Why does Pinewood Prep include these novels in their curricula?
Homegoing – AP Lit
The use of Homegoing due to their many sexual scenes including the explicit sexualization of children, explicit masturbation while coercing a couple to have sex, and other gratuitous explicit sex scenes, are inappropriate for Pinewood students, should not be part of Pinewood curricula, and stands in stark contrast to Pinewood’s mission and reputation.
Hamnet – AP Lang
Not to be confused with Shakespeare’s Hamlet, this novel provides(and celebrates) the explicit and graphic statutory rape of a minor by a 26-year-old woman so that she could get pregnant and force her parents to allow her to marry him. How soes this align with Pinewood’s mission?
Beantree.- AP Lang
A self-proclaimed political writer, Kingtree promotes illegal immigration while going out of its way to silence any other perspective on illegal immigration. I thought Pinewood did not take political stances. The inclusion of this novel in Pinewood’s curriculum begs the question: what is Pinewood’s stance on illegal immigration?
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Homegoing
Here are excerpts from Homegoing (by Yaa Gyasi, published in 2016, used by AP Lit). This book was assigned to read in its entirety in 2021/22, 2022/23, and 2023/24. Due to time constraints, the current 2024/2025 AP class will only be analyzing specific passages.
Page 12: Matters were only made worse by Effia’s blossoming beauty. When she
was twelve, her breasts arrived, two lumps that sprung from her chest, as soft
as mango flesh. (parent: Why does the reader need to know that a 11-13 year-old child’s breasts are as soft as mango flesh? )
Page 141. Inseparable and mischievous. Ohene had discovered that the stick between his legs could perform tricks…Ohene had showed Abena those tricks.“See?” he said as they watched it lift when she touched it. “What does it feel like?” she had asked. He shrugged, smiled, and she knew what he felt was a good thing. … “Lie on top of me!” she demanded, remembering what she’d seen her parents do so many times… “We cannot do that until we have had our marriage ceremony!” Ohene said, mortified. …. Finally that night, Abena had been able to convince Ohene, and he had fumbled around, thrusting at the entrance until he broke through and she hurt, thrusting inside: once, twice, then nothing. There was no loud moan or whimper as they had heard escape their fathers’ mouths. He simply left the same way he had arrived.
Page 28 “Excited now, he pushed into her, and she squeezed her eyes as tightly as she could, her tongue circling her lips. He pushed harder, his breathing heavy and labored. She scratched his back, and he cried out. She bit his ear and pulled his hair. He pushed against her as though he were trying to move through her. And when she opened her eyes to look at him, she saw something like pain written across his face and the ugliness of the act, the sweat and blood and wetness they produced, became illuminated, and she knew that if she was an animal tonight, then he was too.
Page 216 “Well, why don’t you come over here and give her a kiss?” the gray suit
asked. He had already unzipped his pants with his left hand. With his right hand, he stroked his penis. “Don’t worry, I won’t touch her,” he said. And he kept his word. Robert did all the work that night while the blue suit guarded the door. It wasn’t more than a few tear-stained kisses and carefully placed hands. Before the gray suit could ask for Robert to enter her, he came, a shuddering, breathy thing. Then, immediately after, he grew bored with his game.
Page 47 “…When she heard the soft moaning, the quickened breath, she turned to face the wall of the hut. Once, just once, she had watched them where they lay, the darkness helping to cover her curiosity. Her father was hovering over her mother’s body, moving softly at first, and then with more force. She couldn’t see much, but it was the sounds that had interested her. The sounds her parents made together, sounds that walked a thin line between pleasure and pain. Esi both wanted and was afraid to want.
Page 52: The soldiers looked around and the women in the dungeon began to murmur. One of them grabbed a woman on the far end and pushed her against the wall. His hands found her breasts and then began to move down the length of her body, lower and lower still, until the sound that escaped her lips was a scream. He put her on a folded tarp, spread her legs, and entered her. She screamed, but he placed his hand over her lips, then put his fingers in her mouth. Biting them only seemed to please him, and so she stopped. She closed her eyes, forcing herself to listen instead of see…
Page 54: The soldier shouted something, but they didn’t understand. He grabbed
them by their wrists, dragged them from atop or underneath the bodies of
other women so that they were standing upright. He stood them next to each
other in a row, and the governor checked them. He ran his hands over their
breasts and between their thighs. The first girl he checked began to cry, and
he slapped her swiftly, knocking her body back to the ground….When he ran his hands between her legs, his fingers came back red.”
Page 64 “Cudjo never missed a step in this dance, and his body, both forceful and controlled, awed Quey. Lately, Quey had been thinking about Cudjo’s strong arms encircling him, dragging him down to the ground, Cudjo’s body on top of his.”
Page 64 “I said this arm is small. It feels soft in my hand, brother.” Without warning, quick as a stroke of heat lightning, Cudjo locked Quey’s neck into his arms. “Soft?” he asked. His voice was hardly more than a whisper, a wind in Quey’s ear. “Careful, friend. There is nothing soft here.” Though Quey was losing his breath, he could feel his cheeks flushing. Cudjo’s body was pressed so close to him that he felt, for a moment, that they were one body. Each hair on Quey’s arms stood at attention, waiting for what would happen next. Finally, Cudjo let him go.”
Page 66. Quey knew he should tap the ground three times, the signal to end the match, but he didn’t want to. He didn’t want to. He didn’t want Cudjo to get up. He didn’t want to miss the weight of him. Slowly, Quey relaxed his body, and he felt Cudjo do the same. The boys drank in each other’s gazes; their breathing slowed; the feeling on Quey’s lips grew stronger, a tingling that threatened to draw his face up toward Cudjo’s.”
Page 107 For the entire week after, his body had taken over the excuse-making for him, his penis lying limp between his legs each time he went to her, even on the nights she braided her hair the way he liked it and rubbed coconut oil on her breasts and between her thighs…James had not forgotten Akosua. He could see her every night when he slept, her lips and eyes and legs and buttocks moving across the field of his closed eyes.”
Page 121 They kissed, and whatever clothes Anna hadn’t gotten to, Jo made quick
work of removing. He tasted her and could feel more than hear the pleasure it sent through her body like a current, the way she stifled her moans so the kids wouldn’t wake up, an expert at this after many nights and seven children. They worked quickly and quietly together, hoping the dark would mask their motions if one of the children happened to be peering through the curtain, unable to sleep. Jo grabbed onto Anna’s butt with both of his hungry hands. As long as he lived, it would always be a pleasure and a gift to fill his hands with the weight of her flesh.
Page 148 Soon her lips were meeting his. … Abena took off her wrapper and heard Ohene Nyarko suck in his breath, removing his own. At first they just stared at each other, taking their bodies in… He reached for her, and she flinched, remembering the last time he had touched her… Now Ohene Nyarko pinned her arms down to the hard red clay. She bit his arm and he growled, letting go, until she hugged him back toward her. He moved like he knew the scenes that were playing inside her head. And she let him inside her. And she let herself forget everything but him. When they had finished, when they were sweaty and spent and catching their breath, Abena laid her head against his chest, that panting pillow, his heart drumming into her ear.
Page 194 That night, Crippled Man turned Crazy Woman onto her back and entered her,
forcefully at first, and then more timidly. She opened her eyes to see him working more slowly than he used to, using his arms to push off, push in, his sweat dripping slowly off the bridge of his nose to land on her forehead and trickle down to meet the floor.
Page 276. That week the Bradford pear trees started to bloom. At school everyone said they smelled like semen, like sex, like a woman’s vagina. Marjorie hated the smell of them, a reflection of her virginity, her inability to liken the smell to anything other than rotting fish.
infoblock
Hamnet
Here is an excerpt from Hamnet (by Maggie O’Farrell, published 2020, used by AP Lit) where the 26-year-old female protagonist, Agnes, statutorily rapes a minor, the “tutor,” in order to get impregnated by him so that she can force her parents to allow her to marry him.
Page 59 “For a moment, Eliza thinks he might be doing the thing that boys—young men—do sometimes. She has enough brothers to know that there is something that happens in private, and they are ill-tempered if interrupted.” (page 59)
(editor: Generalizes all men and is an offensive attempt to shame and embarrass men. How is this appropriate for Pinewood’s mission and for 16-17-year-olds? Let’s reverse the roles and see if it is offensive: “For a moment, John thinks she might be doing the thing that women do sometimes. He has enough sisters to know that there is something that happens in private, and they are ill-tempered if interrupted.” I?s that not offensive to women?)
pages 67-71 (editor: Context… A 26-year-old woman statutorily rapes a 17-year-old boy in order to get pregnant so that her parents will be forced to allow her to marry him. This statutory rape is graphically and explicitly described and celebrated—at no point in the novel is this considered wrong. Let’s switch the roles for a moment to gain clarity in not just the graphic nature and context, but the specific inappropriateness of presenting a novel that condones statutory rape. If a MALE English teacher chose to present sexually explicit material to a class of 16-17-olds in which a 26-year-old MAN statutorily rapes a 17-year-old GIRL in order to impregnate her and force his parents to allow him to marry her, I’d say at the very least it would be creepy and there would be some very concerned parents.)
“Rock, rock, jolt, jolt…
Except that something was moving the apples. Again and again and again, over and over, with a shunting nudging, insistent motion….
The breathing of mammals, of a size too large to elicit the interest of [the kestral’s] appetite, increasing in pace. The hollow of a palm landing lightly on muscle and bone. The click and slither of a tongue against teeth. Two planes of fabric, of differing texture, moving over each other in obverse direction….
The pace of the knocking varies: it pauses; it slows; it builds; it pulls back again.
Agnes’s knees are raised, splayed open like butterfly wings. Her feet, still in her boots, rest on the opposite shelf; her hands brace against the whitewashed wall. Her back straightens and bows, seemingly of its own accord, and low, near-growls are being pulled out of her throat. This takes her by surprise: her body asserting itself in this way. How it knows what to do, how to react, how to be, where to put itself, her legs white and folded in the dim light, her rear resting on the shelf edge, her fingers gripping the stones of the wall.
In the narrow space between her and the opposite shelf is the Latin tutor. He stands in the pale V of her legs. His eyes are shut; his fingers grip the curve of her back. It was his hands that undid her bows at her neckline, that pulled down her shift, that brought out her breasts into the light—and how startled and how white they had looked, in the air like that, in daytime, in front of another; their pink-brown eyes stared back in shock. It was her hands, however, that lifted her skirts, that pushed herself back on this shelf, that drew the body of the Latin tutor towards her…
And now there is this—this fit. It is altogether unlike anything she has felt before. It makes her think of a hand drawing on a glove, of a lamb slithering wet from an ewe, an axe splitting on a log, a key turning a well oiled lock. How, she wonders, as she looks into the face of the tutor, can anything fit so well, so exactly, with such a sense of rightness?
The Latin tutor opens his eyes for a moment, the black of his pupils wide, almost unseeing. He smiles, places his hands on either side of her face, murmurs something, she isn’t sure what, but it doesn’t matter at this particular moment…
All of [the apples] turning their eye upon her, then away, and then back. It is too much, all too much, it is overwhelming how many of them there are, the noise they are all making, the tapping, rhythmic, rocking sound, on and on it goes, faster and faster. It steals her breath, makes her heart trip and race in her chest, she cannot take much more, she cannot, she cannot. Some of the apple rock out of their places, on to the floor, and perhaps the tutor has trodden on them because the air is filled with a sweetish, acrid smell and she grips his shoulders. She knows, she feels that all will be well, that everything will go their way. He holds her to him and she can feel the breath leave him, enter him, leave him again.”
Questions:
How does this fit with Pinewood’s mission?
How is this appropriate for students at Pinewood?
How do these teachers and administrators, who approve of this, fit within Pinewood’s mission?
If I recited these quotes within my company, I would be fired. If I recited these quotes to minors, I would be arrested for sexual harassment of a minor. How on Earth would this be appropriate in an English department?!