamingo some of the time? I mean, you don't really need that pig character playing catch in the background with that duck character on page 4 if all that matters is main character which is the bear with the woolly scarf in the foreground playing with some fishies in the lake? What's with these white people's obsession with pigs anyway?

Not that I have anything against the piggies (coz they're still cute as h*ll) and I have quite high tolerance for them, but I'd like to avoid them as much as I can, coz as you can see, I'd go over analyzing things and I'd feel conflicted although I know I shouldn't be. Eating pork and touching pigs (and dogs) are clearly prohibited in Islam, therefore over the years, even the images are deemed taboo. However, pigs suffer a higher degree of forbiddance compared to dogs.

I asked my wise old Tok once, about this dilemma, and she raised an interesting point. She said with utmost diplomacy that, it is true in Islam, there is nothing wrong with the images per se, but we have think a little ahead when a child is concerned. Her rational is, if the child sees a picture of a pig in a book, and she says it out loud even with total naivety, therefore the word itself, which we all know socially and culturally as impure, will always be at the tip of her lips.

Having said that, I guess although I don't want to be an extremist, there should be supervised limitations. After all, aren't we supposed to keep off things that are 'syubhah'? Moreover, I have to think of the elders too. They won't be so happy to see Nunu reading or playing with these things, at least not obviously, so I have to be careful not to let them go through Nunu's bookshelf if I don't want to get an earful from them. I have to, okay. My mom once used liquid paper to erase a line of a poem from Nunu's book which she thought as blasphemous.

I don't plan to ban these images from my daughter's eyes and knowledge. They're god's creations too. And I think that if my daughter is going to learn about these animals and the offensive stigma they come with in our culture and religious beliefs, then she might as well learn it young, and learn it from me.

And when the time comes when I have to explain to her why she can't use the word pig often because it's not a nice word for a little girl for her to use, but no offense to the little innocent pink animal, I hope I'm well prepared.