Print 1 A

Colonial and Postcolonial Rewritings of "Heart of Darkness"
A Century of Dialogue with Joseph Conrad by Regelind Farn
ISBN: 1-58112-289-6
DISSERTATION.COM
Boca Raton, Florida USA 2005
Colonial and Postcolonial Rewritings of "Heart of Darkness": A Century of Dialogue with Joseph Conrad Copyright 2004 Regelind Farn All rights reserved. This text has been accepted as a PhD dissertation by the Faculty of Cultural Studies at the University of Dortmund, Germany. Dissertation.com Boca Raton, Florida USA 2005 ISBN: 1-58112-289-6
In memoriam Jack Canavan
Acknowledgements
Thanks to my supervisor, Prof. Dr. J urgen Kramer, for just the right balance between guidance and openness to my quirky ideas. Thanks to Prof. Dr. Walter Gr unzweig for taking me onto levels of abstraction toGrunzweig which I would never have ventured on my own. Thanks to the examination committee, Prof. Dr. J urgen Kramer, Prof. Dr. Walter Gr unzweig, Prof. Dr. G unter Nold, Prof. Dr. Hans Peters and Dr. Graham Cass, forGrunzweig turning the oral examination into a sparkling intellectual exchange. It generated many new ideas again, which are incorporated into this text. Thanks to Sue Rogers, Brussels, for proofreading my text for publication. All remaining signs of a German accent are due to my own obstinacy. Thanks to Thorsten Leiser, Dortmund, for the cover graphics and design.
Using the PDF version

To nd signicant words with special characters, search for the word with the basic character instead. E.g. to nd D oring, search for Doring; to nd C eline, search for Celine, to nd Ng ug , search for Ngugi. However, these words cannot be found as part of longer search strings. Links inside the document and URLs are clickable. The author and the publisher assume no responsibility for the content of any web site linked to by this document.
Doring Celine Ngugi
A Typeset in L TEX.
Contents
Introduction 1 Reading Heart of Darkness 1.1 Historical and biographical background . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2 Formal techniques and impressionism . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.3 Biographical and psychological interpretations . . . . . . . . 1.4 Myth, allegory and symbolism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.5 Victorian ideas and the n de si` ecle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.6 Ethics, philosophy and religion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.7 Politics and economy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.8 Darwinism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.9 Influence on modernist writers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.10 Racism and imperialism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.11 Gender . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.12 Recent approaches: postcolonial criticism, discourse analysis and deconstruction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 5 5 8 10 12 14 16 18 19 20 21 25 26 29 29 32 35 36 38 40 43 45 45 48 51 54 57 58
. . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . .
2 Rewriting and rereading Heart of Darkness 2.1 The politics of rewriting and rereading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 Journeys . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3 Self and identity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3.1 Perspectives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3.2 The Janus-faced man (and how women live with him) . . 2.4 Encounters: exploiters, givers and help racism . . . . . . . . . 2.5 Language: wariness, scepticism, necessary strategies and dicult 2.6 Representation and images of self and Other . . . . . . . . . . . 2.6.1 African authors except South African . . . . . . . . . . . 2.6.2 Indian authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.6.3 Caribbean-born authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.6.4 White Western authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.6.5 White settler perspectives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.6.6 Complexities and limitations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . dialogue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
ix
2.7
2.8
Rereading Heart of Darkness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.7.1 Layers of meaning revisited . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.7.2 The crowd of savages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.7.3 An English half-caste clerk Kurtz had with him 2.7.4 A wild and gorgeous apparition of a woman . . Political and social function of writing . . . . . . . . . . 2.8.1 Hauling in the pre-text . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.8.2 Teaching Heart of Darkness and its rewritings .
. . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . .
59 59 60 60 61 64 64 65
Chapter 3 has a hypertextual structure. Please select one of the following three paths (paths 1 and 2 cover all texts, path 3 covers a subset). 3 A century of creative response (path 1: by timeline) 3.1 Ford Madox Hueer and Joseph Conrad, The Inheritors (1901) 3.2 Leonard Woolf, Pearls and Swine (1921) . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3 W. Somerset Maugham, Mackintosh and The Fall of Edward Barnard (1921) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.4 Andr e Gide, Travels in the Congo (1927/28) . . . . . . . . . . . 3.5 Louis-Ferdinand C eline, Journey to the End of the Night (1932) 3.6 Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter (1948) . . . . . . . . . 3.7 Charlotte Jay, Beat Not the Bones (1952) . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.8 Patrick White, Voss (1957) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.9 Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (1958) . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.10 Wilson Harris, Palace of the Peacock (1960) . . . . . . . . . . . 3.11 Graham Greene, A Burnt-out Case (1961) . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.12 Chinua Achebe, Arrow of God (1964) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.13 Ng ug , A Grain of Wheat (1967) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.14 Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North (1969) . . . . . . 3.15 Arun Joshi, The Strange Case of Billy Biswas (1971) . . . . . . 3.16 Patrick White, A Fringe of Leaves (1976) . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.17 J. M. Coetzee, In the Heart of the Country (1977) . . . . . . . . 3.18 V. S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River (1979) . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.19 Robert Silverberg, Lord of Darkness (1983) . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.20 Caryl Phillips, Heartland (1989) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.21 David Dabydeen, The Intended (1991) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.22 Marlene NourbeSe Philip, Looking for Livingstone (1991) . . . . 3.23 David Malouf, Remembering Babylon (1993) . . . . . . . . . . . 3.24 Mineke Schipper, Conrads Rivier (1994) . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.25 Abdulrazak Gurnah, Paradise (1994) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.26 Urs Widmer, Im Kongo (1996) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.27 Redmond OHanlon, No Mercy (1996) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.28 Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things (1997) . . . . . . . . . 3.29 Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible (1998) . . . . . . . . 3.30 Jerey Tayler, Facing the Congo (2000) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . x 67 67 76 78 82 89 96 102 109 115 127 133 138 147 154 159 166 172 178 185 190 194 202 208 214 221 227 233 242 249 255
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
3 A century of creative response (path 2: by geography) White Western authors 3.1 Ford Madox Hueer and Joseph Conrad, The Inheritors (1901) 3.2 Leonard Woolf, Pearls and Swine (1921) . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3 W. Somerset Maugham, Mackintosh and The Fall of Edward Barnard (1921) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.4 Andr e Gide, Travels in the Congo (1927/28) . . . . . . . . . . . 3.5 Louis-Ferdinand C eline, Journey to the End of the Night (1932) 3.6 Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter (1948) . . . . . . . . . 3.11 Graham Greene, A Burnt-out Case (1961) . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.19 Robert Silverberg, Lord of Darkness (1983) . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.24 Mineke Schipper, Conrads Rivier (1994) . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.26 Urs Widmer, Im Kongo (1996) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.27 Redmond OHanlon, No Mercy (1996) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.29 Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible (1998) . . . . . . . . 3.30 Jerey Tayler, Facing the Congo (2000) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Settler colonies: Australia 3.7 Charlotte Jay, Beat Not the Bones (1952) . 3.8 Patrick White, Voss (1957) . . . . . . . . . 3.16 Patrick White, A Fringe of Leaves (1976) . . 3.23 David Malouf, Remembering Babylon (1993) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
67 67 76 78 82 89 96 133 185 214 227 233 249 255 102 109 166 208
Settler colonies: South Africa 3.17 J. M. Coetzee, In the Heart of the Country (1977) . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172 Colonies of occupation: African countries except South 3.9 Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (1958) . . . . . . . . . 3.12 Chinua Achebe, Arrow of God (1964) . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.13 Ng ug , A Grain of Wheat (1967) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.14 Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North (1969) . . . 3.25 Abdulrazak Gurnah, Paradise (1994) . . . . . . . . . . . . Africa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115 138 147 154 221
Colonies of occupation: India 3.15 Arun Joshi, The Strange Case of Billy Biswas (1971) . . . . . . . . . . . 159 3.28 Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things (1997) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 242 Caribbean-born authors 3.10 Wilson Harris, Palace of the Peacock (1960) . . . 3.18 V. S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River (1979) . . . . 3.20 Caryl Phillips, Heartland (1989) . . . . . . . . 3.21 David Dabydeen, The Intended (1991) . . . . . . 3.22 Marlene NourbeSe Philip, Looking for Livingstone . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (1991) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127 178 190 194 202
xi
3 A century of creative response (path 3: images of Africa) 3.4 Andr e Gide, Travels in the Congo (1927/28) . . . . . . . . . . . 3.5 Louis-Ferdinand C eline, Journey to the End of the Night (1932) 3.6 Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter (1948) . . . . . . . . . 3.9 Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (1958) . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.11 Graham Greene, A Burnt-out Case (1961) . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.12 Chinua Achebe, Arrow of God (1964) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.13 Ng ug , A Grain of Wheat (1967) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.14 Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North (1969) . . . . . . 3.17 J. M. Coetzee, In the Heart of the Country (1977) . . . . . . . . 3.18 V. S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River (1979) . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.19 Robert Silverberg, Lord of Darkness (1983) . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.20 Caryl Phillips, Heartland (1989) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.22 Marlene NourbeSe Philip, Looking for Livingstone (1991) . . . . 3.24 Mineke Schipper, Conrads Rivier (1994) . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.25 Abdulrazak Gurnah, Paradise (1994) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.26 Urs Widmer, Im Kongo (1996) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.27 Redmond OHanlon, No Mercy (1996) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.29 Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible (1998) . . . . . . . . 3.30 Jerey Tayler, Facing the Congo (2000) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Works cited and consulted Finding Congolese literature
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
82 82 89 96 115 133 138 147 154 172 178 185 190 202 214 221 227 233 249 255 263 272
xii
Introduction
Heart of Darkness is the only text that many people have ever read about the time when the Congo was a personal colony of King Leopold II of Belgium. After more than a hundred years, it is still the standard narrative about that place and time, and still has an important position in the curricula of the Western world. (Post)colonised countries, too, started out with Western curricula, and are continuing to redene their position with regard to this tradition. One mans blend of representation, cultural allusions and highly personal emotion, shaped by his individual aesthetic aims, has made an immense contribution to the worlds image of Central Africa and indeed of (post)colonised peoples in general. Conrads image is not a positive one. Though his narrator passionately denounces the way Leopolds men exploited and harmed Africans and Africa, he also pictures Africans as prehistoric, savage and half-formed humans, and Africa as a dangerous and mysterious site that attracts and destroys the white traveller. The master narrative that lives on through Heart of Darkness has confronted its readers with two questions for over a hundred years: rst, how do the colonised or their descendants represent themselves, and what do they set against, or contribute to, the tradition founded on Heart of Darkness? Second, how can whites (like myself) approach these countries and these people again, how can we see and represent them, and ourselves in relation to them, when we cannot help but acknowledge our cultural inheritance, whether by perpetuating or by rejecting it? A surprising number of authors have outlined answers to these questions in their own works of ction or travel accounts. These rewritings of Heart of Darkness are not history books, yet they all contribute to the representation of historical realities and of human beings living in them. This representation has a political dimension, however highly one may value artistic qualities. Beyond responding to Conrads image of colonial Africa, authors take up a wealth of dierent subjects suggested by the many layers of meaning in Heart of Darkness. Conrad alludes to a variety of discourses and texts of his time, and reacts to much of the Western zeitgeist of the period. He thus foreshadows the concept of rewriting itself. Conrads narrator, Marlow, ironically distances himself from every value system and explanation he evokes. By this, he creates space for other points of view. 1
COLONIAL AND POSTCOLONIAL REWRITINGS OF HEART OF DARKNESS
Ngugi
The rst responses to Heart of Darkness stem from white Western writers. Like Marlow, they are becoming aware of the limitations and injustices of the colonial system, but are deeply inuenced by the discourses and ideas that sustain it. Wilson Harris has called Heart of Darkness a frontier novel in that it identies, but cannot transcend such inuences. This frontier still exists in white rewritings as late as the 1960s, in some respects even until today. Todays Western rewriters, among them such diverse and illustrious gures as Redmond OHanlon and Barbara Kingsolver, identify contemporary discursive frontiers far more explicitly than their earlier predecessors. All over the world, dialogues with pre-texts are becoming increasingly explicit. Many texts of ction or travel diaries incorporate methods of reception history and discourse analysis. Texts from white settler colonies have shown this development for a long time. Patrick Whites Voss identies how imported European discourses, which are epitomised by Heart of Darkness, were incorporated into the discursive eld of emerging Australian society. This approach becomes more intense over time in white writing from Australia. J. M. Coetzee describes comparable developments in white South Africa, and like Conrad pictures a time in which people begin to analyse and reject earlier discourse. The growing doubt of traditions of factual and emotional dominance that is intensely described in Heart of Darkness has invited rewritings from many moments of historical transition. Around the dening time of decolonisation, black African authors began to address Conrads image of Africa, starting with Achebe and Ng ug . They were initially read with a view to ethnological counterrepresentation and sociopolitical didactic intentions. Later critics have discovered their discourse-analytical contributions. Achebes Things Fall Apart , for instance, echoes Conrads style wherever Igbo customs appear unnecessarily violent, and thus points out that those customs are just what Conrad readers expect from Africa. More recently, Tayeb Salih from the Sudan discusses how school readings and popular stereotypes among Africans and Europeans contribute to both exoticist attraction and desires for dominance or revenge. Relating to Conrad, Salih and many other rewriters show that both the dominant and the dominated feel drawn to the Other in situations in which they feel destabilised in their own culture, and that they are simultaneously afraid of going under to the closeness to the Other. Many authors reinterpret the fantasy of being absorbed into the Other, which scares Marlow. Arun Joshi rereads it as a true quest for identity. In The God of Small Things , his compatriot Arundhati Roy names a house that is the place of international and intercommunity encounters the Heart of Darkness. This shows how much Conrads words have entered world-wide imagery. Roy studies how upper-middle-class Indians have an unwanted, but deep-seated reex to identify with Conrads Congolese in contact with whites, although in contact with less privileged Indians, they rather act like former colonisers.
INTRODUCTION
Roy uses the word Anglophilia for her characters tendency to evaluate themselves through white eyes. Anglophilia is also an issue for migrants from the former colonies who live in the West. In Dabydeens The Intended , young migrants in Britain nd that Conrads tale, which is presented to them as an integral part of British culture, aects both their self-images and their image of Africa, while actual information about Africa is harder to come by. Dabydeen and other writers from the Caribbean relate to the absence or fragmentation of knowledge about history and ancestral places available in the Caribbean. Some of them use Conrads model of layered meaning as a frame in which to address this fragmentation, most famously Wilson Harris, who insists that after the destruction described by Conrad, people and societies can re-create themselves and go beyond the symbolic limit embodied by Conrads Inner Station. Writers from the Caribbean also react intensely to the absence of names and geographical details in Heart of Darkness. While this omission helps Conrad stress how many universal rather than historically specic experiences he addresses, Caryl Phillips and Marlene NourbeSe Philip use it to create new outlooks on history. NourbeSe Philip reinterprets the silence that Conrad and other colonial writers created by leaving out African names and voices. She links the silencing of Africa and Africans, which accompanies well-intentioned but autocratic white dominance, to another act of silencing in Heart of Darkness, Marlows withholding information from a woman out of what he feels is protectiveness. Authors all over the world relate to Marlows lie when describing dicult communication between men and women. They struggle to situate this and other psychological issues somewhere between what is specic to their respective cultures and what Marlow calls the common humanity of dierent peoples. Graham Greene already draws parallels between gender-related communication problems and those of late colonialism. Around these and many other themes, authors world-wide portray characters who either try to view their own experience in terms of Heart of Darkness (and soon learn the limitations of this approach), or who evaluate Heart of Darkness socially and politically relative to their own experiences. By identifying Marlows implicit assumptions and judgements, rewriters make it easier for their readers to relate to Heart of Darkness. Simultaneously, their characters demonstrate how to analyse and rework discourses that they (or others) have so far taken for granted. Accordingly, literature classes and book lovers increasingly read Heart of Darkness together with one or more of its rewritings. Scholars are contributing a growing number of essays and talks. They usually cover one or a few texts. I discuss 30 novels, short stories and travel accounts from ve continents. Most critics emphasise individual
aspects of the reuse of Heart of Darkness in the more recent texts.1 This provides new approaches for reading those texts, whereas I focus on how rewritings help reread Heart of Darkness. Some authors, such as Greene, Achebe and Naipaul, have been at the centre of attention in connection with Heart of Darkness for some time. Others have not received due consideration in this context before. This study provides a quick and comprehensive guide for teachers who wish to introduce their students to Heart of Darkness and to choose works to read together with it. My work is also aimed at rst-time readers of Heart of Darkness, who are often considerably puzzled by Conrads many allusions and abstractions, and react intensely to his image of Africa. They can relate to rewriters as fellow (re)readers. Chapter 1 identies layers of meaning in Heart of Darkness by giving an overview of critical approaches to the novella. Chapter 2 adapts these approaches to read its varied rewritings. This consistent framework relates the texts to Heart of Darkness and can also help compare them to each other. While showing what insights can be found with existing critical tools, I also oer a new set of reading tools for rewritings, and provide some ideas for teaching thematic selections. Chapter 3 summarises and analyses the individual creative responses.
On research trends see Nakai, Centenary Conference, or Nakai, English Book 31, and the bibliographies in Conradiana . For short overviews see Moore, and Knowles & Moore 168-71. Examples of typical essays are those by Peters, by Schwerdt, and the contributions by Davies and Fincham in de Lange & Fincham, Conrad in Africa . Nakai studies a single statement of postcolonial theory for six authors (English Book ), while Caminero-Santangelo discusses ve rewritings under the specic aspect of neocolonialism.
Chapter 1 Reading Heart of Darkness

The number of critical publications on Heart of Darkness has reached thousands and is still growing fast. The dierent approaches highlight the many perceptual modes or discourses Conrads tale interweaves.1
1.1
Historical and biographical background
The past and present of the country that has been known as the Congo Free State (18851908), the Belgian Congo (1908-60), Zaire (1971-97) and the Democratic Republic of the Congo has been the focus of increasing public interest in recent years. Historical works (notably Hochschilds) make a fascinating read and help understand the complex background of Heart of Darkness. In addition, numerous biographers have studied Joseph Conrads time in the Congo (June 12 to December 12, 1890). Here, I will give only a few salient facts that are taken up in the rewritings discussed.2 The Bantu kingdom of Kongo, which straddled the estuary of the Congo River, was a thriving imperial federation when Portuguese settlers and slavers arrived in 1482 to establish a small colony. The rst European explorer of the vast interior was David Livingstone (1813-73), a Scottish doctor, missionary and scientist. He was not motivated by material greed but by personal curiosity, religion and later by a wish to free Central Africa from Afro-Arab slave traders. Then followed Henry Morton Stanley (1841-1904), whose famous search for Livingstone may be one of the inspirations of the search for the originally idealist Kurtz in Heart of Darkness. With the help of the locals, Stanley
This chapter is based on Watt 147-253 (n de si` ecle ); Watts; Tredell; Knowles & Moore, unless otherwise noted. These works also contain extensive bibliographic information on Conrad criticism, which is omitted here for the sake of brevity. 2 Information in this section stems from Ascherson; Sherry; Hawkins, Exploitation; Hawkins, Reform Movement; Najder; Pakenham; Lindqvist; Hochschild.
1
found Livingstone in 1872. He greeted him with the famous words Dr. Livingstone, I presume? While Stanley insisted that he wanted to aid Africa and may well have believed this in earnest, he was infamous for his violence against African members of his large expeditions and his willingness to shoot indigenes who got in his way. In this respect, he may have served as an inspiration for Kurtz himself. Stanley wrote countless newspaper articles and more than twenty books (Kurtz, too, writes for the papers). Several of Stanleys book titles contain the word dark Through the Dark Continent (1878), In Darkest Africa (1890), My Dark Companions and Their Strange Stories (1893). He wrote passages like the dark spectral isles of the stream; the sepulchral gloom beneath the impervious foliage (Founding , par. 2). They are echoed in Heart of Darkness in descriptions such as the forest stood up spectrally in the moonlight (28). Stanley anthropomorphised tropical nature, and endowed it with intentions: Ah! the hateful, murderous river, so broad and proud and majestically calm, as though it had not bereft me of a friend, and of many faithful souls [. . . ]. What a hypocritical river! (Dark Continent , par. 1). Marlow describes the river as this strange world of plants, and water, and silence [. . . ] brooding over an inscrutable intention (36). From 1884 to 1908, the Congo was the personal colony of Leopold II of Belgium (18351909). He dened the borders of the huge state. Leopold exploited the country ruthlessly and gave it very little in return. He was very good at presenting a philanthropic facade to the world, and passed o his acts of greed as selfless charity. Most Europeans admired him and believed that it was important to open to civilization the only part of our globe which it has not yet penetrated, to pierce the darkness which hangs over entire peoples3 , as he described it. Conrad was almost certainly influenced by this discourse before his Congo journey. He learned the truth when he was there, which disillusioned him intensely. King Leopold may thus have served as another inspiration for Kurtz. Heart of Darkness also contains detailed information on some of the kings methods in the Congo, which included thinly disguised slavery and a commission system in which agents could earn percentages (Heart 27) according to how cheaply they procured the ivory. This encouraged many of them to seize it at gunpoint. Some agents became utterly cruel in their position of unchecked power supported by superior weapons. Later, in England, Conrad was able to access information about such men from newspapers, including an agent who ornamented his flowerbeds with human heads to intimidate Africans. Several men have been discussed as possible models for Kurtz. Conrad may not have witnessed all of the cruelties he describes in Heart of Darkness, but based some of them on the atmosphere in which he travelled, and on reports in the papers.
Leopold II, welcoming speech to his 1876 Geographical Conference, qtd. in Hochschild 44.
1.1 HISTORICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL BACKGROUND
The Arab or Afro-Arab slavers whom Livingstone wanted to replace by legitimate trade under European control were mostly speakers of Swahili from what is today Kenya and Tanzania. At the time, they had carved out a commercial empire in a large region around Stanley Falls (now Kisangani), Kurtzs Inner Station. Stanley and Leopold fought them, but also made contracts with them, notably with their leader Tippu Tip. At Stanley Falls, there was no Kurtz on his own, but a station with several white men and a few hundred black State workers, as well as a large Afro-Arab settlement. Afro-Arab power is one of the most important historical facts not mentioned in Heart of Darkness. The result is a purely binary encounter between black and white, weak and strong, victims and intruders. African achievement, too, is omitted. Conrad was present at some negotiations with dignied and still powerful African chiefs (Karl 289), and he was able to witness such complex achievements as a gigantic system of vertical poles stuck in the river bed, even in the rapids and cataract, that held shing nets and weirs (Baumann). Finally, Conrad leaves out the names and characteristics of places and countryside, though he mentions them in his private Congo Diary. Similarly, he does not name most of his characters. This creates the impression that Marlow journeys through a featureless void, or a dark tunnel without distinctive traits and points of reference, and that atrocious deeds are done, but not by real people to real people.4 In Conrads only other story with a Congo setting, An Outpost of Progress (written before Heart of Darkness), African characters have names and agency, they talk with the white characters, and the setting is far less abstract or mysterious. This shows that his reductive image of places and people in Heart of Darkness is based on a conscious artistic decision, not on a deplorable limitation of his perception. Conrads rst biographer G. Jean-Aubry believed that he had really seen and experienced everything as he wrote it. Only later was it recognised that the Kurtz story is ctional and that Conrad invented, changed or re-arranged many other events, though he retained his basic trajectory and numerous actual observations. Conrads representation of the Congolese as savages without merit can inspire a real craving for historical fact, because it depicts Central Africa as being without a history and geographically unspecic. Recent researchers, including Norman Sherry and Hunt Hawkins, have invested a lot of work in tracing Conrads experience. Others, especially Sven Lindqvist, have researched into what Conrad may have heard and read about the Congo and other colonies while he was writing.
Cf. Hochschild 204 for a similar argument about another text.
1.2
Formal techniques and impressionism
Conrad used many literary techniques in novel and surprising ways. He used existing genres, but subverted them and added approaches of his own. Heart of Darkness is ostensibly an adventure story, an important genre at the time, but is lled with stagnation, failure and futility, and peopled with starched-shirt bureaucrats instead of men of action. Moreover, the novella contains psychological and other aspects that are not normally part of an adventure story. It also is a story of the colonies, another important contemporary genre, but Conrads whites are neither noble, triumphant nor pleasantly titillated by their exotic surroundings. The contemporary stereotype of African darkness is used, but is partially reversed by suggesting that whites have their own darkness and bring it to Africa. Guerard suggests that Heart of Darkness is not primarily about Kurtz or about the brutality of Belgian ocials but about Marlow its narrator (37). To his listeners, this narrator appears like a Buddha [. . . ] without a lotus-flower (Heart 10). This introduces a meditative frame, which helps add to a simple tale of action an inquiry into its moral and philosophical implications. However, it also indicates that Marlow does not possess the full truth about the meaning of his tale (revelation being symbolised in Buddhism by the lotus flower). Marlow is a limited narrator, relating the story from his personal viewpoint, as opposed to narrative omniscience. Some critics even call him an unreliable narrator, for instance by claiming that he misinterprets Kurtzs last words as a moral judgement, consistent with his own frame of reference, while the reader has enough information to understand them as an assertion that Kurtz actually enjoys and craves the horror (Batchelor 91-92), or that he claims the human condition in general to be one of horror (Watt 236). Marlow is introduced by a frame narrator. This is another common technique of the time. In Heart of Darkness, the indirect narration contributes to the ambivalence and irony of the tale, and the paraphrase by the frame narrator even makes it hard to assign complete responsibility for particular attitudes to Marlow. There is a third nested level, as another limited individual, the Russian, narrates to Marlow much of the information the reader gets about Kurtz. The reader is drawn into the intimate connection between Marlow and his audience of friends as a fellow listener. The description of the relationship between the listeners and the narrator foregrounds the readers active role in conferring meaning to the tale, and the link between personal and social experience. In his spontaneous, highly personal narrative, Marlow tries to interpret the Congo journey of his youth. He distrusts
1.2 FORMAL TECHNIQUES AND IMPRESSIONISM
his own ability to relate this experience. This emphasises the subjectivity and relativity of individual perception. The unnamed frame narrator explicitly introduces this highly modernist concept, stressing the inconclusive (11) quality and even the oblique technique of Marlows oral narrative, whose meaning [is not] inside like a kernel but outside like a halo produced by a glow (9). Marlow, who narrates four of Conrads works, has often been considered Conrads British alter ego. However, there are dierences. Karl states that Marlow is a misogynist and Conrad was not (284). Orr argues that like some other characters of Conrads, Marlow is partially what the author did not want to be (9) such as a racist or a liar. Finding it dicult to come to terms with his experience, Marlow resorts to irony. Irony points to discrepancies in a given situation, such as the dierence between highflown words and actual deeds or, more generally, between claim and reality. It establishes a special relationship between the narrator and the reader in that the reader has to perceive and interpret the ironic undercurrent under a surface statement (or can refuse to do so). Irony makes it possible to point out problems without oering a solution or even a complete value judgement. For instance the descriptions of a soldier as one of the reclaimed (19) and of a reman as an improved specimen (38) point out that the colonisers force these Africans to act in ways that are violent or benet only the colonisers. However, these ironic descriptions do not imply a rejection of the general ideology that claimed whites had a duty to draw blacks towards their own work ethics and raise their standing on a Social Darwinist scale. While the instances in question are not an improvement of the Africans condition, the basic possibility of an improvement is not challenged. Irony and sceptical sarcasm add to the modernist presentation of an elusive reality and of unstable value judgements, making the text more complex, more ambivalent and less activist in nature. Some critics nd satirical elements in the exaggeration of white ineciency and even in the extremes of Kurtzs character. Some even claim sardonic comical elements, such as the visual impression of the helmsmans slow fall and his hanging on to the spear as to an intimate possession, or Marlows musings about whether he looks appetising to cannibals. Probably the most frequently expressed criticism of Conrads style is that of his insistent use of negative adjectives like impenetrable or unspeakable. Leavis was the rst to nd fault with this technique, which makes a more precise meaning impossible, while others later praised it for conveying a dream-like quality. Marlow narrates his sensory perception and the meaning he subsequently deduces from it, in that order, so that the reader only gradually nds out what is going on, for example in the realisation that the clinking sound is made by men who form a
10
chain gang (19). This technique, which Watt has dubbed delayed decoding (175), gives the reader access to Marlows immediate sensations, complete with a true-to-life delay between impression and understanding. Though Conrad used techniques from many literary styles and traditions, he did not want to be a member of any particular artistic movement. It is however helpful to take a look at traditions that influenced him and that he influenced. The term impressionism rst referred to the famous school of painting whose heyday roughly coincided with Conrads creative life. It privileges the perceiving consciousness over the perceived object, for instance by creating an eect of mist or changeable light through the broad brushstrokes into which the actual object is decomposed. Similarly, Conrad created a sense of imprecision, haze and changing perspective that show a persons perception of facts, rather than an attempt to pin down the facts themselves. Parts of this method are the delayed decoding and impenetrable adjectives, the insistence on mist or shadow, and the absence of a claim to a unied message in the narrative. The frame narrator in Heart of Darkness evokes the eect of impressionist paintings by talking of a misty halo(9) that envelops Marlows tale. Closely connected with this method is Conrads way of creating synaesthetic eects through descriptions of sensory perceptions. Heart of Darkness presents an almost cinematic sequence of strong visual scenes.
1.3
Biographical and psychological interpretations
As a child, Conrad (1857-1924) experienced the subjection of his home region in partitioned Poland to the Russian Empire. As a seafarer, he saw the workings of imperialism throughout the world. These experiences, together with an energetic alignment with English culture and values, had a complex influence on his view of imperialism. Conrad was naturalised as a British subject, but remained in many respects a foreigner. His marginality in England and in English literature enabled him to take a self-conscious, fresh look at the certainties and uncertainties of a persons place in the world. It reinforced his insistence on the fluidity of perception and values. Most of Conrads biographers claim that he suered from depression, exacerbated by physical diseases, which were caused or worsened by his stays in the tropics. Najder (145) draws on medical works to cite symptoms of depression, and shows that numerous indications of these occur in Conrads letters and works. He relates the dark-tunnel feeling created by Heart of Darkness to such symptoms as shrinkage of psychological space; [. . . ] seeing his world in gray and dark colors, and feeling it is unreal and chaotic.
1.3 BIOGRAPHICAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL INTERPRETATIONS
11
This feeling, together with one of incapacity and inaction sometimes to the extent of stupor, may have contributed to the futility Conrad saw in white activities in the Congo (which in fact were goal-oriented and eective in themselves), while he projected a fear of madness and of the disintegration of personality onto Kurtz. Batchelor claims that with Heart of Darkness, Conrad descended into the depths of his depression, to emerge a healthier and stronger man (88-95). He shows how Marlow initially uses work as a therapy against his disengagement from reality when he states that work oers the chance to nd yourself. Your own reality (Heart 31), but moves on to a direct confrontation with his fears as embodied in Mr. Kurtz: Marlow recognizes both that Kurtz is mad and that he, Marlow, resembles Kurtz more closely than he resembles anyone else (Batchelor 90). Sherry (347) points out that given the choice of nightmares between Kurtzs sensitive moral destabilisation and the callous, bureaucratic everyday cruelty of the pilgrims that is stable normality for them, Marlow chooses the former (Heart 62). During his encounter with the Intended, Marlow makes an eort to end the moral relativity (Batchelor 91) of his experience by rmly banning Kurtzs horror from her and his life. Paradoxically, he can only get a grip on reality back in Europe by using a lie about colonial reality in the Congo, a lie that keeps the Intendeds illusions about Kurtzs high mission intact. It can be seen as a comment on human nature that after Marlows destabilising experience, and after he has felt alienated from people in Europe for a while, his way back to normality is through a self-deception that realigns him with society and helps him repress what he cant come to terms with and what is systematically not permitted to be known in a world dominated by words like Kurtzs (or Leopolds). In this context, the irony and bitterness of his tale can be seen as signs of his acknowledged impotence in the face of a disturbing reality. The insistence on dream and nightmare in Heart of Darkness anticipates some of the interest of Freuds book The Interpretation of Dreams , which was published later in 1899. Freud argued that dreams are coded signals for repressed fears and conflicts within the unconscious self. He investigated the influence of the unconscious on a persons conscious mind. In a Freudian reading, the darkness of African nature in the novella stands for unconscious fears and anxieties lining Marlows retrogressive (dream) journey into the self, the dancing shore-dwellers stand for primal bogeyman-like aggressors, Kurtzs female African friend for rather frightening sexual needs, and so on. The identication of darkness with the unconscious, together with the Freudian and Jungian idea that the unconscious is the place of primordial or even pre-human emotions, may explain Conrads conflation of assumed African darkness with primeval human traits.
12
Kurtz and Marlow are sometimes interpreted as two aspects of the same self, with Kurtz standing for the Freudian id (the anarchic desire to gratify basic instincts) and Marlow standing for the ego (the human consciousness negotiating between the id and the superego, or conscience). In his quest for his alter ego or even for a presumed superego embodied by the remarkable man (Heart 61) who has some ideals, Marlow thus nds an addict of monstrous passions (65) or his own id. On another level, that of the actual (not symbolic) encounter with Africa, Marlow projects his expectations, desires and fears onto the Congo, resulting in a mixture of temptation and threat that seem to be inherent in the alien world. To avoid or delimit anything that eludes control and in order to make the lack of understanding feel less threatening, he names the Other as strange or mysterious. Due to a mechanism of psychological displacement, he perceives the discomfort caused by his projections and his lack of comprehension as an essence of Africa.
1.4
Myth, allegory and symbolism
Myth was to become an important focus both in psychoanalysis and in the modernist movement. It was considered a goldmine of tales about ageless, universal human experiences. In the absence of a belief in religion and in heroes, myth can be evoked in order to provide a substitute orientation, or it can contribute to the irony of an imagery of hollowness, a loss of the core that used to be embodied in ancient beliefs. Heart of Darkness contains references to mythical journeys including the Odyssey , and to the descent into the underworld in Dantes Inferno and in the Aeneid , in which, symbolically, the helmsman dies like Marlows (Karl 290). The two women at the companys oce in Brussels, the sepulchral city, appear to guard the entrance to the Inferno (Heart 20) to which Marlow likens the grove of death (22). The jumble of dying humans and rusting machinery in Matadi (the companys station and start of the march) can be seen as the rst chamber of a modern realm of darkness, followed by a river (Styx) journey to rescue a soul from Hades (Sherry 350). Marlows journey also echoes the quest for the grail, or for an enchanted princess sleeping in a fabulous castle (Heart 44) of fairy tales. While Freud searched for individual unconscious messages and motivations, C. G. Jung (1875-1961) studied archetypes: timeless recurrent basic types, situations or motifs of human life that are rmly anchored in the collective unconscious, and are often found in ancient religions, myths and folklore. Most symbolist writing predates Jungs work, but it is best analysed in Jungian terms. Conrad was attracted to the symbolist
1.4 MYTH, ALLEGORY AND SYMBOLISM
13
aspiration to elevate the specic by making it evoke the general, the archetypal. Kurtz may embody the archetype of a person who is hollow at the core (Heart 58), who has no ethical backbone or no strong Freudian ego (Baines 227; Watt 234). As soon as he is released from the restraints of society, he goes under to a wilderness, in his case either by getting too close to the sinister psychological forces symbolised by the Congolese, or by giving in to the powerful position that enables him to satisfy his lusts. Marlows journey follows the timeless motif of a quest and an initiation. Guerard read it as a Jungian night journey into the unconscious (15). Kurtz also echoes the more recent myth of Faust, an extremely complex and intelligent man who makes a bargain for his soul with the devil (Heart 50) in exchange for knowledge and power. Goethes Faust is an epitome of the romantic era, a man who puts his individualism and self-fullment above moral and social duty. At a time when religious beliefs are on the wane, Faust tries to take over the now-vacant position of God himself, because he believes in his own potential more than in anything else. Kurtz begins his report with the argument that we whites, from the point of development we had arrived at, must necessarily appear to them [savages] (sic) in the nature of supernatural beings we approach them with the might as of a deity (50). His attempt to transcend his human state ends with his relapse into an animal state of gratication of his various lusts (57). Marlow ultimately stays inside his limits and is able to emerge from his vicarious participation in Kurtzs experience. The cynical description of the colonial project as a merry dance of death and trade (17), and the statuesque appearance of Kurtz as an animated image of death carved out of old ivory [. . . ] shaking its hand with menaces at a motionless crowd of men made of dark and glittering bronze (59) evoke a European medieval allegory: in the dance of death, a symbolic image, corpses and skeletons lead the living to the grave. Like the impressionist technique, the symbolist approach in Heart of Darkness is introduced by the frame narrator, whose geometric image makes it clear that the meaning (the halo) is larger than the vehicle that transports it (the glow). Watt (180-200) begins with this image to describe a form of symbolism radically dierent from that discussed above. An existing and closed myth such as that of Ulysses or Faust would be a kernel inside a nut, and thus the opposite of what has been announced (Heart 9). Moreover, Heart of Darkness does not fully or exclusively evoke any single myth. Each symbol points not to one myth, but to several meanings. To take the example of Marlows visit to the company oce in Brussels, the knitters evoke two of the three mythical Fates, but they may also embody the callous knitters at the guillotine, the Roman spectators greeted by the doomed gladiators, or the emotionally deadened, machine-like employees
14
of a large bureaucracy. The highly selective choice of details gives weight to each such detail. The reader feels that this weight is there, but is not helped to nd out why this detail has been selected for a description. This creates a gap between the overt fact and the feeling that it must mean something more to warrant its inclusion. The reader is prompted to ll this semantic gap according to his or her personal imagination. Around the impressionist whole that denies one nal and objective meaning, a whole range of symbolic meanings can thus be produced. Fragmentary and open, they remain suggestive even after the readers decoding eort. Watt also states that Heart of Darkness is the only one of Conrads texts to belong to a specically symbolist tradition of ction (188). In this context, one can argue that the omission of names and specics from Heart of Darkness helps the reader think about highly selective symbolic details, rather than about the details of down-to-earth real life. It emphasises that Marlows attention is focussed on internal and moral questions, not on historical fact.
1.5
Victorian ideas and the n de si` ecle
The Victorian world order was collapsing in the 1890s. Among the few ideas of the late Victorian era that still ease Marlows life (while Kurtz disregards them, contributing to his downfall) are the Carlylean values of work, duty and renunciation [. . . ] except that Marlows word for renunciation is restraint, and for duty, delity (Watt 151). In this view, work contributes to self-knowledge and to emotional stability. Together with the renunciation of a purely egoistic search for gratication, work saves a person from self-centredness and therefore from navel-gazing despair. Duty takes the place of the declining Christian devotion to a higher cause, an aim in life. Marlow tries to hold out against his diculties with the aid of this value system. Even here, the decline of Victorian values is visible, as work ethics are eective only for Marlow. The pilgrims are lazy and rapacious. The ecient accountant in Matadi is a horror, and his work ethics help insulate him from all perception of his surroundings. Kurtz with all his recent history keeps on thinking that he has the duty of writing for the papers (Heart 68) to promote his ideas.
siecle
The pervading atmosphere of the 1890s, the n de si` ecle, was one of melancholy or even despair, of perceived decadence and agonizing pointlessness and disillusionment. Science contributed its share to this gloom. The law of entropy, discovered in 1851, made people think that the sun would go out suddenly, stricken to death by the touch of that gloom [the cold parts of the universe] (Heart 8) practically tomorrow, leaving the earth cold and dead. Moreover, in the wake of new astronomical results, this generation was making a dicult forced transition from a universe that God had made expressly
` 1.5 VICTORIAN IDEAS AND THE FIN DE SIECLE
15
for humans, to an indierent universe dominated by laws of chance. Ideas resulted that resembled what is now called Existentialism, seeing life as a mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose (69). Evolution theorists reminded people of the persistent presence of the animal in humans, questioning the possibility of ethics founded on sheer will power, and intensifying the contrast between nature and culture (Najder 249-50). The belief in the social benets of material progress had been fostered with increasing industrialisation, sometimes to the extent of thinking that technical progress and free commercial competition would solve all problems of humankind. By the end of the century, people were severely disillusioned. Heart of Darkness shows that technology supports a conquest that dehumanises both the conqueror and the victim. Kurtzs command of thunder and lightning (56) facilitates his dangerous hubris. Moreover, technology is beginning to take its toll on nature, leading to an inhabited devastation (18). The competition between the European powers over colonies was growing, leading to the formal adoption of an imperialist programme as British government policy in 1894. Jingoism was flourishing in Britain when Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness. An important movement in literature was that of aestheticism, which claimed that the main aim of art was to evoke feeling and beauty, not to be descriptive, didactic or to have a moral purpose. In reaction to the prevailing utilitarianism of the industrial age, aestheticists wanted art to be separate from all inquiry into specic historical, political or scientic circumstances, and to follow its own laws. They expressed this in the claim that art should exist for arts sake. Aestheticism was closely related to symbolism, trying to purify language from the everyday communication of facts in order to evoke an abstract, universal essence reminiscent of Platonic ideas in the (inevitable but incidental) specic experience. Authors achieved this by sensuality, an intense use of symbols, synaesthetic eects, and suggestion rather than statement. They saw common subject matter and ease of understanding as signs of compromise with vulgar taste (Stokes). Conrad did not consider himself a member of this movement, but he admired some writers, such as Baudelaire, who belonged to it (Karl 268-70). His proclaimed desire to shine the light of magic suggestiveness [. . . ] over the commonplace surface of words (Preface to Narcissus 224-25) is an aestheticist concern. Possibly, Conrad felt that leaving out the names of persons and places would make his narrative more universally applicable and less specic to a Congo journey. Marlows persistent use of the words fact and reality does not (necessarily) refer to historical fact but to what he considers the opposite of his dream-sensation (Heart 30) inside the world of the book. His main interest is in the feelings inspired by his journey.
16
1.6
Ethics, philosophy and religion
Watts (47) argues that Heart of Darkness presents a number of ethical paradoxes, an approach that abounded in the 1890s. Among others, he names the following paradoxes: Civilization can be barbaric. It is both a hypocritical veneer and a valuable achievement to be vigilantly guarded. Society saves us from corruption, yet society is corrupt. Imperialism may be redeemed by an idea at the back of it, but imperialism, irredeemably, is robbery with violence. A person who sells his soul does at least have a soul to sell, and may gain a signicance denied to the mediocre. Moreover, images of good and bad, especially light and darkness, are used in contradictory ways in Heart of Darkness. Attempts to nd straightforward ethical statements in the novella are foiled by such contradictions. Another paradox is created around the question of work ethics. Marlow does not question colonialism as such, but only Leopolds methods. He insists that in the British colonies, some real work is done (13). By this, he strives to show that his captaincy is not immoral because he undertakes it in the good British spirit of work and service. On the other hand, when his aunt calls him one of the Workers (15), this does align him with Leopolds colonial project in a way he feels uncomfortable with. The question of work ethics is paralleled by a similar contradiction involving altruism: Marlow feels that colonialism can be redeemed by embracing an idea unselshly. This idea can be compared to Kiplings white mans burden, a self-righteous sense of mission and duty, and especially to religious zeal. The idea (or illusion) of inspired and necessary service can easily turn into fantasies of unlimited power and superiority, as with Kurtz. An altruistic devotion to an abstract idea also makes people vulnerable to someone like King Leopold who abuses their idealism for his own purposes, as with Marlow. Shrewd people with less moral purity but more intense, concrete goals can easily manipulate and exploit pure altruists. Altruism is thus both a positive and a negative personality trait. Outside such paradoxes, Conrad studies ethical questions for instance in the context of Darwinism. The alleged cannibals prove themselves moral beings too, when out of primitive honour (Heart 43) they do not eat anyone on board. This raises the question whether ethics are really a concern of white civilisation, or a basic human concern. Heart of Darkness contains numerous philosophical allusions, such as to Hegels dialectics (between progress and atavism), and also raises the philosophical question of language and social communication. Marlow is concerned with the inadequacy of language, which he sees both in his own inability to convey the dream-like sensation of his journey and in the possibility of atrocious deeds hiding under a cloak of philanthropic rhetoric.
1.6 ETHICS, PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION
17
Watt argues that, on a far more literal level than that of interpretations as a demon, Lucifer or Faust, Marlow yearns to meet Kurtz as a person with whom a dialogue will nally be possible, someone who may be able to oer a convincing idea and a fruitful direction to colonisation. All others do not communicate and are so unaware of the problems of civilisation that they do not feel a need to talk about them. Therefore, Marlow hopes that Kurtz will provide meaning, only to nd that Kurtz is so absorbed in his rhetoric that he produces nothing more than high-flown monologues (194-95, 223, 234, 240). Lies, too, bring up issues of language and philosophy. Philosophers question whether there is an absolute truth; and even if there is a denite truth about individual facts, whether this truth is of any value or whether the saving illusion (Heart 74), which helps humans live, is preferable. All of Marlows lies are protective and arise out of the same moral preoccupations that make him hate lies: Marlow lets the brickmaker believe he has power in Europe so he can help Kurtz, promises the Russian to protect Kurtzs reputation, promises Kurtz success in Europe, tears the postscript o, and lies to the Intended. Marlow does not present religion as a valid system in itself, as he does not believe the existence of a God. Like myth, religion serves as a source of traditional images and of reminders of the values of old. The ironic appellation of pilgrims emphasises that nobody in the novella is faithful to any redeeming idea, arguably not even Marlow, whose only idea in a senseless, confusing world is to do his captains work. The comparison of the Congo River to a snake evokes Paradise after the Fall, and contributes to the idea that Africa attracts the quester and seduces or destroys him or gives him knowledge that will be very hard to live with. Most other religious references are ironic. Some evoke disillusionment, such as the bitter echo of Bunyans optimistic The Pilgrims Progress in the word pilgrims. Others expose the questionable value system of society, with quotations like whited sepulchre[s], which is originally an image for hypocritical Pharisees (Heart 13; Matthew 23.27), or the labourer worthy of his hire, an ironic allusion to the religious rationale that is seamlessly linked with other motives for imperialism (Heart 16; Luke 10.7). If religion is no longer an authority, then a comparison of Congolese drums to bells in a Christian country (Heart 23) can only equate the beloved superstitions of one people with those of another, ultimately showing both to be common delusions of humanity. Comparisons between quasi-religious superstitions are even more cynical the young man in the grove of death appears to believe in the power of a bit of white worsted (20), while near the grove, the accountant believes in the power of bookkeeping to ensure a feeling of safety; and Marlows reman believes in his impromptu charm (39) of rags just as Marlow believes in the bandages he ties to his chimney.
18
Far worse than what Marlow perceives as simple superstitions is the destructive praying to [ivory] (26). This prayer to Mammon is one of the dangers of an existentialist world, for which a completely new set of moral standards would have to be found to replace old religious norms. While Marlow is not optimistic that this will happen, he asserts the psychological need for some belief. He insists that Kurtzs nal judgement redeems him, because it expresses some sort of belief (69), some ability to judge when everything is relative.
1.7
Politics and economy
Heart of Darkness is often seen as the work that comments most clearly on the history of wars and genocides in the 19th and, prophetically, in the 20th century (Lindqvist; Watts 50). It shows the depravity of persons who are backed by a powerful system that carries them along and diminishes their sense of personal responsibility, both in the rather pedestrian greed of the pilgrims, who resemble the soldiers of a colonial power or of Hitler, and in the charismatic absolutist power of Mr. Kurtz, the dictator himself. Both kinds of power have emotional and material aspects. Marxist critics typically set out to analyse the material conditions of the production and consumption of a literary text, and its economic subtext. They describe how the characters lives are determined by the underlying system of ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange. From this point of view, Marlow is partly a victim of his economic needs. His search for a dependent employment leads to his involuntary complicity in Leopolds project, which in turn harms the Congolese. This problematic complicity is partly, but not wholly, within the individuals power to enter or to eschew. Marlow looks at the map of the snaking Congo River in a shop window. This location makes the link between the symbolic and the material level explicit: colonial discourse about Africa is used to rationalise exploitation. Marlow himself arrives at an analysis of Leopolds economic system. He realises that, contrary to Leopolds rhetoric, the new colonising class in the Congo acquires a precious trickle of ivory for a stream of [. . . ] rubbishy cottons, beads, and brass-wire (Heart 21). The Russian later reveals that it is in fact a stream of guns and ammunition, since Kurtz has cartridges but no wares left. By keeping Kurtzs exemplary debasement secret (lying to the Intended and tearing the postscript o Kurtzs report), Marlow refuses to participate in the political process, which would begin with the divulgation of information. However, silence looks like consent, and thus this refusal is a contribution to the political process in spite of its passivity.
1.8 DARWINISM
19
1.8
Darwinism
Until well into Victorian times, Westerners thought that the world contained the species God had made at creation, all of them and no others. At the top of creation they saw a single human race, comprising peoples with positively or negatively evaluated cultural, religious and visual characteristics, but all made in Gods image. New research that culminated in Darwins The Origin of Species (1859) replaced this reassuring world by one of evolution and of survival of the ttest. Some biologists and doctors set up evolutionary hierarchies of animals, then of what they called human races, an assumed biological distinction. Political and economic ideologies of Social Darwinism soon followed, endorsing imperialism as a philanthropic, necessary domination by those whom mental eorts and inherited qualities best qualied for it. These new concepts merged with the eects of the European arms race that led to ever more ecient weapons during the 19th century. When peoples were wiped out, theorists soon said that they would have gone under anyway, that helping them on their natural, inevitable way out actually meant a humane mercy killing, or that they had instinctively given up at the contact with a human race at a higher stage of evolution, proving the scientic theory. In The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin concluded that the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate[!] and replace throughout the world the savage races (ch. 6, qtd. in Lindqvist 107). Conrad did not subscribe to these theories, but he was heavily influenced by the argumentation that ultimately led to such conclusions. At the European end of the (Social) Darwinist scale some people saw an overcivilised society in a process of descent down the evolutionary ladder, a decay through oversoftening and through a lack of individual struggle, where the worthy were no longer the winners. They feared that the light of civilisation was only a periodic, momentary flash of lightning (Heart 9) between relapses into darkness, and articial compared to the primal, shapeless wilderness.5 Here may lie another reason why Heart of Darkness leaves out African achievements and personalities and the Arabs at Stanley Falls. This omission makes it possible to portray an encounter between the two extremes on the Darwinist scale, between the utter savagery (Heart 10) that is an extension of the natural world of a past when the big trees were kings (35) and the weaklings who become monstrously disoriented as soon as they step away from the civilized crowds (Outpost 250) and from their secure place between the butcher and the policeman (Heart 49). Conrad continued a recent tradition of degenerate white characters going under in colonial ction (Boehmer, Literature 34).
5
On Darwinist discourse see Lindqvist 75-88, 97-107, 115, 117, 119-20.
20
Darwinist theory was to be at the basis of later racist fascism. Kurtz with his Nietzschean will to power (Orr 72) can be seen as an early disciple of the Social Darwinist superman ideology that was to become embodied in Western dictators of the 20th century. I will use the word race without inverted commas where it refers to the old pseudoscientic categories, whose power actually hinges on the possibility of confusing sociological, political and imagined biological distinctions with reality and with each other. For instance, Hueer & Conrads The Inheritors studiously exploits this confusion. Where the word race refers to todays categories, which are recognised to be socially constructed rather than biological distinctions, I will set it in inverted commas.
1.9
Influence on modernist writers
One of the reasons for the fame of Heart of Darkness is its proleptic nature. Batchelor states that [w]ith historical hindsight we can see Conrad as one of the founding fathers of modernism, but that is not a view that he himself would have welcomed or understood (269). The core of the modernist movement in Britain and the US lay between 1908 and 1914, embodied by a new generation of writers including Yeats, Pound, Lawrence, the Woolfs and Joyce. They retained the features described as the impressionism and symbolism of Heart of Darkness. Like Conrad, they were stimulated by new ideas in anthropology, psychology, philosophy, political theory and psychoanalysis. The encounter with cultures whose aesthetics and ways of life were radically dierent from European ones led to new questions in the European view of self and of artistic self-expression, as foreshadowed in Marlows reflections on shared humanity and on the narrative act. Modernist writers have in common with Conrad an emphasis on the ambiguity and relativity of perception, an ironic or satirical approach, as well as layered and dense narrations. They use a multiplicity of symbolic suggestions, mythological references and other allusions with an ambition of synthesis. With the help of a radical paradoxicality and intentional opacities, they express a sceptical stance towards religion, civilisation and human nature. Modernism also continues Conrads sense of absurdity or meaninglessness, of human isolation and of the problematic nature of communication.6 Conrads delayed decoding was a precursor of the stream-of-consciousness technique used notably by Virginia Woolf.
Cf. Knowles & Moore 124; Watts 49, 51-52.
1.10 RACISM AND IMPERIALISM
21
1.10
Racism and imperialism
A protest movement against King Leopolds methods in the Congo began in Britain in 1904.7 One of its founders called Heart of Darkness the most powerful thing ever written on the subject8 , written even long before the Congo atrocities were widely discussed in newspapers and organised protest started. Although Conrad felt that he did not have enough time and energy to spare to become an active participant of the movement, he contributed an open letter in which he again denounced Leopolds regime of terror and forced labour in the Congo. In this letter as in the novella, Conrad does not describe the Congolese as equal to whites. This did not pose a problem for the Congo Reform Association, which was not claiming that the Congolese were as intelligent as whites or able to rule themselves. In keeping with the progressive discourse of its time, the Association was asking for a better colonial treatment of the Congolese, but retained the idea that good colonialism would be in their own best interest. Heart of Darkness is to this day considered a powerful anti-imperialist text for the intensity with which it describes the crimes of Leopolds rule. Until 1975, racism was never much of an issue. People apparently made no clear distinction between antiimperialist and anti-racist qualities, assuming that a text that had one would also have the other. In 1975, Chinua Achebe, Nigerian novelist and professor of African Literature, gave a lecture at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst that exploded this belief and was soon known all over the world. Achebe called Joseph Conrad a bloody racist (Knowles & Moore 299), which he moderated in later printed versions to a thoroughgoing racist (Image 257). Conrad saw and condemned the evil of imperial exploitation, Achebe conceded, but was strangely unaware of the racism on which it sharpened its iron tooth (262). Heart of Darkness, he argued, projects an image of Africa as the antithesis or negation of Europe, as the foil against which the achievements of European civilisation are made to stand out. Marlow represents Africans as a part of the wilderness. He reduces them to fragmented body parts, limbs or rolling eyes (254). On the other hand, Marlow nds that an African who does something more than materialise out of the evil jungle to scare him resembles a dog in a parody of breeches (Heart 38; Image 254). Where he describe the suering of Africans sympathetically, he does so in a spirit of contemporary liberalism, which conceded that it was bad for colonial subjects to suer horribly, but which never claimed equality for them. Marlow does not even say
On the Congo Reform Association cf. Hawkins, Reform Movement. Letter from Edmund Dene Morel to A. Conan Doyle, October 7, 1909. Qtd. in Hawkins, Reform Movement 80.
8 7
22
that the dying helmsman has a distant kinship with whites (Heart 51), but that he lays a claim to it; and Marlow nds this claim to a common humanity frightening and ugly (Heart 38; Image 254). Africans are denied the faculty of speech, communicating even among themselves with short grunting phrases (Heart 42; Image 255), unless to proclaim themselves cannibals or to ttingly announce the death of Mr. Kurtz, whom Africa has corrupted. Marlow views Africans in a positive light only when they stay in their place (Heart 36; Image 254), such as the oshore paddlers at the beginning of the novella and Kurtzs woman friend, who stays behind when he leaves. Similarly, he warns Europeans to stay where they belong lest they be corrupted by triumphant bestiality (Image 252). Readers and scholars of Heart of Darkness, in Achebes experience, often argue that the unsympathetic representation of Africans is no real problem because the novella is not about Africans but about Marlow and Kurtz. In fact, Achebe nds this as bad or worse a problem than Conrads descriptions of the Congolese as niggers, yelling crowds and prehistoric men. He argues that Africa is far too important to be reduced to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind (257). Referring to the model of layers of meaning, one can say that Achebe objects to the way the basic layer, African reality, is superseded by the layers of European ethical theory, ageless myth, psychology and so on, and Africa is re-interpreted to be part of these layers, with a simple rainforest acquiring the evil power of Fausts devil, or real living persons being equated with unconscious fears. Heart of Darkness can be read an experience that could happen to anybody and anywhere. Until then, critics had seen this as a token of the high quality of the novella, arguing that it elevated a simple individual journey into the realm of the dateless and ubiquitous; and they had therefore, for instance, praised the dropping of African points of reference with its concomitant dark-tunnel eect as a stroke of genius (Sherry 350). Achebe was the rst to argue that it is not good writing to sacrice other peoples individual lives to artistic methods, intellectual traditions or personal truths. Africans, he points out, have their own languages, cultures and history and they have names, too. Colonisers imposed their desire for power and wealth on what they saw of Africa and Africans, Conrad imposed his desire for literary art and genius on what he saw. For Achebe, one of the problems surrounding Heart of Darkness is that white racism against Africa is such a normal way of thinking that its manifestations go completely unremarked (257). With most other topics, readers and critics would notice that characters are being depersonalised and that their country is being fogged over by the Conradian adjectives. With Africa, it is just what they expect. Readers who defend Heart of Darkness arguing that it is a limited or unreliable narrator who is speaking, not Conrad himself, do not meet with Achebes approval either. In spite of two
1.10 RACISM AND IMPERIALISM
23
narrators and of relentless irony, he argues, Conrad fails to even hint at any alternative frame of reference in which the narrative could be interpreted, and he presents Marlow as trustworthy, liberal and resembling himself in career. Invariably, allegations of racism come with questions of guilt in tow. European racism is a lot older than anybody living, Achebe argues, and this should relieve us all of considerable responsibility and perhaps make us even willing to look at this phenomenon dispassionately (252). More vicious, however, is the tenacious reproduction of dehumanising images of Africa, either intentionally or as a reflex action (261), which among many other things comprises the inclusion of Heart of Darkness in school canons. White people now have access to resources that would allow them to know better for instance, the opportunity to encounter Africans or to read more accurate representations of their lives. The highly necessary ability to look at Africa not through a haze of distortions and cheap mystications but quite simply as a continent of people not angels, but not rudimentary souls either just people will be its own [. . . ] reward (261). A debate ensued that has become known as the Achebe controversy. Some Western Conradians defended Heart of Darkness with as much emotional vigour as he attacked it. Many of them argue that Marlows views on race are of their time while its antiimperialism is ahead of its time, or that it is not permissible to judge a literary work according to political ideas.9 Several writers and critics from formerly colonised countries have given particularly interesting responses to Achebes lecture. Some of them take up variations on Achebes stance, while others, including Ng ug wa Thiongo (Writers in Politics 19, 76-78) andNgugi Wilson Harris (Frontier), nd some grounds of defending Heart of Darkness, especially on account of its critical and satiric treatment of the colonisers. The following two readings will prove especially fruitful in the context of rewritings. The Guyanese author Wilson Harris calls Heart of Darkness a frontier novel (Frontier 263) in the sense that Conrad, by means of irony, shows the discourse of colonisation to be biased and insucient, but does not oer a new discourse. According to Harris, Conrad spent all his energy in exposing the illusions of imperialist rhetoric and subsequently suered from an exhaustion of spirit that froze [his] genius and made it impossible for him to cross the frontier upon which his intuitive imagination had arrived (266). Conrads distorted depiction of Africans is a parodic exaggeration of normal representation by complacent Europeans, and Kurtzs postscript a parody of the notion of moral light that devours all in its path (265), the way a homogenous society nds it a moral duty to conquer and subject everyone who is dierent. Conrads
Cf. Watt 158-59; Watts 55-58. Firchow also goes to great lengths to reject accusations of racism against Heart of Darkness.
9
24
scepticism, however, keeps him from oering any new perspectives. Such new material, Harris argues, has been forthcoming in more recent literature, including a search for spiritual meaning and for the value of words, as well as models of multicultural and individualist (postcolonial) societies. Frances B. Singh from India argues that while Heart of Darkness should not be removed from the canon of works indicting colonialism, the novella mainly shows the problem [Conrad] ran into when he attempted to indict colonialism (280). According to Singh, the problem is that the historical and the psychological levels of the metaphor [of darkness, horror etc.] work against each other (271). At the historical level, Marlow shows the horrors of colonialism. At the psychological level, however, he reassociates the horror with the Congolese. Marlow implies that they let all the vile unconscious desires run free that civilisation has been able to suppress in Europeans. According to Singh, Marlow nds that Kurtz has been infected and corrupted by the Africans unspeakable rites (Heart 50) rather than by his unchecked power, and Conrad sides with Marlow in every respect. So Conrad, being a man of his time, actually succumbed to the ideology that said Africans were evil [and therefore] must be conquered and put under white mans rule for their own good (272). However, Singh sees some light on the horizon for a new frame of reference. She nds that Kurtzs African friends are presented as simple, selfless and protective at least in part of the text. This suggests that Kurtz does not go so native that he becomes depraved, but he actually does not go native enough (277). If only he blended in with his friends enough to stop getting ivory for the company and for his European career, he could become part of their civilisation like an anthropologist studying a culture, and he could learn to value their way of living instead of getting them to help shoot other people for their ivory. For Singh, the horror refers to what Kurtz has done to Africans, and it also refers to men like Marlow who seemed to hate colonialism but really lived by its values and associated the practices of the blacks with the road to perdition (277). Exterminate all the brutes (Heart 51) shows Kurtzs wish to get rid of the brute colonisers who represent his link with greedy Western culture, and the Russian is closer to a truly intercultural encounter than Kurtz. Another important observation is that the idea of a sordid farce acted in front of a sinister back-cloth (Heart 17) is programmatic for the whole story. Marlow criticises everyone. One may argue that anti-African statements are not to be seen as hurtful because there are as many or more anti-European statements. This argument does not take into account that power in representation is not symmetric. Negative representation of Europeans is a criticism of their power, negative representation of Congolese supports that power (van den Broek 68).
1.11 GENDER
25
What is perhaps the most confusing feature of Heart of Darkness is Marlows Protean ability to switch between positive and negative stereotypes, or, rarely, between a stereotypical and a personal view of an African (Fincham, Sign). Marlow feels that to appreciate the common humanity of black and white, the European traveller must at least be as much of a man as these on the shore, while a few sentences earlier he has stated that they belong to the night of the rst ages (38). When the helmsman is dead, Marlow regards him with aection, but he also disavows this aection instantly to make the man a mere tool: I missed my late helmsman awfully [. . . ], dont you see, he had done something, he had steered [. . . ] a help an instrument. It was a kind of partnership (51). With the African woman, contradicting stereotypes alternate within one and the same sentence: a wild and gorgeous apparition of a woman [. . . ] treading the earth proudly with a slight jingle and flash of barbarous ornaments. [. . . ] She was savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnicent (60). Images of savagery and barbarism coexist with the fantasy of a natural, authentic and honest life, of masculine strength untainted by civilised flabbiness, of feminine pride unweakened by the Victorian paleness of the Intended. Conrad exploits the deep response of readers to racialist fantasies, of which many readers (as Achebe criticises) are not aware. In addition, he keeps the readers unconscious need to nd a closed order or principle alive by giving it no satisfaction, by switching rapidly between contradictory fantasies. Conrad takes this switching to a bewildering limit, creating a tension that may partially explain the intensity of Heart of Darkness and the diculties critics have had in tackling his treatment of race.
1.11
Gender
In the wake of the Achebe controversy, feminist readings of Heart of Darkness have been oered. Nina Pelikan Straus, Bette London, Johanna M. Smith and Elaine Showalter were among those who claimed that Heart of Darkness was not only racist but also sexist. Feminists argue that the Othering and silencing of women by men is comparable to the representation of the colonised Other that helps uphold white dominance. Marlow depicts Africans as a voiceless backcloth, women as out of it (Heart 49). He feminises Africa itself as a prostrate body that white men enter and plunder. Race and gender stereotypes collude to represent Kurtzs African woman friend as a part of nature, melting her into the fecund and mysterious, immense wilderness (60). Like Africa and Africans, female characters are depersonalised into symbols, mythical gures or similar abstractions. For instance, the Intended can be seen as an incarnation of naive Europe at home that supported the men in the colonies with a belief in their moral purity and their necessary service, while at the same time desiring the money those men were making there (Parry 37-39).
26
Critics who read the Intended as a person rather than a symbol have disputed whether Conrad tries to expose that society keeps women, or anyway Victorian leisure-class women, out of it and that Marlow withholds Kurtzs secret from the Intended to preserve masculine territory, or whether the author takes these exclusions for granted as much as his narrator does. Readings that inquire into masculinity analyse how the narrative constructs, represents or undermines a concept of manhood. The issue of Marlows lie(s), for instance, can be correlated with a masculine sense of self and its psychological and cultural foundations. He might feel gallantly protective of the Intended, or he might fear that a woman with a mature capacity for delity, for belief, for suering (Heart 73) may prove to be stronger than he can stand. Kramer argues that it would shatter his world view if such a strong woman existed. By withholding information from her, Marlow gives her no chance to prove herself strong in the face of reality. Hawkins (Psychology) and Kramer state that Conrad depicts the tension between a pressure to follow manly role models, and personal feelings of insecurity or inadequacy. To alleviate this tension and feel safer, men may aim to acquire power over both women and colonial populations, and represent them as inherently inferior. Heart of Darkness withholds attributes that are traditionally perceived as masculine, such as self-determination, responsibility or influential verbal self-expression, from male African characters, whom it describes as feminised and weak (cf. Hall 262).
1.12
Recent approaches: postcolonial criticism, discourse analysis and deconstruction
Since the 1970s, the following three methods have gained ascendancy. Many critics apply them in combination with each other or with other methods.10 Postcolonial criticism analyses texts from the point of view of a world that is working through the aftermath of imperialism, as well as struggling with neo-imperialism and contemporary racism. Discourse analysis is based on the assumption that there is no true representation of life but only dierent discourses about it. These discourses are based on life, and they have an influence on life. Deconstructionist approaches tease out the contradictions inherent in each text, rather than trying to nd a unied message in it. They contribute to a growing alertness to ambivalence in individual and societal views. Singhs contribution cited in Section 1.10 is an example of a deconstructionist reading.
For this section cf. also Ashcroft, Griths & Tin; Adam & Tin; Boehmer, Literature ; D oring; Gandhi; Walder.doring
10
1.12 RECENT APPROACHES
27
An analysis of ideological contradiction in a text will often nd that the text subverts its own intentions. For instance, Eagleton argues that by asserting that white colonialism is as savage as actual savages, Heart of Darkness arms a racist stance to the precise degree that it criticises it (135). One of the most important concepts from discourse analysis is that of Africanism, introduced by Miller in analogy to Edward Saids earlier denition of Orientalism. The term Africanism denotes Western discourses about Africa that produce images of the continent, which are then presented as knowledge and used to exercise control. Western recipients take Africanist discourses to be African reality. They perceive this constructed reality as an alien world, yet it has been produced by European minds. Miller argues that Heart of Darkness showcases a whole range of Africanist discourses, and makes the initial perception of a discourse as Africanist possible (170). According to Miller, Heart of Darkness demonstrates how Africanist discourses are used. For instance, Marlow names Africa only as one of several blank spaces. Given merely the description as the biggest blank, which has by now turned into a place of darkness, the reader familiar with Africanist discourse infers that the Congo is the site of his journey. In addition, Africanist discourse is produced by Kurtz, who is mainly a voice and the writer of a long report, and by Marlow, who positions himself as an eyewitness. In Culture and Imperialism , Said argues that Heart of Darkness transports Conrads reaction to Africanist representations he read, as much as it conveys his journey and his psychological makeup. In the Congo, Conrad saw Africa through the eyes of the discourses he was familiar with, and people have a tendency to nd what they expect to nd. Therefore Marlow considers the colonised people incapable of any form of selfgovernment, and the only question he sees is how to carve up Africa between the British, the King of the Belgians and other whites. Just as no alternative to imperialism was conceivable, there is no alternative to Marlows and Kurtzs voices. Complete authority over representation of Africa lies with Marlow, just as complete authority over representation, aesthetics and power on a larger scale lay with the West. However, Conrad, and Marlow, are unusually self-conscious. While Marlow cannot imagine any alternatives to imperialism, he does present the violence and the inconsistencies inside imperialism, and he marks his own narration as limited. (Here, Said contributes to Harriss idea of a frontier novel, cf. p. 23.) Said emphasises that in spite of this alert to Africanist discourse, Heart of Darkness was a part of that discourse. However ironically, the novella presented stereotypes and putative knowledge of Africa to contemporary readers who did not have an alternative frame of reference (Culture and Imperialism 24-26, 67-68).
28
Postmodernist theorists generally see postcolonial writing as grist to their mill. Both postcolonial writing and European postmodernism are influenced by the experiences of imperialism and decolonisation. Both movements unmask abstractions and show that all attempts to make universally applicable statements are in reality specic and political. Western postcolonial analysis combines Marxism, which emphasises the local, the specic and the strategically structured, and poststructuralism with its emphasis on the international, the hybrid and the fragmented. In response to the binary nature of Western philosophical tradition, poststructuralism identies reality and language as indeterminate, multilayered and historically contingent, and experience as uncentred, pluralistic and multifarious (Ashcroft, Griths & Tin 12). Theories of hybridity, as an alternative to the universalist and the univocal, are an important part of poststructural analysis. Postcolonial writing that embraces hybridity, such as rewriting, is especially congenial to poststructuralist criticism. This can make it harder for less cosmopolitan or less hybrid non-Western writers to nd Western readers.
Chapter 2 Rewriting and rereading Heart of Darkness

2.1 The politics of rewriting and rereading
The previous chapter shows that Heart of Darkness presents a web of European ideas that were partly about Africa, and partly about other topics but were projected onto Africa. The novella and its title have become a cultural symbol that stands for this web of discourse. Heart of Darkness may look like a description of African reality (and of colonised countries in general), but it is not, though to some extent it is about King Leopolds colony and a travellers highly personal emotional reaction to it. Marlow gives priority to the life-sensation of any given epoch of [his own] existence that which makes its truth (30) at the cost of leaving out other viewpoints almost completely. Such unilateral representations of historical realities demand creative responses from other perspectives. In recent years, postcolonial criticism of rewritings of canonical Western texts has emerged as an autonomous academic area. It was rst conceptualised by Ashcroft, Grifths & Tin in 1989. The main explanatory mechanism they deploy is that of a powerful metropolitan centre to which (in Salman Rushdies words) the colonial periphery writes back. After initial imitation and admiration of European writing and a desire to become part of it (assimilation), colonials abrogated the power of the literature and language of the centre, that is, they no longer took it as the point of reference or measure. They emphasised that the importance of the centre is discursively constructed and not universal. Rather than simply reversing the standards of the centre, they subsequently appropriated writing and language, that is, they remoulded them to transport the peripheral experience. This appropriation was part of a general struggle over the power invested in writing itself. The colonial self was proclaimed central and self-determining. Writing back also implies informing the erstwhile centre of this abrogation and appropriation. 29
30
Doring
Later theoretical works show that rewritings contain even more complex approaches to identity, hybridity and the reinvention of societies than the model of writing back covers. Boehmer (Literature ) and Walder stress that dierent historical contexts create dierent modes of response. D oring points out that rewritings from (formerly) colonised countries, often called postcolonial countries, are a paradoxical form of response. Authors from these countries who rewrite Western texts have usually studied in Western or strongly Westernised institutions of learning. The Western canon has thus contributed to the atmosphere in which they write as well as to their self-image, and they feel a need to respond to this contribution. Rewriting fulls the double function of representing the self and directly addressing the previous representations of it that are to be revised. Ambivalently, rewriters work against the Western pre-text, but also refer to it rather than discarding it altogether. Such references help gain the esteem of a Western and Westernised readership, so rewriting is not sheer rejection. Writers or characters who cite Western content can claim a novel kind of membership in the Western cultural tradition, and destabilise it from the inside without relinquishing their own cultural space, to which they adapt the citations. Rewriting canonical texts means rereading them in new ways. Authors create a communicative exchange without negating the dierences in perspective. Gandhi describes how this can take the form of a peaceful and therapeutic reworking of the past that helps create new alliances between the former colonised and colonisers. Caminero-Santangelo points out that the theory of oppositional writing was created to help counter the earlier model of literary influences, which enabled Western critics to read (post)colonial literatures as derivative and secondary. He argues that postcolonial authors go beyond both of these models, in that they make creative use of Heart of Darkness when treating themes that are not related to colonialism. He also stresses that these authors appropriate the pre-text to relate to other, specic historical situations and to heterogeneous old and new discourses, rather than writing back to a monolithic colonial discourse. Hybridity in the sense that the colonial impact has left its traces, is arguably inevitable. An explicit dialogue with European texts is an active political and emotional choice. I extend the term rewriting to include texts from (formerly) colonising countries. What these texts have in common with those from (formerly) colonised countries is the desire for a dialogue with canonical Western pre-texts. White Westerners, too, seek their identity in response and in contrast to those who have earlier tried to dene it for them. Especially later white Western writers, who can be called postcolonial based on time though not on space, also seek new possibilities for encounters with the postcolonised. They therefore feel the need to revise or subvert pre-texts that suggest patterns and limits for an encounter.
2.1 THE POLITICS OF REWRITING AND REREADING
31
Some rewritings relate to Heart of Darkness very explicitly, containing similarities in plot or characters, which show that the authors intend to respond visibly. Other texts contain some verbal and stylistic echoes, or responses to the body of discourses for which Heart of Darkness has become a symbol, so that it may rather be the readers decision to read a book in the tradition of Heart of Darkness. Conrads novella is such a pervading master narrative that writers may respond to it indirectly, even unconsciously, or based on other texts in the same tradition, and yet make important contributions to the way one reads Heart of Darkness today. The formal degree of the relationship does not limit the intensity with which a text can relate to Heart of Darkness. In other respects as well, all rewritings need to be read both as writerly and as readerly texts. Many postcolonial authors, led by writer-theorists including Achebe and Ng ug , have explicitly proclaimed that they intend to full a political and didactic func-Ngugi tion. They have thus sharpened a world-wide consciousness of the relationship between social and literary practices. Writers sociopolitical intentions are especially important in their responses to the level on which Heart of Darkness is a text about reality. On the other hand, to relate to the readers participation in constructing meaning, and to understand the reactions to the many cultural references Conrad weaves into his text, a close reading or discourse analytical approach is especially helpful. An approach that is open both to a reception of didactic intentions and to deconstructionist reading methods is thus very well suited to rewritings of a canonical Western text. Within this framework, I focus on the following ve themes: self and identity, encounters, functions of language, representation and images of the Other, and the political and social function of writing. These themes cover the layers of meaning identied in Chapter 1 and help directly relate rewritings to them. There is a danger that Westerners may try to incorporate writing from (formerly) colonised countries as an extension of their own thinking rather than see it as separate discourses. The new insight into cultural relativity in the West may again marginalise the Rest as a backdrop for Western self-questioning. Such theory both values and perpetuates what it declares as marginal, and recognises but contains dierence. In countries where viable alternatives to English continue to exist, the choice of language in literature is intensely disputed. English, while used as a lingua franca and consequently in some countries as the language of national liberation movements, is simultaneously considered the language of the oppressor, and sometimes writers are reproached with writing for the richer, larger Western market rather than for their own people, or of introducing a split between an English-speaking elite and others in their own society. Radical writers including Ng ug , who calls for decolonisation to a point where all eects of colonisationNgugi would be left behind, no longer write in English, or write in their local language and translate some or all of their texts into English.
32
One can argue that non-Western authors who make their works accessible in European languages and who refer to Heart of Darkness more or less explicitly show that they tolerate comparative readings, so that my project of reading them from a Conradian, Western perspective can perhaps be attempted without implying hegemonic motivations, as long as it is understood that these texts invite many other readings that go beyond seeing them as rewritings.
2.2
Journeys
Marlows tale appears to be a single account of his journey. Only when reading its rewritings does one realise how many dierent motivations to go on a journey and how many subsequent experiences he describes simultaneously and without transitions. Some of these experiences appear to clash, yet coexist in his tale which makes it so interesting, but also so hard to read. Heart of Darkness contains all of the following ways of perceiving a journey, an astonishing array. Many colonial travellers are motivated by an intention to improve the lives and mentalities of the colonised. Marlow calls this the redeeming idea. Maughams Walker is far more convinced of this idea than Marlow, but is being replaced by people who are not. Yet, this belief persists in dierent forms of aid and missionising until today, from Andr e Gide to Kingsolvers Nathan. In Greenes The Heart of the Matter , this impetus is gradually replaced by (Marlow-like) feelings of pointlessness and stagnation. Maughams Mackintosh and Gide discover questionable colonial methods that they feel can and should be improved. The discovery does not destroy their belief in the colonial project as such. This belief is profoundly shaken for those travellers, including Hueer & Conrads Radet and Callan as well as Jays Emma, who feel that they discover an irredeemable colonial crime, which dehumanises the colonisers. In Heart of Darkness, the assessment that colonial lapses are avoidable coexists with the idea that irreparable crimes have been discovered: Marlow thinks that in British colonies real work is done (13), while he also feels that colonialism is always robbery with violence (10). One of his conflicting thoughts is that the conquest of the earth [. . . ] mostly means the taking it away from [other peoples] (10). Similarly, other colonial travellers and settlers ambivalently recognise that the country may already belong to its indigenous inhabitants spiritually and materially. Whites Voss , Harris and Malouf raise this question. While all these ways of perceiving a journey centre on the interaction with the colonised, others centre on the traveller. Many travellers and settlers undertake the journey to gain income or larger economic security. While they thus feel that they travel into
Andre
2.2 JOURNEYS
33
sites of current historical fact, most of them simultaneously travel into themselves. The most extreme clash is that between journeys into recognisable history and journeys into the white fears, desires and fantasies projected as the inner Congo or Congo of the soul, which are both present in Heart of Darkness and coexist quite often. Silverberg describes the fantasy journey as if it could have happened at a denite point in history, Widmer satirises it, and OHanlon analyses the discourses and dreams that constitute it. In addition, travellers traverse discursive spaces inspired by European pre-texts and other pre-existing representation. Some seem to go to places directly shaped by Heart of Darkness. Dabydeens narrator travels on a Congo River recreated in London, Schippers Ellen on Conrads river, and Tayler in what his acquaintances call the heart of darkness. NourbeSe Philips Traveller explores the more general discursive space of colonial and feminine silence. Another discursive space, the primal, primitive, ur-human or prehistoric one, has inspired many variations. Gide restricts it to nature. Voss , Harris and Malouf combine it with creation or re-creation. Joshi reinterprets it as positive, NourbeSe Philip undermines the categories of history and prehistory. While Tayler hardly analyses this discursive space, and casually recreates it as much as a hundred years after Heart of Darkness, OHanlon analyses its constructedness but realises that he is still not fully immune to its pitfalls. OHanlon also identies the concepts of archetypal sites and of the unconscious as discursively dened. Closely related to these is the idea of a mythical space. Gide and Whites Ellen, while journeying abroad, mostly traverse the psychological spaces of their native myths. Maloufs settlers and those in Voss encounter myths of the new country. Joshis and Roys main characters listen to myths of another community in the same country. Harris, Schipper and Gurnah create new discursive spaces, mixing myth and religious tales of dierent origins. C eline, Harris and Widmer mark their characters journeys as veritable dream jour-Celine neys and thus also reread Marlows as one, while White and Malouf weave elements of dream into experiences that the characters perceive as real. All of these dreams are experienced together with symbolic images of light, darkness and shadow. Some recent authors modify this symbolism. Coetzee deracialises it by systematically not relating it to skin colours, while Widmer playfully inverts the colours, which emphasises that their symbolic meaning is a constructed one. Otherwise, darkness and shadow are usually connected with negative ideas. C elines Bardamu feels that his journey leads him into theCeline dark side of the human condition, while Whites Ellen believes that she travels into a peoples dark savagery. The related journey into various lusts (Heart 57) is described as fascinating, but violent and destructive by Salih and, on a wholly dierent level, in Silverbergs fantasy lusts. Joshis description of peaceful lusts shows that it can also be a true psychological quest.
34
Celine
Celine
Marlow implies a journey into hell or descent into an inferno. Jay reinterprets this as the travellers own, changeable perception. In Voss , it is taken up as one of many discourses of evolving Australian settler society, while Naipaul interprets it in political terms. The idea of hell is complemented by Gurnahs and Roys journeys into a fallen, elusive or false paradise, and Joshis exploration of a doubtful one. Such strong images are often connected with journeys of initiation. C eline, Gurnah and Kingsolver describe travellers who are initiated into knowledge of power structures. Harriss travellers are initiated into a new spiritual dimension. Whites Ellen is changed by her glimpses of passion, of cannibalism and of what she feels is her darker self. Many others as well are initiated into emotional experiences stronger than the ones they had known before their journeys. NourbeSe Philips African women explicitly intend to initiate the foreign traveller. She thus satirises the colonial assumption that Africa is per se a zone of initiation, or even exists for this purpose. Initiation can trigger a process of emotional maturing, but not everyone matures on their geographical and psychological journeys. Many characters feel that they travel to where there is no societal control. This happens to Western travellers and settlers, and also to their non-Western counterparts who travel to Europe, such as Salihs Mustafa, or elsewhere, such as Naipauls Salim, Mahesh and Shoba. Many do not have the emotional maturity or discipline to retain their moral integrity in this situation. The journey into the unknown evokes strong feelings just because it is unknown. The biggest, the most blank (Heart 11) white space on the map can be a destination to simply get away from home, as with C elines Bardamu and Greenes Querry, but is more often connected with desires for adventure and discovery. The explorers in Voss as well as OHanlon and Tayler initially feel that this blank is a space where they can prove themselves, but they all learn that it is too powerful to provide this kind of manageable backdrop. NourbeSe Philip shows that the feeling of a blank has been equated with that of a silence. This silent or hardly-understood space can inspire ignorance and careless misunderstandings as in Arrow of God , or respect for thoughts and actions that others can decode but oneself cannot, as with Leonard Woolf and later writers including OHanlon and Kingsolver. For travellers and settlers from very dierent walks of life, the unknown space becomes a metaphysical landscape, invested with a personality and intentions, and sometimes threatening. Most of these landscapes mirror the self, and can be the site of very specic projections. Where Harris, NourbeSe Philip and Kingsolver describe a feminised country, Tayler sees an indierent nature that is bigger than humankind. Jay demonstrates that the discourse of a landscape with a personality can be manipulated and used by persons who want to influence others emotions.
2.3 SELF AND IDENTITY
35
The following types of journeys are not present in Heart of Darkness. Their conspicuous absence has invited rewritings that provide them, in the form of a simple addition or of a protest against their absence. This means that Heart of Darkness contains their seeds, too, in a negative way. Scientic thinking, which can be seen as a form of mimesis, prompts travellers to ethnologise the site of their journey. This begins with Gide and is satirised by Roy. Moreover, Gide, Maloufs minister and OHanlon see nature abroad as a rich inspiration for biology and other disciplines. Numerous others nd, often to their surprise, that they travel into beautiful nature, or habitable nature, or that they nd a relationship to nature. Many travellers perceive the new place as a livable space. Maughams Edward Barnard even believes that he has found a true paradise. Those who feel that they venture into the heart of an Otherness not invested with any master symbolism have perhaps the richest experiences, being open for new insights. They may perceive the new country as a space where they learn, look for acceptance and nd mutual dialogue. This begins with Greenes A Burnt-out Case ; it is central for Schipper, OHanlon, Kingsolver and Tayler. This experience is supported by Achebes and Ng ug s demystifying descriptionsNgugi of indigenous peoples, which show travellers that they intrude on a complex society that has its own issues. The more travellers learn about such a society, the more rmly do they become convinced that the space belongs to its indigenous inhabitants (cf. A Burntout Case , Naipaul, Schipper, OHanlon, Kingsolver and Tayler). Ng ug s Thompson,Ngugi Naipauls Salim and Jerey Tayler even realise that they are not, or not fully, welcome, and leave a postcolonial country.
2.3
Self and identity
Identity is influenced by the dicult balance between acquired ideas and actual experiences, between cultural rootedness and destabilisation. In colonial and postcolonial reading and writing, the category of generation, or age, turns out to be as important for the formation of identities as the classic trinity of race, class and gender. Writers and their characters nd themselves born into a cultural hegemony, shaped by indigenous or extraneous culture(s) or both, and into a body of available knowledge shaped by deliberate or accidental remembering, forgetting and distortions on all sides. As individuals, members of each generation internalise, reject or modify what they nd. As writers, and especially as rewriters, they additionally place themselves in a relationship to their earlier authors. Harold Bloom has conceptualised this relationship as an oedipal struggle.
36
2.3.1
Perspectives
Over time, rewritings of Heart of Darkness portray characters with increasingly complex perspectives. Rewriters inspire later rewriters. The courage of relating one marginal perspective to a canonical text that was most probably not intended for people with that perspective can encourage others to relate a point of view to it that is even less comparable to the established narratives of the former colonial centre. This development influences and is influenced by a more general one, that of migrant and hybrid perspectives nding increasingly stronger voices in the Western literature market. European perspectives that do not conform to traditional norms are increasingly explored as well. In fact, this already holds for Marlow, who is not at all the established hero of adventure stories. Marlow is a character in a dominant group who prefers to see himself as an uninvolved bystander. Maughams Edward Barnard, Jays Emma and Greenes Querry casually share this self-perception. Ng ug s Mugo, a person in a dominated group who fervently wants to be an uninvolved bystander, nds out that this stance is not as easy in his case, because he is forced to realise that to make no choice supports the powers that be.1 Some persons in the dominant group who want to be neutral are drawn into the role of ambivalent or passive semi-collaborators, which can also be said about Marlow. Hueer & Conrads Granger tries to forget this by claiming that he is powerless himself. Widmers Kuno and Willy practically take globalised exploitation for granted. C elines Bardamu, Salihs women, Whites Ellen and Kingsolvers Orleanna are members of the dominant group but see themselves as victims or are victim personalities. Coetzees Magda is aware that she is ambivalently victimised and dominant. In dominated groups, tensions arise because most do not identify with the dominated role imposed on them. Achebes Okonkwo and Ezeulu as well as Salihs Mustafa, dominant individuals in a dominated group, see themselves as agents and perceive history as a series of struggles, not of dominant/dominated dichotomies. It is especially obvious that the historical situation of the East African Arabs omitted in Heart of Darkness cannot be categorised in this dichotomy. Their perspective is described by Gurnah, and a comparable one by Naipaul. Salihs characters are Muslims as well, and see themselves as members of an old and strong culture, but their lives are not structured by a relationship to a dierent (dominated) ethnic majority. People increasingly mingle and cross over geographically or socially. Some persons from a dominated group join the dominant group, to improve their own standing or
On the dominant/dominated model see also Dorsinvilles approach cited in Ashcroft, Griths & Tin 32-33.
1
Ngugi
Celine
37
because they do not see any other possibility. They see history from intermediate perspectives of collaborators or middlemen. Achebes Nwoye and Oduche, Ng ug s KaranjaNgugi and Phillipss interpreter are central characters with this role. Many other authors include minor characters in similar roles. Starting with Ng ug , several authors show how new national leaders become power-Ngugi ful with independence, neocolonialism is on the rise, and new dominant and dominated groups come into being. Hybridised wealthy class or post-middlemen personalities in formerly colonised countries, including Joshis and Roys protagonists and OHanlons Marcellin, struggle to nd their identity both in interaction with dominated groups within their society and vis-` a-vis the former colonisers. Another dicult search for identity and position, and another journey that can be related to Marlows, is that of (post)colonial migrants in Britain. Salih, Naipaul and Dabydeen reuse Heart of Darkness to describe such journeys. In the present sample of books, there is no strong correlation between the migrancy of authors and the choice of migrancy as a topic. Many other writers of non-Western origin are cosmopolitan as well (including Achebe, Harris, Ng ug , Naipaul, Phillips, Dabydeen, NourbeSe PhilipNgugi and Gurnah), most having moved to privileged Western countries. This contributes to their in-between perspective. For comparisons with Heart of Darkness, it is of special interest that Joseph Conrad was a migrant himself, although he appeared as a white man among others to the Congolese. In London, the characters nd what Marlow projects onto the Congo. Salih and Dabydeen parodically resituate the heart of darkness in London. Salih reassigns to this city the various lusts and the temptation to go under to the attraction of Otherness and of (gendered) power. Dabydeens narrator nds echoes of Marlows symbolic representation. His friend Joseph goes under to the influences of the white natives (prejudice, pornography and police). The direction of Marlows journey is reversed, but his aim is preserved, by men from the colonies who come to seek greater economic security in London and who reassess themselves on their journeys, like Naipauls Salim and Indar. Indars hope to reconnect with his own Indian roots at the Indian embassy in London shows that the citys colonial past has made it a meeting point of the world. The two men come to see it as a place where exiles can carve out a new position, and can try to participate in the wealth that has in part been brought to London from the colonies (an exotic wealth, which is symbolised in the ornamental dolphins and camels Indar sees on the London Embankment (157)). Like settlers, the eventually try to nd and claim a new home. Naipauls and Dabydeens migrants place themselves in the middle tiers of hierarchies of race, achievement, privilege and oppression. As multiply displaced persons, they inhabit a perspective between assimilation/admiration and abrogation.
38
Those who are hybrid by descent or culture have a similarly complex task of dening a position for themselves. Maloufs Gemmy has a liminal position that upsets the secure feeling of those who see themselves as monocultural. For Harriss descendants of migrants, the task of nding a social position and a home is especially dicult because they belong and do not belong at the same time. They may even feel guilty for claiming their space, but they have no other place to go. Authors and characters who know a lot about the other group are able to occasionally describe their own group from the perspective of the Other. Achebe briefly switches to a white perspective, Phillipss narrator imagines the thoughts of the Governor, Dabydeens narrator assesses himself as he thinks white British people do. Whites are beginning to acquire this ability as well: OHanlon and Tayler try to learn how Africans see them. Postcolonial developments generally favour the development of insecure or learner personalities in the privileged group, including Schippers Ellen, OHanlon, Kingsolvers women and Tayler. Finally, after exploring perspectives other than the ones of the old centres, it is easier to imagine transcending all existing outlooks. Harris and NourbeSe Philip experiment with exemplary or markedly non-realist perspectives, Salih and Widmer with a (satirical) exchange of perspectives.
2.3.2
The Janus-faced man (and how women live with him)
Celine
Marlow withholds Kurtzs truth from the Intended but tells it to his male friends on the yacht. A surprising number of rewritings take up this theme. The truth is always about urges. Kurtzs urges include greed and desires for power, sex, unspeakable rites and heads on stakes. He really comes to embody all primitive urges, named or not. Most male characters do not address their urges openly with women. C elines Bardamu learns to lie to get what he wants, which is usually sex, but also includes money, food and an easy time. Greenes Scobie cannot talk about his adultery to his wife. Salihs Mustafa and narrator do not tell Hosna about Mustafas experience, which has to do with sex, power and death. When Silverbergs Andrew Battell returns to England, he is oered a teenage bride, but adopts her instead in order to protect her from his extravagant sexual knowledge, and later tells his tale of violence and cannibalism to her young husband but apparently never to her. Dabydeens narrator feels that he needs to protect Janet and Rashida from the kind of masculinity he nds in pornography. While the men prefer to withhold information about all urges or instincts from women, sex is mentioned most frequently, and reveals an important pattern: all men except Scobie satisfy their urges exogamously; all men lie to women of their own kind.
39
Interestingly, Patrick Whites Ellen, a female character in a novel with a male author, appears to have a similar pattern. Back in white society, she chooses the most suitable among her personalities, and neither talks about her sexual experiences with Garnet and Jack nor about cannibalistic and other savage incidents with the Aborigines. However, she does not have anybody like Marlows male friends in whom she could conde. This shows that she is not Janus-faced in the same sense as men in other texts, but that society expects middle-class women to be silent and (appear to) lack knowledge in certain areas. Ellen is aware that she gives in to these expectations and has partly internalised them. From this sample of books, it appears that in societies across the world there are traditions of restricted communication flow between the sexes, which are beginning to be addressed. Later rewritings show important developments. Salihs narrator feels remorse about his silence and wonders whether he could have prevented Hosnas death by telling her about Mustafas past. His problem is explicitly related to age or generation, as his parents have earlier withheld from him the information that Hosna has practically asked them for his hand in marriage to protect her from the forced alliance that ends in her death. His parents feel that a woman should not initiate communication of such importance; the narrator himself begins to doubt this tradition. As long as the communication problem is not addressed, mens fears of how women will react when they get the information may be justied. The women in The Heart of the Matter are aware of Scobies situation but cannot muster the strength or the directness to talk about it. When Joshis Situ and Meena nd Billy, they feel that their own rights are more important than their husbands concerns; they have not learned to negotiate. In both novels, gender-related communication problems lead to the death of the male protagonist. Such women really are the horror.2 Later generations of women are learning to analyse and possibly to handle the mens behaviour. Dabydeens Janet sees through the whole issue and points out that some men cant do it [communicate sexually, but also verbally] with clean women (242). The book ends before the reader can nd out what the consequences of this knowledge will be. There is a second predominantly masculine janiformity, the split between a public and a private self. Kurtzs public persona is contained in his report, and his (later) private emotions in the postscript. The coexistence of his public and private self in these two texts on the same page marks his descent into madness and death. Some later men become aware of the public/private dissonance and learn about it, some do not.
By equating Kurtzs last word with your name (Heart 75), Marlow possibly implies that the Intended is the horror, especially insofar as she stands for Europeans who send men to the colonies and champion discourses at home that do not relate to what the men really experience there. On this equation cf. Stark; Ellis.
2
40
Salihs Mustafa makes (sexual) exploitation his private art form, but writes textbooks on economic justice. Dabydeen satirises his narrators desire to write for a public in big and sublime words, which conflicts with the young mans personal situation and hampers his development.
2.4
Encounters: exploiters, givers and help racism
Marlow calls his steamer the forerunner of change, of conquest, of trade, of massacres, of blessings (67). It turns out that this is a very exact description of the roles whites will have in the encounter. In rewritings all over the world, whites appear either as exploiters or as givers, and often both at the same time. Gide sometimes employs people who have been forcibly recruited for his expedition, but he also insists on paying his African employees well, and takes this as a starting point for some emotional encounters. Maughams Walker exploits the islanders because he wants to give them a road. At the other end of the century, people repeatedly take it for granted that OHanlon and Tayler have come for diamonds or other wealth, and ask them for money or other resources about as often. This perception corresponds to the international political situation, as Western companies exploit non-Western resources while aid organisations and governments send material help (with more or less obvious ulterior motives). Some writers analyse the exploiter-giver phenomenon in political and psychological terms. Naipauls Salim nds that colonial Europeans wanted gold and slaves, like everybody else; but at the same time they wanted statues put up to themselves as people who had done good things for the slaves. [. . . ] they got both the slaves and the statues (23). Salims friend Indar realises that after colonialism, Americans have all this money to spend on Africa, which according to Indar really means that they use the surplus wealth of the western world to protect that world (160). Indar himself exploits this attitude and money for a while. Kingsolvers Adah feels that [n]o other continent has endured such an unspeakably bizarre combination of foreign thievery and foreign goodwill (632) as Africa. Dabydeens narrator implies that during his childhood in Guyana, whites handed out food to improve their standing in the ongoing independence struggles. Harris describes non-white dominant descendants of immigrants who inhabit the exploiter-giver role: his Donne wishes to be an all-round protective ruler for the Arawak or Amerindian workers whom he exploits. Help racism, a part of the giver role, is a dangerous discourse. It resembles the weak/strong dichotomy in Heart of Darkness, albeit with a dierent semantic. Help racism splits the world into a permanent dichotomy of (white) givers, who are considered
2.4 ENCOUNTERS
41
strong people who can handle things, and (non-white) receivers of alms, who are considered weaklings who cannot. Dabydeens narrator hate[s] his classmate Nasim, who is in hospital victimised by a racist attack, because he looks like pictures of hungry Third-World children and remind[s] us of our own weakness, our own fear (14). Even givers who are aware only of altruistic motivations, like many missionaries, cannot bring anything purely good. Religion is used for political purposes (cf. Kingsolvers Orleanna and the evangelical movement in Ng ug , Grain 84-85), and it is usuallyNgugi destructive in some way, for instance by contributing to social divisions or to a colonial hegemony (cf. e.g. Achebe, OHanlon). The giver problem is foreshadowed in the paradox that is created around altruism in Heart of Darkness (cf. Section 1.6). Altruism is exposed as an illusion, a way of doing things without knowing ones own real motivations for them or the motivations of the people one works for. Greenes The Heart of the Matter gives a strong symbolic explanation for this by showing how feelings of pity can amount to a refusal to take the pitied persons seriously and let them share control; however, Greene does not explicitly transfer this explanation to (neo)colonialism. Rewritings thus show that giving or help racism is not only a philanthropic smokescreen that hides primitive urges as Marlow mostly implies, but is itself one of the primitive urges that Kurtz comes to embody. If one rereads Heart of Darkness with this idea in mind, Kurtzs argument that we whites, from the point of development we [have] arrived at, [. . . ] can exert a power for good practically unbounded (50) is actually part of his various lusts he lusts to be the stronger, be in control, be a parent gure and make other peoples lives his project. Kurtzs report thus attempts to oer a verbal cloak or even a rationale for satisfying this urge just as much as it does for his other urges. Such a rationale is parodied by Phillips. His character Lewis feels that a woman ought to be glad he rapes her; this mirrors his Governor who feels that Africans ought to be glad about civilising colonialism. Encounters outside of these roles appear to be quite rare, even where some of the participants wish for them. Often, people are out of sync. After colonisers taught the colonised for so long that white skin means an exploiter or a giver, a white person who tries to be something other than that is sometimes forced to confront the old roles as internalised by denizens of formerly colonised countries (cf. esp. OHanlon, Tayler). Postcolonial white travellers have an uneasy feeling when their skin colour causes expressions of deference or admiration, especially if they themselves rather think that the problematic colonial past is inscribed in it. This dissonance determines the white travellers reactions to OHanlons Xavier Bague (220, 235, 237, 258), as well as to Schippers market woman (35) and congregation (79-80).
42
Nevertheless, some postcolonial texts oer approaches to breaking free from the roles of exploiter, giver and help racist. Greenes Querry is cast by the journalist Parkinson as a stereotypical giver. Querry and the other whites at the leprosery keep stressing that this is an impossible role, and that they are actually doing what they enjoy doing, which includes research, closeness to intense human situations, and freedom from larger white society. Querry feels that his emotional healing is aided by the African man Deo Gratias. Coetzees Magda must learn to accept help from her black farm hands, and is forced to relinquish her economic exploiter-giver role when she cannot pay them. Coetzee studies the diculties of this learning process extensively. Schippers Ellen feels guilty for the exploiter role of whites that she nds in the past, in Europeans who live in postcolonial Zaire and are nostalgic for the old colonial times, and in her husband. She also begins to analyse the giver role as a political one. She gives language classes at a university that is nancially supported by the West, and realises that this is not a pure gift but one with strings of cultural imperialism attached. Ellen associates whiteness with guilt, and is surprised when some Africans give her a chance to overcome such feelings. Kingsolvers Leah goes through a similar process. Each of the two women learns to see herself outside the exploiter-helper dichotomy when Africans oer her the role of an ally and tell her that white skin does not necessarily carry a burden of complicity. Each becomes able to accept Africans in the role of givers, which includes givers of emotions and new discursive approaches. Redmond OHanlon is destabilised when he realises that the role of a giver of (scientic and atheist) discourse, which he originally selects for himself, is not appropriate in the Congo. He also realises how easily a material gift can backre, when his tarpaulins end up with an elephant poacher. Generally, a growing awareness of failed colonial and postcolonial gifts is part of recent changes in the encounter. Jays Washington has caused deaths by sending indigenes far away from their homes (84, 99), OHanlon nds that the European hospital is considered a dangerous site of infection (36), and Gurnah shows how Christianisation makes some Africans vulnerable (61-62). Similarly aware of failed gifts, Kingsolvers Adah tries to envisage a world in which whites give up helping Africa. She ends up with biologistic ideas about birth and death rates and the eect of the climate on the availability of food. Her thoughts appear rather bizarre, probably because, unlike her sister Leah, she does not communicate with Africans in order to get their opinions. The texts unanimously suggest that the way out of problematic traditional roles is a mutual exchange and cooperation in which all participants behave as equals.
2.5 LANGUAGE
43
2.5
Language: wariness, scepticism, necessary strategies and dicult dialogue
Marlow learns to distrust the high-flown words he hears about and from Kurtz. His disillusionment about what he has heard in Brussels comes full circle when he learns that Kurtz used to write for European newspapers. An impressive number of rewritings recommend being wary of big words. The power, bias and sometimes corruptibility of the mass media are discussed by Hueer & Conrad, in Greenes A Burnt-out Case , by Naipaul, Dabydeen, Widmer, Roy and Tayler. Manipulative use of language outside the media is discussed mostly by Jay. Woolf, Naipaul, Salih and Dabydeen stress the eects of school reading on personal development. NourbeSe Philips Livingstone embodies the importance of words in the colonial process; Achebe and Ng ug earlier studied this powerNgugi of language by describing white characters who write a book or a report. The sheer number of authors who address this topic underlines how important public representation and discourse have been in the colonial and neocolonial process. Authors from all backgrounds stress again and again how many people are not aware of this importance, and depict characters who suer or make others suer because they cannot see through big words. The more one is wary of what others say, the more will one distrust ones own words, fearing that they may turn hollow inadvertently. Marlow is sceptical whether language can express his experience. He uses irony and the impressionist method of multifarious allusions to underline his scepticism and to express as much as he can without committing himself to any one direct message. As opposed to this, it appears that authors and societies who need language for a social and political struggle can express some scepticism about its capacities but ultimately have to use it as a tool.3 Ng ug s characters, forNgugi instance, do express some scepticism about words, but ultimately always manage to get their feelings and facts across to their interlocutors. Harris distinguishes between scepticism about language as a means of describing art, music or private emotions, and trust in language as a communication tool. In Heart of Darkness, one may admire the artfulness of so many layers of meaning encoded in so little text, or one may feel angry about how much these extraneous layers obscure Congolese reality and hamper comprehensibility. Indeed, this anger helps the reader realise that Conrad marks Marlows discourse as limited without having an alternative to oer. Many readers will oscillate between admiration and anger. Numerous rewriters exploit this ambivalence, by both modelling their texts on the layeredness and canon awareness of the pre-text and rewriting history with a view to comprehensibility
3
Cf. also Boehmer, Literature 248; Harris, Frontier 266-67.
44
and even didacticism (Achebe, Naipaul and Gurnah are only a few examples). They achieve this by selecting and shaping the layers of cultural knowledge to t the historical reality they represent, while Marlow rather edits reality to make it t the available theories. A more accessible representation does not have to mean less complexity or even less art. Of course, some (post)colonial writers do claim a right to texts that are hard to understand. The most obvious examples are Harris and NourbeSe Philip. However, they each give a clear philosophical message, which can be understood without a huge decoding eort. Irony, too, is generally subordinated to such aims. The strategic emphasis of postcolonial writers on accessibility and on historical fact suggests that both scepticism about language and Marlows degree of allusiveness or encryption are a kind of luxury, which can only be aorded by writers who do not feel that they have to get a didactic, activist or otherwise direct message across, and by readers who have enough time and education or reference books to decode a text. Obfuscation is a luxury for the privileged. It seems, then, that Westerners have become poorer with respect to discourse or discursive power since decolonisation. Over time, more and more white authors strive for accessibility. They struggle with dicult new insights and wish to make them clear to their readers, not to encrypt them. This is especially visible in Schippers ctional diary and in OHanlons and Taylers non-ctional accounts. The question whether one can aord an attitude can also be detected in the area of dialogue between the (post)dominant and the dominated. Marlow hints at this area mostly by leaving it out. He practically excludes the possibility of dialogue with Africans, although he implies that at least two Africans on the ship (the managers boy and the headman of the woodcutters) know enough French to get by. Conrads creation of the Russian character who can understand some African languages but not that of the region suggests that the author self-consciously avoids addressing this area. He implies that Marlows tale cannot transcend the colonial silence in which the colonised are described by the colonisers but do not represent themselves although they are the ones who are forced to learn a new language and use it. As the example of Marlow shows, colonisers did not have to enter into dialogue if they did not want to. From Achebes rst novel onwards, (post)colonised writers provide far more intercultural dialogue than the earlier white writers. In Arrow of God , Achebe discusses the problem that colonisers just do not bother to ask the colonised when they do not understand something. Again, it appears that postcolonial white writers cannot aord the attitude of their colonial predecessors any longer. They provide more and more intercultural dialogue.
2.6 REPRESENTATION AND IMAGES OF SELF AND OTHER
45
This begins with Greenes A Burnt-out Case (1961), a text on the brink of decolonisation. Later whites want to know what members of other cultures think about them, and use this information as food for thought (cf. esp. Schipper, OHanlon, Tayler). The white search for self moves on from an introspective to a dialogic approach. Such intense dialogue can result in what feels like a glass wall, a situation in which each participant begins to see the others position or cultural tradition, but cannot quite come to terms with it. This is an energy-consuming and at times frustrating process, but writers unanimously present it as a necessary postcolonial stage. This mutual and precise consciousness of limited understanding is hardly comparable with the earlier vague impression of generally mysterious or enigmatic natives that whites projected as their essence. It begins with A Burnt-out Case and Schipper, and is intensied by OHanlon and Tayler, whose dialogue with some Africans is sucient for both sides to locate the glass wall quite precisely, i.e. to identify the cultural content that causes it. Coetzees Magda tries to overcome a dierent limitation to dialogue, that imposed by Apartheid. While she can quite easily describe her perceptions and feelings, she nds it hard to bridge the communicative distance from black South Africans that earlier whites have set up. From scepticism about one language, problem awareness has moved on to language barriers and dicult dialogue.
2.6
Representation and images of self and Other
White writers representations of colonised peoples all over the world influenced each other, and they often used closely related stereotypes for vastly dierent cultures. Writers from the colonised and postcolonial world have therefore responded to somewhat similar images, and symbols or models of resistance and innovation have travelled around the world much like the colonisers tropes. Nevertheless, the histories of the countries that are often subsumed under the term postcolonial are so dierent that it is questionable whether a common conceptualisation is appropriate. The following sections focus on the individual elds of experience relevant for this study.
2.6.1
African authors except South African
In colonies of occupation, the colonisers enforced European literary canons as an educational hegemony, and systematically silenced local history. The black African writing discussed here begins with the struggles for independence. Achebe, Ng ug and GurnahNgugi focus on retrieving and rewriting history around the time of colonisation, while Salih treats a satirical inversion of the colonial journey set shortly before decolonisation.
46
Doring
Ngugi
Doring
According to D oring, African authors retrieve history by providing a thick description (Cliord Geertzs term) of an African society as a coherent, complex and livable civilisation at a specic position in space and time. Rather than minimising internal tensions as well as drawbacks or violent aspects of that society, they place them in their social context. African authors locate agency and social responsibility in Africans at least as much as in Europeans. This includes the agency of middlemen, collaborators, converts and other persons with mixed aliations, so that the encounter never appears as a binary antagonism between victors and victims, or between oppression and retaliation. Authors address the awkward question of where ancestors went wrong and made colonisation possible, but also describe their creative opposition and victories. They trace the mixture of struggle and cooperation between cultures and the desire-hate relationship and mutual dependence between coloniser and colonised. This can function as a therapeutic remembering. African authors openly address the emotional attraction of some Africans to the coloniser and do not shirk or minimise it. Achebe studies it around Nwoye and Oduche, Ng ug around Karanja, and Gurnah around Yusuf, although Yusuf flees from a situation rather than look forward to the new one. Salihs inversion of the situation permits him to study the emotional attraction of the colonised for the coloniser and vice versa outside its original power context, which makes it easier to analyse it on the level of psychology without running into problems on the level of politics, such as blaming the success of colonisation on the colonised. D oring also points out that the narrative voices are those of bilinguals who know enough about white readers to interpret an African culture for them, and to relate to Western pre-texts. This shows that the (post)colonised have a huge head start with respect to intercultural knowledge, because they have been forced to acquire a larger store of learning about the Other than is possibly available to whites even now. Ashcroft, Griths & Tin (38-77) study how changes to the English language enable writers to express dierence and to reject the ways of structuring the world that are offered by the original British lexicon, collocations and connotations. Indigenous words and allusions to cultural knowledge not readily available to a foreign reader reverse power, in that the Western reader does not understand everything. These techniques can maintain a distance and keep readers from assuming they are acquiring mimetic, ethnologically real and ownable knowledge in the sense of Orientalism or Africanism. In addition to these well-researched strategies, an important form of cultural appropriation is the reclaiming of words or concepts that colonial authors associated with the colonised and described as negative. Instead of avoiding these words, African authors try to free them from their past mark. The rst example of this is Achebes reclaiming in Things Fall Apart of words like crowd, mysterious, rite and childlike,
47
which colonisers used in negative descriptions of Africans, and which he reassociates with specic meaningful and plausible actions and feelings. He also reclaims African nature (together with the word wilderness) as a habitable and familiar site. Moreover, African authors claim or reclaim concepts that colonial writing associated with whites only and considered to be outside the scope of African agency. Salih claims the Kurtz role or dominance of the intruder for his character Mustafa. Though he does this in the form of a parody, it points to actual possibilities beyond the imagination of colonial writers. Gurnah reclaims the journey of initiation into the African interior by showing that East African traders had this experience before whites did. African authors resituate white characters, texts and readers politically and socially. Achebe, Ng ug and Gurnah position white characters as people who approach an AfricanNgugi society from its margins and who remain marginal to the stories told (D oring 112). SalihDoring describes European society as the site of the various lusts that Marlow earlier assigned to Africans and to the lunatic fringe of the white community. This marginalisation and the insistence on African agency and motivations (or on accidental synergy as in Arrow of God ) puncture the superinflated ego of white writers and readers who believe that all developments are the whites merit or fault. African texts invite their white readers to identify with the marginality of white characters, and moreover resituate them as learners. Achebe situates Heart of Darkness as specic by emphatically using its diction in contexts where African customs appear violent. This shows that Conrad presents only the downsides of an African society and that these are the descriptions white readers have come to expect. Conrads style also intrudes into the village meeting at the end of Things Fall Apart (in which Igbo society does indeed fall apart), although no white person is present. This marks the colonisers as intrusive and destructive while maintaining the idea that important agency ultimately lies with the Igbo. Colonisation intensies their individual personality traits, but does not cause them. Achebe and Ng ug both situate books written by white characters. By giving someNgugi idea of the contents, they imply that history written by the colonisers is quite worthless as information about Africa, compared to their own books. Gurnah evokes a similar idea by portraying a complex society and having one of its members say: When they come to write about us, what will they say? That we made slaves (87). Achebe and Ng ug reread Heart of Darkness to nd in it a rather simplistic dis-Ngugi course about whites, which reduces them to the role of colonisers. The white characters they construct from it appear as egocentric mists whose discourses are full of clich escliches (D oring 133). Achebe and Ng ug reassign Conrads complex mode of representation toDoring
Ngugi
48
cliche
Africans, and his more supercial one to Europeans. Salih, too, constructs the lawyers at Mustafas trial from white pre-texts. Less obviously, this also holds for his white women, who mostly utter stereotypes and respond to stereotypical qualities they project onto Mustafa, which practically turns them into stereotypes themselves. Salih treats the idea of various lusts, and the Kurtz role that corresponds to these lusts, as a clich e. Since Conrad criticised and satirised some of his white characters himself, this reuse of his text is not fully antagonistic. African characters explain whites in the categories of an African culture. They thus interrogate whites philosophical assumptions and value systems. The most complex example is that of Moses Unachukwu in Arrow of God , who interprets Christianity in Animist terms. He combines the binary discourse of light and darkness that the missionary associates with the Christian God, with the Animist idea that gods can change their opinions and that their intentions may not always be to peoples advantage. The result is a Christian God who brings light that will stamp out all [Igbo] customs as daylight chases away darkness (405). Not only does the existence of Igbo non-binary thinking resituate European binary thinking as one possibility among others and thus mark it as specic, but Unachukwus interpretation also explains history much better than a Christian one. In several other areas as well, African authors challenge monocentric and binary structures. Achebes and Ng ug s community-oriented representations are quite multivocal. In Gurnahs composite society, people are used to dierence. Achebe shows that truth is not absolute, but depends on the specic situation, while Ng ug demonstrates that ideas are not valid independently of circumstances and personalities. To go directly to the rst rewriting from Africa, skip to page 115. For the thread Images of Africa, skip to page 82.
Ngugi
Ngugi
2.6.2
Indian authors
The main focus of these two novels is the self-image of upper-class and upper-middle-class Indians, whose lives are influenced by the tensions between social groups in India, the tensions of Westernisation and mental decolonisation, and generational conflict in both of these areas. Joshis novel is set around 1947, the time of Indian independence, while Roys is set in 1969/93 and encompasses the diculties of globalisation and neocolonialism. Joshis protagonists stem from Delhis smart society (3). Roys Ipe family are land-owning Keralite Christians, a community which claims to descend from Brahmins and whose members, even the rather secularised ones, are proud that their church is a lot older than colonial missionising. These aliations lead to complex and ambivalent
49
self-images. On the one hand, the characters traditional self-images place them closer to the social standing of whites or (post)colonisers than to that of other segments of the Indian population. On the other hand, British rule turned members of dominant Indian classes into collaborators or middlemen and into subordinates. Joshis Romi and Billy (both born c. 1925) as well as Roys Chacko (born c. 1938) and Ammu (born c. 1942) live in the tension between admiration and abrogation of the Western influence. Both Billys father and Chackos and Ammus father worked with the British administration and became nostalgic for British rule once it was over. Romi, Billy and Chacko themselves attend universities in the West, which is a status symbol among their set. Starting from this background, they try to overcome what Roys characters call Anglophilia, and to construct a new self-image. The Indian characters consider their admiration of the West their own mistake, and are thus aware of their own agency rather than claiming a victim role. They are only partially able to move beyond this admiration. In the attempt, all three men have to address the paradox that they cannot help but use their Western learning as one of the sources from which they construct a self-image that partly rejects Westernisation. Billys American studies of ethnology and psychology, Romis literature courses and Chackos Oxford learning about Marxism and possibly about postcolonial thinking can provide the basis of a certain Western-style kind of self-searching or selfimage. Simultaneously, the theoretical concepts the men study permit, even encourage, the rejection of Western values. Ammu, who has not studied abroad, is influenced by the Westernised curriculum of schools in India. The result is that their decolonising of the Ngugi mind (Ng ug ) itself is hybridised. In both novels, canonical (school) texts play an important role in making people internalise Western thinking. Joshis narrator Romi is rst introduced taking a course on Henry James, who was a friend of Joseph Conrads. Romis own narrative style is Conradesque only in those passages that conflate rural (or tribal) Indians with paradisiacal nature. This can be an influence from the pre-text or a way of exposing its misconceptions, as Billy ultimately rejects Conrads binary idea of overcivilised and natural people. He recognises that there is no such thing as a savage paradise. Roy refers to the pre-text more explicitly by naming the physical site of struggle the Heart of Darkness. By this, she situates this phrase as only a familiar and idiomatic expression or even a clich e, but she also stresses the importance of British set texts forcliche Keralite thinking. In spite of its Western name, which shows that Keralites sometimes half-ironically identify with Conrads Congolese, the Heart of Darkness house is a site of inner-Indian struggle at least as much as of intercultural struggle.
50
This inner-Indian struggle is emphasised by overtones of Kurtz in Chacko. Joshi, too, casts his protagonist Billy in a Kurtz role, and thus reclaims this role for an indigene. He Indianises it by making it a non-violent one; further allusions to Mahatma Gandhi include Billys asceticism and loincloth. A postdominant role encompasses some learning from and about the (post)dominated, with the intention of relinquishing ones own domineering attitude in favour of more justice and a more equal encounter. This occurs especially with white Westerners and white settlers (as will be argued in Sections 2.6.4 and 2.6.5). It is signicant that these Indian characters are marked as postdominant by a similar mechanism. Joshis Romi learns that there may be a reality outside his knowledge, and that as a city person he may not be a t judge in trials where tribals are involved. This means that he marks his own knowledge as limited and learns some humility and respect for the Other. Roys Ammu learns to see a descendant of an Untouchable caste as a human being and an equal, which means that she un learns something taught to her by her own culture. This unlearning, too, represents a paradigm shift of postdominant individuals. Joshi and Roy claim a strong or (post)dominant role for upper-class Indians precisely by describing the processes in which they relinquish some of their dominance. Next to these Indian issues, Joshi marginalises white people, whom he hardly mentions at all. Roy, too, assigns her Indian characters centre stage. Margaret, the only fully British gure, is a rather flat character. She is situated in the Indian context by being consistently called Margaret Kochamma, Aunt Margaret she is only relevant for the story because she is an aunt in the Indian family that is at its centre. In both novels, the Indian characters struggle over already internalised Western values is far more important than the current encounters with Westerners. This situates the postcolonial struggle inside Indian minds more than between nations, reminding one of Achebe who writes about an inner-African struggle between villagers and middlemen rather than about black-white encounters. For privileged Indians the ability to mediate towards Westerners is not really a choice. The authors portray them as so Westernised or hybridised that they live in an intermediate space whether they want to or not. On the other hand, Roy stresses that the actual practice of mediation remains a choice: Hindu theatre performances are shortened for white tourists, and bilingual Keralites restrict their own linguistic scope to English for their visitors. Joshis Romi even mediates in both directions. He writes about Billy in English and uses transcribed Hindi to better explain English phrases, but he also explains Indian customs for the benet of non-Indian or non-local Indian readers.
51
By this, he forces all kinds of readers to realise that they are not the only intended recipients of the text. All ideas a Western reader may have of a clear-cut dichotomy between whites and everyone else are overturned by the ambivalent position of Joshis and Roys Indian characters. To go directly to the rst rewriting from India, skip to page 159.
2.6.3
Caribbean-born authors
Authors in this group (Harris, Naipaul, Phillips, Dabydeen, NourbeSe Philip) have quite disparate aims and strategies. Nevertheless, there are some connections and common methods. Harris, Phillips and NourbeSe Philip strongly abstract from factual history. Phillips does this by constructing the bare bones of a historical situation that might have taken place anywhere on the West African coast, while the other two use poetic and symbolic categories. Such abstractions remind one of Conrads attempts at universalising an actual journey, but stem from a dierent context. In the Caribbean, colonisers systematically annihilated the languages of the slaves. Later, British educational policy prohibited any reference to slavery or to the African ancestry of the slaves. This limits any attempt to appropriate a silent history or reconnect to a precolonial condition. Harris and Phillips each construct a common frame of reference for people whose detailed histories were lost during slavery and invasion. Harris and NourbeSe Philip treat historical themes with overtly non-realistic, philosophical methods. Naipaul and to a lesser extent Dabydeen (in the childhood scenes set in Guyana) rewrite (post)colonial history. Harris, Phillips and NourbeSe Philip, too, oer new outlooks on historical facts and discourses. Simultaneously, most of these writers create ctional global or intermediate perspectives that do not correspond to factual history, but are nevertheless linked to new ways of looking at history, and help make statements about identity. NourbeSe Philip imagines the Pan-African perspective of a traveller of African descent who comes from the African diaspora but also identies with the African continent. Naipaul uses a perspective that does correspond to factual history, but links up the lives of traders of Indian descent in East Africa with those, like his own family, who came to the Caribbean to earn a living. He explicitly connects these two perspectives by using the Old Motto of his birthplace Trinidad as the motto of Kisangani, where his character Salim goes to look for new economic security. This, too, encourages a new perspective, namely a Pan-Indian one. Harris creates a ctional perspective by letting people from dierent centuries travel together. This helps him situate descendants of all
52
newcomers as self-determined settlers and state that they can and must claim a right to a new home in the Caribbean, even if the parents or grandparents of many were brought or retained against their will. Harris suggests viewing them as descendants of a hybrid continuum rather than as antagonistic communities, and turning to the Arawak for help and guidance. He positions all descendants of recent comers as postdominant with respect to the Arawak, which is a ctional situation. They invest the Arawak with a conspicuous Otherness that is symbolic of all actual dominated Others in the Guyanese history of variegated immigration. The identication of this Otherness with victimisation is tentatively broken when, by a use of nonlinear time, the Amerindians have strong legal titles to the land. Moreover, the crew member Schomburgh, who is positioned as a non-indigene, has an Arawak grandparent and speaks the language. This undermines the binary distinction between Amerindians and settlers, while the crew members feel sure that this distinction exists. Harris links his treatment of Caribbean-born persons as self-determined settlers to the theme of re-creation after destruction. He feels that the colonial destruction of old structures and identities has set free creative energies, which help re-construct or re-imagine what cannot be recovered. Harris borrows the Conradian concept of a dream consciousness for this re-creation (Peters). While Harris thus reclaims dreams as positive energy instead of Marlows nightmare, NourbeSe Philip reclaims (colonial and feminine) silence as a creative and meditative ability. She claims the journey of initiation as an act of a person of African descent. Dabydeen, too, claims the journey of initiation for his young migrants, and aspects of the Kurtz role for his character Joseph. Referring explicitly to Heart of Darkness, Joseph reclaims the colour black as one that is not only skin colour (and thus half of Marlows binary pair), but oers a gamut of meanings. The narrator later reclaims and radically reinterprets the concept of a dark self when he calls Joseph his own dark self, referring to all those (especially non-British) aspects of his personality that are not admitted into Oxford University. Dabydeens explicit discussion of Heart of Darkness is part of a development that appears to be related to time more than to space, the recent incorporation of discourseanalytical approaches in texts of ction. Dabydeen shows how available discourse and information shape perception and self-perception. This elevates the experience of the reader as a t subject for literature. School canons, which are an important pre-discourse and area of reading experience, are discussed in intellectual writing.
53
NourbeSe Philips Traveller reclaims and unlearns the discourse of the colonial silence with the help of those aected by it. She uses the image of sweating out words for an unlearning of acquired discourse in general. She learns some things, including patience and an awareness of her own limitations but also a kind of non-rationalised intuition, by not understanding what she sees. Both the unlearning of discourse and the acceptance of help from postdominated groups position The Traveller as someone who must work hard to give up a binary idea of the strong and discursively powerful on one side, and the weak or (in her case) the silent on the other. The Traveller views the components of pairs like word/silence or discoverer/discovered as complements and not as mutually exclusive. The eort to give up binary categories, an abrogation of traditional Western thinking, is especially prominent in recent writing. Harris already lets several incompatible events happen at once and experiments with a power structure (between the Arawak and all the very dierent immigrants) that is binary and non-binary at the same time. This development was foreshadowed by Heart of Darkness, where binary pairs (such as dark/light, savage/restrained) are maintained, but their valuation and attribution is subject to incessant change and confusion (cf. Fincham, Sign). This shows again how advanced the frontier on which Heart of Darkness stands (Harris) really is, but also how long it has taken to transcend it with the help of world-wide contributions. In some respects, some Caribbean-born authors go beyond Heart of Darkness and simultaneously appropriate the novella as a template. Naipaul adds a middle perspective and historical sequel, while also using Conrads description of Kurtz as an authorising template for his description of Mobutu and of the way Salim learns about the dictator. He thus implies that a description of history that is based on Conrads ction is better than his own character Raymonds less ctionalised history writing, which he situates as useless and as insuciently based on real sources. Phillips, too, uses and extends the Kurtz character, by splitting him into his components of vulnerable philanthropy (the Governor), power unrestrained by social control (Mr. Price), and the egocentric assumption that what suits Europeans, is good for Africans (Lewis). To go directly to the rst rewriting by a Caribbean-born author, skip to page 127.
54
2.6.4
White Western authors
Celine
Chronologically, the rst rewritings of Heart of Darkness are narratives and travel accounts by white Westerners. White Western texts form two groups. The pre-independence works can be described as colonial writing in that they were produced by members of the colonial power (Hueer & Conrad, Woolf, Maugham, Gide, C eline, Greene). The second, later group (Silverberg, Schipper, Widmer, OHanlon, Kingsolver, Tayler) reacts to a new situation. Political independence is a reality, racism is no longer acceptable after World War II but is still deeply rooted in white mindsets. Strategic and economic neocolonialism persists. All writers in the rst group are Europeans, whereas the second includes white writers from the US. Though a formerly colonised country, the US are now usually counted as part of the West, as the centre of power, including that of cultural hegemony and neocolonialism, has been shifting from Europe to (white) North America. Writers in the rst group have a range of means of commenting on Heart of Darkness or of adding to it. Hueer & Conrad mostly elucidate the political situation. Gide adds ethnological and naturalist knowledge and a more detailed assessment of colonial projects. He is an early proponent of the strategy of separating levels of meaning that do not belong together, when he stresses that he nds exotic, mysterious or gloomy qualities in African nature rather than in African persons. Woolf, too, separates what he calls facts from views or interpretations, and from feelings of nightmare. Woolf, Maugham and C eline add dierent ideas on how the Kurtz role is inhabited in a range of common situations. Greenes The Heart of the Matter shows how a sense of futility like Marlows gains ground, while his A Burnt-out Case is written on the brink of decolonisation and forms a link between the rst and the second Western group in several respects. By questioning the theory and practice of colonialism, these authors prepare the ground for Western reception of (post)colonised writing. They mostly point out the contradictions and the hypocrisy of the civilising mission without being able to imagine alternatives. Whiteness is still unquestioningly seen as normal and everyone else as different from the norm. One can still nd the old colonial stereotypes in slightly dierent guises, for instance when Gide insists that there is something prehistoric in Africa, even if it is only the forest. Once more whites turn the colonised peoples into a backdrop, this time for their own anxiety, insecurity and self-doubt the colonial drama. White selfdiscovery resembles a therapeutic process in which writers try to state as precisely as possible what they feel is wrong. The idea that the (white) self is split into a good, moral and civilised part on the one hand and an abyss of lusts and primitive desires on the other, is superseded by the assumption that it consists of a more complex interplay of dierent impulses. This makes
Celine
55
it harder to split o a bad part and project it either onto a Kurtz or onto a foreign Other. From a clearly polarised Marlow and Kurtz, there is a development to the ambivalence between a bad man who does good things or a good man who does bad things in Maughams The Fall of Edward Barnard (78), to C elines Bardamu and RobinsonCeline who both are complex personalities and yet complement each other, and to Greenes integral, psychologically intricate characters. Although the rst group is interesting in itself, it is especially fruitful to discuss what legacies and paradigm shifts in the Western outlook on (formerly) colonised countries exist between the rst and the second group. The second group (with the exception of Silverberg) is signicantly influenced by writing and rewriting from (post)colonised countries, including rewritings of Heart of Darkness. Perhaps the most important paradigm shift in the second Western group of texts, all of which are set in Central Africa, is towards learning from Africans and towards a perception of Europeans and Africans as equal communication partners. In Conrads time, Europeans thought that only Africans had to learn, and the discovery that the dominated had an influence on their dominators was a surprise if not a taboo. It led to extreme fantasies and fears of whites going native (both in the sense of emotional hybridity and of sexual encounters between members of dierent groups) and going under like Kurtz. In recent decades, the new ability to learn without feeling (too) threatened has brought a host of new insights. It has also brought the fruitful awareness that one does not know nearly enough yet. White writers have taken over the wish to represent African individuals and societies as complex and interesting. As they cannot do this without help, they increasingly cite African interlocutors and media (cf. Schipper, OHanlon, Kingsolver, Tayler), which is a development towards multivocal representation. Some whites have taken over the desire to teach (contemporary) African history to their readers, associating themselves with the didactic project of revising available knowledge. The recent incorporation of discourse analysis in non-theoretical texts can have didactic and auto-didactic aspects. It is foreshadowed by Greenes analysis of the workings of help racism discourse in A Burnt-out Case and by an early wariness of language in general. Schipper and OHanlon name and discuss pre-texts explicitly rather than alluding to them. OHanlon strives to separate what does not belong together (the Congo, psychoanalysis and prehistoric man, for instance). Tayler is wary of the clich es containedcliches in older texts. Kingsolver shows how discourses aect white speakers in dierent ways, and how children at dierent ages absorb them. Widmer parodies the Congo of the (white) soul that is one of the layers of meaning in Heart of Darkness. Unlike Conrad,
56
cliche
he marks it as a clich e, and shows that it is an autonomous concept that bears very little relation to the real Congo. He shows how the Congo of the soul is made up out of projections and desires on the one hand, and of discourse and media content on the other. (An extreme example of this media content is provided by Silverberg, who shows the influence of supercial political correctness but hardly that of any other recent developments.) An important aspect of the discourse-analytical approach is the project of un learning Western discourses, which often begins by situating them politically or socially, preferably with the help of Africans. Schippers Ellen initially reads Heart of Darkness mostly in context with the river and with nature, and acquires a new outlook when her student Mofolo points out Marlows descriptions of Africans to her. Moreover, Ellen increasingly abstains from interpreting her experiences, and feels that she is no longer sure what life means. She tries to do without extraneous explanations of experience and to avoid projecting too much onto Africans. OHanlon tests Western psychological and religious discourses against what he learns in the Congo, and is destabilised by their unexpected inadequacy. He begins to analyse the constructedness and specicity of some fundamental elements of current Western thinking. This abrogates their claim to universal or absolute truth. Binary discourse, too, is increasingly deconstructed. OHanlon dismisses the Christian dualism of good and bad as too simple. The unlearning of discourse begins with an awareness that ones own knowledge, representation or discourse are limited. This is possibly foreshadowed in Heart of Darkness, in what Harris calls the frontier novel eect. The limits of Western knowledge are rst discussed explicitly by Woolf. Schippers Ellen stresses how little she knows about Congolese villages. OHanlon centres his book around the increasing awareness of how little he really knows about African discourses and religions. This awareness may have been sparked by postcolonised writers who situate whites as marginal or as Other in a given situation, an idea which especially Schipper, Kingsolver and Tayler take up. Some travellers learn from not understanding (cf. Schipper, OHanlon, Kingsolver, Tayler). What they learn includes the insight that it is possible, and sometimes more respectful, to live without trying to know everything. This represents a departure from older Western Enlightenment epistemology, which postulates that everything is knowable. To go directly to the rst Western rewriting, skip to page 67.
57
2.6.5
White settler perspectives
Like the white Western authors, authors who assume white settler perspectives (Jay, White and Malouf in Australia, Coetzee in South Africa) can be discussed in two temporal groups marked by paradigm shifts, though these groups cannot be described by a colonial/postcolonial divide. Authors in both groups (with the exception of Jay) discuss the settler-specic concern of nding, or founding, an emotional home and identity, of constructing a local symbolic repertoire, and of claiming their national culture as valuable in itself. This theme strongly shapes their use and reuse of Western discourses epitomised by Heart of Darkness. Apart from this concern (which has been extensively studied by Ashcroft, Griths & Tin), white settlers have much in common with white Westerners. They share the original cultural background, power over the indigenous population, the colonial gaze at the Other, the initial necessity to relate to a new climatic zone and to unknown nature, and the desire to exploit the land for their own purposes. The cultural subordination of settler societies can hardly be compared to the administrative and military subordination and material exploitation of societies that were invaded or occupied. South Africa with its large indigenous population is something in between a settler colony and a colony of (persisting) occupation. It is grouped here with Australia as a settler colony, because the South African rewriting discussed (Coetzees In the Heart of the Country ) addresses the themes and conflicts of the white settler perspective. An important dierence is visible in the fact that White and Malouf situate extensive interaction with indigenes in the past (today, Aborigines make up less than 2% of Australian population), while Coetzee discusses todays mixed society. A paradigm shift towards learning from indigenes is foreshadowed in Whites Voss , but becomes central only with Malouf and with Coetzee. Coetzee also discusses in detail the diculties in the development towards a desired interaction between blacks and whites as equals. Coetzee takes up the influence of available discourses on identity, and shows Magdas incipient unlearning of the old language (43). He appropriates the Kurtz role as her starting point for radically new developments. Maloufs Remembering Babylon and Coetzees In the Heart of the Country then, make up the second group. Whites A Fringe of Leaves oers parallels to the Congo of the soul by casting the Aborigines as an extreme mirror image and projection of white settler society. However, these savages of the soul are not marked as a parody by obviously surrealist or discourseanalytical elements, as in Widmers later treatment of a similar theme. It is therefore hard to assign this novel to the rst or second group.
58
A Fringe of Leaves and Malouf resituate the binary light/darkness symbolism exploited in Heart of Darkness as an imported paradigm that promotes fear of the Other landscape and population in early colonial Australia. Malouf shows how this paradigm leads to insecurity and violence, and is slowly overcome by an ability to see light everywhere. His character Gemmys bicultural personality ssures the binary division into Aboriginals and settlers, and helps the settlers learn from and about the land with its ancient and established meanings. Some of Maloufs settlers also learn to abandon the desire for absolute categories. An awareness of ones own limitations transpires when Malouf tries to give a fair representation of Aborigines that is clearly based on limited knowledge. Coetzees Magda separates concepts that do not belong together by consistently calling skin brown, a strategy which leaves the word black free for other, symbolic meanings. She situates a range of pre-texts socially by implying that the language of education and reading is the language of the (white) masters. An important theme for settlers is that of new creation. While the white men in Voss appropriate the Aboriginal myth of creation and nightly dreaming re-creation because it seems to oer an opening for the newcomers, Malouf (like Harris) reinterprets this theme as one of re-creation after destruction. He thus acknowledges that settlers destroy Australian indigenes and nature, a topic which White does not mention. Simultaneously, Malouf stresses that settler societies have to recover from their own disruptions. White, Malouf and Coetzee study ways in which after such disruptions, societies absorb and transform the discourses epitomised in Heart of Darkness as part of new discursive elds. Such literary reception studies are a discourse-analytical project. (It amounts to another use of Heart of Darkness which cannot be traced to either influence or opposition, in addition to the one discussed by Caminero-Santangelo, cf. p. 30.) To go directly to the rst rewriting from a white settler colony, skip to page 102.
2.6.6
Complexities and limitations
It is important to realise that the strategies and paradigm shifts discussed above cannot be associated with countries, but at most with dierent perspectives. For instance, Joshi and Roy describe wealthy Indian characters with some techniques that position them as (post)dominated and others that show them as postdominant. If Joshis rural Indians were to write a book about themselves, they would probably use mostly the former. Conversely, African perspectives discussed here mostly relate to strategies of the (post)dominated, but if Gurnahs rich merchant Aziz or Taylers colonel were to describe themselves, they could take advantage of both the (post)dominated and the postdominant bodies of thought. The choice between these bodies of thought is itself a strategic
2.7 REREADING HEART OF DARKNESS
59
decision. Harris chooses approaches that place his characters in the settler/postdominant category, although he could also have described the same people as mostly (post)dominated. Similarly, Joshi and Roy stress the (post)dominant members and aspects of Indian society in order to depict a strong country, precisely by showing how characters try to give up some dominance. Finally, caution is in order. All these developments are virtually restricted to people who are privileged both in material and in discursive respects. Indeed, many authors world-wide stress this limitation. White travellers realise that many see them in the mould of exploiters-givers, and that neocolonialism is shaping todays encounters. Tayler, who incidentally reproduces some older demeaning discourses unthinkingly himself, realises that many Zaireans do not feel safe with regard to whites. He also nds that a white person who is willing to learn and resituate himself is considered an exception by other whites or is simply not understood by them, an experience which is shared by Schippers Ellen and Kingsolvers Leah. Leahs African husband would even be denied admittance into her sister Rachels Brazzaville hotel on grounds of skin colour. Joshi and Roy show how strong divisions and binary categories remain inside Indian society even while a privileged few are beginning to doubt them. Roy also shows how cultures are watered down into toy histories (120) and supercial television content, which are consumed by a majority. Many authors stress the misleading images published in mass media.
2.7
Rereading Heart of Darkness
A change of canon does not just mean a change of texts, but a change of reading strategies used on older canonical texts (Ashcroft, Griths & Tin 189; D oring 185). KnowledgeDoring of rewritings changes the way one reads Heart of Darkness.
2.7.1
Layers of meaning revisited
With the help of dierent rewritings, it becomes easier to nd, understand and think over dierent layers of meaning and aspects of characters in Heart of Darkness. Many of these are discussed as types of journeys in Section 2.2. Other examples include ideas (cf. Ng ug ), fear (cf. Malouf), and philanthropic discourse or help racism as a primitiveNgugi urge. OHanlon and Tayler, with the help of Africans, reinterpret the layer that addresses religion. In dierent ways, they both imply that religious references may not be an empty echo of an obsolete concept for Marlow, but something that is really hard to give up even for an atheist because it is so deeply entrenched in the culture.
60
2.7.2
The crowd of savages
Rewritings make it easier to see the inconsistencies or small openings in Heart of Darkness that mark its discourse as limited and point to the possibility that there is more to Africans than Marlow admits. For example, NourbeSe Philips reading of silence throws into relief Marlows awareness that Africans can communicate with each other and some of them with Europeans. In spite of this awareness, he still cannot transcend the colonial silence, a purely white limitation. A Fringe of Leaves shows by the conspicuous pairings between white and assumed Aboriginal habits that the concept of savagery has been constructed as the counterpart of (European) civilisation and mirrors it practically one to one. By providing a thick depiction of a (post)colonised society, rewritings can make the reader realise how much energy Marlow invests in constructing his savages as a featureless crowd (Heart 59), and how much energy Conrad or Marlow invests in establishing that this is not so; that they have social structures (headmen and priests in scarlet) and languages, that they are t to be friends (62) for the Russian, and so on. With this in mind, it becomes evident that Marlow does not simply overlook aspects that fall outside his binary principle of civilised and savage. Rather, he perceives them for brief moments, and then instantly blocks out this awareness. This shows how he silences colonial realities in this particular case.
2.7.3
An English half-caste clerk Kurtz had with him
Hybrid characters in rewritings remind the reader of the half-caste in Heart of Darkness (34), who turns up in a few sentences in one situation like a deus ex machina to solve a logical problem in the plot: if Kurtz has got rid of his white assistant and all that is left for him are unreliable or unintelligent Africans, then how does his ivory get downriver? The position of this man in Heart of Darkness is extremely interesting in that it mirrors a whole discourse about persons of mixed descent. He is not suciently white to count as a white man, so that he does not disrupt Kurtzs solitude among black Others (on the same page there is the bizarre phrase alone in a small dugout with four paddlers). He is not suciently black to be one in the crowd of semi-humans who would never be able to pilot a fleet of ivory-laden canoes. It appears that a character of mixed descent is a great literary device when a gure without attributes is needed. This eacement is especially surprising because he would be enormously interesting who is his white parent? How and why did he get to Kurtzs station? What did he talk about with Kurtz, was he at all like the Russian? Does he see himself as part of the African population, or as white, or neither, or both? Where does he live after he has taken the ivory downriver? This man provides an unexpected ssure in the black/white
61
binary structure, but he disappears as fast as he has arrived. While Marlow construes Kurtzs mental hybridity as a dangerous transgression, he apparently feels that a person of hybrid descent is too African to deserve much consideration. In rewritings, persons of mixed descent appear mostly as middlemen or interpreters (cf. Gide 28). For Maughams Mackintosh a half-caste has a low status, but even that amount of white blood made him possible to talk to (168); Silverbergs Dona Teresa has a similar status. Others appear as an embodiment of quite openly acknowledged rape (cf. Naipaul), or as a transgression of social divisions that is eventually punished (cf. Roy). A rewriting from a perspective comparable to that of Kurtzs clerk remains to be found. What comes closest is Harriss positive image of hybridity as a chance for peace and renewal. Similarly, Dabydeens Patel thinks that when immigrants grow rich enough to become socially acceptable to the British, hybridity and mixed descent will flourish (245-46). For NourbeSe Philips Traveller, persons of mixed descent count as explorers, while they do not for her Livingstone (66). Gurnahs Yusuf, a member of the Swahili society, which as a whole is of mixed descent, mirrors Marlows initiation into Africa from the other side of the continent and of the power struggle. Naipauls Metty is in a somewhat similar historical situation as Yusuf.
2.7.4
A wild and gorgeous apparition of a woman
The possibility is left open that the pilgrims shoot Kurtzs savage and superb, wildeyed and magnicent (60) woman friend. If this is the case, there is a range of symbolic implications. Perhaps the other whites end Kurtzs intimate connection with Africa because they consider it too threatening. Perhaps the woman embodies the African continent whose lifeblood is being drained by the pilgrims; and though her power is bolstered for a while by her cooperation with Kurtz, they eventually put an end to it. Perhaps Marlow represses the wild sexual attraction she stands for, in favour of the pale and subdued Intended-Europe. Kramer argues that for late Victorian men there existed two roles for women, the mother/wife and the temptress/prostitute, and the latter could arouse feelings in a man which threatened to dissolve his identity, he could become her slave or he had to kill her (145). If this is what it can feel like for a man, what would it feel like for a woman to be assigned this role? Incidentally, it does not look as if this woman wanted this role. She tries to gain access to Kurtz when he is ill. She attempts to guard his property (the rags) against the Russian, and she risks her life to follow him to the steamer. This looks more like a domestic and long-standing kind of love than like the actions of a temptress.
62
Though it is rather easy to imagine what this scene means for Marlows side of the story, it is hard to get an idea of a real woman from his distancing and Othering description that is based on what is possibly the most tightly packed array of mixed and confused binary opposites and abstractions in the whole book. It takes quite a leap of the imagination to see this woman as a human being rather than a symbol. Nevertheless, it is obvious (as with the savages) that Conrad gives her a more important role or personality than Marlow permits himself to realise. She represents an opening in the story through which another reality tries to get in. On second thoughts, this woman must have been struggling to get into the story for quite a while, as the Russian has been risking [his] life every day for the last fortnight to keep her out of the house during Kurtzs illness (61). Among other things, she could have contributed some local experience in the treatment of tropical diseases, and helped the white man. Like the Intended (cf. Kramer), she, too, could have proved stronger than such a man could stand. Perhaps this is why she has been kept out of the house. Trying to nd her in rewritings, one realises that it is not easy for a white traveller to meet her. Schippers Ellen and Jerey Tayler have little chance to encounter black women. They nd that many African women are not in a social position to meet a foreign visitor, and have not had as much opportunity to learn a European language as men. Ellen has only male students. Somewhat similarly, Coetzees black woman (Klein-)Anna is not much of a factor in the situation on the farm; the main struggle takes place between Magda, who has the privilege of whiteness, and Hendrik, who has that of maleness, while Anna is mostly at the mercy of the developments between them. Other women appear as the exogamous partners of male heroes in rewritings that portray a dominant perspective, the women who serve the urges of the Janus-faced man. The most extreme example are Silverbergs darker and darker women. Joshis Bilasia is another. Skin colours are reversed with the white girlfriends of Naipauls and Dabydeens protagonists, and with Salihs white women. Salihs Jean Morris and Mustafa choose death because their lives are completed after their ultimate experience with the exogamous encounter. This suggests that Kurtzs woman friend may have oered herself up to exoticism or gone hybrid with him, and that life may no longer have meaning to her without this hybridity. In this case, she would represent the most tragic kind of (emotional) cooperation with the coloniser, and take the initiative to end her new loneliness. Finally, the American-Polynesian exogamous anc ee of Maughams Edward Barnard is the cousin of his original white-American bride. This sheds a wholly new light on Otherness and exoticist alliances. Yet, these exogamous partners are mostly used to provide information about the male characters, and are thus functionalised.
ancee
63
The woman in Phillipss Heartland does not speak much, and the narrative voice does not follow her perspective, but she has an important function. In contrast to what Marlow thinks about Kurtzs woman friend, this woman is clearly a victim and not a seducer at all. In this story, slavery is directly identied with rape, and the colonial project is gendered. This symbolically identies the woman with Africa, and it endorses the idea that women have more to say on this subject. Phillips thus indirectly opens the way for black womens perspectives. Like Phillipss female protagonist, Harriss Mariella used to be not a temptress but a victim, but she becomes strong and shoots(!) Donne who has subjected her to violence and sexual abuse. The duplication of Mariellas name with a place name identies her with the land, and she leads the settler-travellers to the palace as their guide and/or as a member of the folk they are following. Nevertheless, she is moved into the background as one of the silent Amerindians who are not seen in the palace, and her youth is not described, unlike those of the travellers. She is another woman who would have more to say. Several authors use (the possibility of) sex between members of dierent groups as an image for social (re)denition struggles, including Salih, Coetzee and NourbeSe Philip. The character who gets closest to the perspective of Conrads African woman is NourbeSe Philips Traveller. She taunts Livingstone with the idea that she could become that woman as the traditional white man sees her, a sexual temptation that draws him under. The Traveller is an intellectual and a quester, and she is very much aware of the power vested in the temptress role (not in her personally, because the powers of darkness are not individuals). As she narrates her story herself, the reader follows her thoughts and learns how this new temptress analyses the abstract power assigned to her kind and uses it playfully. The Traveller does not really want to go native with Livingstone or to draw him under, but reclaims the temptress role to provoke him into a new dialogue. In many critical texts (but not in Heart of Darkness), the African woman associated with Kurtz is called the mistress, an ugly word and a direct opposite of the romantic Intended. Given her domestic carer role, shouldnt she be called his wife by common law? Marlow feels that the colossal body of the fecund and mysterious life seemed to look at her, pensive, as though it had been looking at the image of its own tenebrous and passionate soul (60). Fecund? What if there was more than one half-caste in Heart of Darkness? Marlow guards himself against this possibility by emphasising that she is an image of a soul, not a body. But there is an undercurrent here that drifts towards a new perspective, that of the white intruders African child.
64
Joshi describes a hybrid family that embodies a development in this direction. Bilasia has a wifes role and status. She has children and domestic responsibilities with Billy, and Romi respects her as Billys true wife, the one he asks how to bury his body. I am sure there are rewritings from the perspective of Kurtzs African friend and from that of her children, or if there are not, there will be. They are just some of the many more texts that must be found and heard among the voices responding to Heart of Darkness. This project is a never-ending one.
2.8
2.8.1
Political and social function of writing

Hauling in the pre-text
Marlow does everything to make his tale feel far away. He stresses how far away the biggest blank on the map is not only geographically but also mentally, by establishing a veil of incomprehensibility between the Congo and himself or his listeners. He does this with the help of negative adjectives, by leaving out names and specics, by (ironically) establishing but at the same time undermining binary categories, and by stressing that he can neither understand nor influence the events. He uses big theory and, into the bargain, makes it hard to understand by alluding to it rather than explaining it. Moreover, for a long time Heart of Darkness has been a set text in educational systems, which can make a text feel far away because someone else has selected it for the readers and explains it to them in predened, well-worn categories. Rewritings show how readers-rewriters haul in Heart of Darkness like something nautical at the other end of a chain, that is. From the start, authors set out to show what it feels like to be in the Congo, how men like you and me inhabit the Kurtz role, and similar close-ups. Several later writers discuss how people encounter Heart of Darkness as a text and learn what it has to do with their own lives. The political and social function of writing does thus not remain abstract or far away. It means neither a call for moral outrage (about faraway places, for most readers) nor can it be discussed in theory only. Rather, readers participate in it quite automatically, and it is intimately personal. Heart of Darkness is often rewritten in context with social and political transitions. Writers hark back to Conrads novella when describing dening moments as diverse as the foundation of nation, incipient scepticism about new nations, migration, and eorts at redening encounters outside the old roles. First of all, their texts help their readers learn about specic (historical or contemporary) political realities and the social function of available discourses about them. A second step would be to draw ones personal conclusions in thought or action.
2.8 POLITICAL AND SOCIAL FUNCTION OF WRITING
65
2.8.2
Teaching Heart of Darkness and its rewritings
The insights in the previous sections conrm that it is especially fruitful to teach Heart of Darkness together with one or more of its rewritings. There is an abundance of possible choices, each making it possible to reread Heart of Darkness with a dierent aim. The following list outlines a few suggestions. For some classes, one may wish to include additional historical and literary historical information on the countries discussed. Mutual responses: Achebe OHanlon. Courses can emphasise the representation of Africa, and the use of existing discourse. Conrad blends Western discourses and accepts or ironically questions them, Achebe resituates them as marginal or intrusive and rereads them in certain African categories, and OHanlon explicitly analyses them and resituates them as specic with the help of Africans. An excerpt from Silverberg can be read for comparison, as an example of a text that shows little intercultural influence on representation. School: possibly Naipaul Schipper (if you read Dutch) Dabydeen Roy. Courses can emphasise the practice and the eects of teaching literature in schools, especially across cultures, and the eects of literary canons on individual identity. This requires the courage to teach about school on a meta-level in schools, and may be especially interesting for a teacher-training class. Narrating or writing the self: Coetzee Dabydeen possibly OHanlon. Marlow searches for himself with the help of a vortex of current scholarly ideas and Western cultural narratives, but he reflects on this technique at most implicitly. He implies that one cannot construct an identity without referring to what one has learned. Later writers make this explicit. This is another obvious topic for a teacher-training class. Third perspectives (Arabs): Naipaul for a narrator who situates himself close to the Arabs Gurnah Salih for African Muslims who do not live within another ethnic majority. Courses can emphasise the writing and rewriting of history. Third perspectives (middlemen): An Outpost of Progress Achebe (with special regard to Nwoye and/or Oduche respectively) Gurnah Phillips. An interesting topic is the (often accidental) interaction of private aims and desires with political and social developments, which exists in the life of every reader. In this context, one can also compare ambivalent or passive semi-collaborators in dominant groups with those in dominated groups. Settlers: Harris White Malouf Coetzee. Courses can emphasise ways of constructing identity, dierences between settler roles in dierent countries, and paradigm shifts over time. (Post)colonial migrants in London: Naipaul Dabydeen Salih. An interesting topic is the stealing back and forth and symmetric or antisymmetric mirroring of discourse.
66
Women: Phillips Coetzee NourbeSe Philip Schipper (if you read Dutch) Kingsolver (if you have an emphasis on popular novels). One can discuss whether women have an easier time redening the encounter, and whether the self-identication of some white women with the colonised place does justice to historical situations. Salih can be added to intensify this controversy and spark discussions on the relation of race and gender. Salih also underlines that even if white men do treat women and the (post)colonised somewhat alike, this does not mean that (post)colonised men feel less masculine. Teaching Heart of Darkness together with its rewritings has a recursive aspect. Usually, schools teach discourse. Decanonising reading teaches and abrogates discourse in equal measure. The marking of ones own knowledge as limited, and the unlearning of ones own discourse advocated in many later rewritings, correspond to a labour-intensive spring cleaning in the readers head. In the best case, this is a very personal, often therapeutic process driven by a true desire to throw out inappropriate learning and rearrange what remains. One becomes aware of what acquired discourses clash with ones own experience, how one believes in conicting discourses at the same time (and thus feels split or insecure), or how one simultaneously believes and does not believe in certain discourses. It is genuinely questionable whether this can and should be done under tutorship, because students might lose the private impulse and the urgency to clean out their own heads in their own ways. In other words, the dangers of containment and hegemony loom large. If schools even teach to unlearn school discourse, there is a danger that this concept may become an empty clich e for many students: just another thing imposed by a literature professor. Other students may feel that wherever they arrive with their thoughts, school is already there. Interestingly, about one third of the rewritings discussed here are by professors or comparable teachers. This shows that a balancing act between canon and decanonising, learning and unlearning (teaching and unteaching?) is possible. In the best case, students can be encouraged to evaluate, resituate and unlearn discourse, but they will always have to select their own approaches for this spring cleaning. Traditionally, each generation of teachers is rather surprised by the approaches each generation of students brings in. Students might confront the teacher openly (or give the teachers head an unexpected cleaning from the inside along with their own), i.e. inform the discursive centre of the abrogation, or they might turn up twenty years later with the results of some quiet, nearly unconscious discourse-analytical process. Expect the unexpected.
cliche
Chapter 3 A century of creative response

3.1 Ford Madox Hueer and Joseph Conrad, The Inheritors (1901)
Ford Madox Hueer (1873-1939, named Ford Madox Ford from 1919) was one of Conrads closest literary friends for a decade.1 From 1898 to 1909, they collaborated on three works. Conrads share of the actual writing of The Inheritors was minimal compared to that in the other collaborations, limited to a few nishing touches on each scene and discussions of the text with Hueer. Later, both men minimised the importance of The Inheritors . Contemporary reception was indierent, and in the canons and criticism of both writers, the novel has always occupied a marginal place. However, if taken as the rst rewriting of Heart of Darkness, The Inheritors has far more to oer than these assessments suggest. The story is told by Arthur Etchingham Granger to an unspecied audience or to the reader, whom he repeatedly addresses as you. Granger, the youngest but estranged member of a noble British country family and an unsuccessful novelist, meets a young woman who claims to be a native of the Fourth Dimension. She informs him that the Dimensionists, who are proud to experience neither empathy nor feeling, are to inherit the earth from its current masters, just as the latter have inherited it from races like the Choctaw. Granger falls mawkishly in love with the Dimensionist woman. She soon pretends to be his sister in order to nd a place in society, and moves in with his old aunt, whom Granger himself has never met. In order to take over the earth, the three currently present, competing Dimensionists intend to destabilise European nancial politics and
Factual information in this section stems from Knowles & Moore 120-23, 173-76; Najder 259-60, 274-75; Demarest.
1
67
68
specically to bring about the downfall of Churchill, a politician who stands for the old order of probity and honesty (and who supposedly corresponds to the real-life Conservative leader Balfour).2 Churchills political opponent is the ruthless and disagreeable Gurnard (standing for Joseph Chamberlain), the second Dimensionist. Granger gets a job as a writer of short biographies of important personalities for a newspaper run by Fox, the third of the Dimensionists on Earth. This newspaper is said to be partially sponsored by the Duc de Mersch, elective grand-duke of a small continental principality. De Mersch has a reputation as a philanthropist and a nancial genius, mainly based on his eorts to bring European civilisation and a railway to Greenland, a place rich in gold, oil and other natural resources. During the following year, while Grangers job brings him into personal contact with Churchill, Gurnard, de Mersch and other important players, the British government discusses whether to back de Merschs railway with a nancial guarantee, Churchill being the main advocate of this support. In order to write an article about de Mersch, Granger travels to Paris, where his aunt and the Dimensionist woman have in the meantime set up a Legitimist salon, in an apparent attempt to reinstate old European dynasties. The Dimensionist claims that from this salon she is engineering the downfall of several European governments. Both de Mersch and some of his opponents frequent the salon. In Paris, Granger interviews de Mersch and dutifully writes a laudatory article, in line with Foxs aim to bring about a boom in de Mersch stocks. After handing in his text to his newspapers oce, Granger buys a magazine that happens to contain an article by the famous French writer Radet (standing for Joseph Conrad). Radet brilliantly exposes the exploitation and murder of the Greenlanders under de Merschs system. The next time Granger visits his aunts salon, Radet is there, having an argument with a Greenland ocial. The same ocial is to accompany Callan, a pompous celebrity and populist writer, to Greenland on a journey lavishly funded by de Mersch, who wants Callan to extol the virtues of the Greenland system. By then, Europe is in the grip of an unspecied nancial crisis. The Dimensionist claims that this crisis is the beginning of the changes she is bringing about. De Merschs nancier commits suicide, and everybody seems to be suddenly tired and on the verge of collapse. Granger returns to England with his now ailing aunt and the Dimensionist, who shocks him by telling him that she is to marry Gurnard, who is her last political obstacle. She intends to make Gurnard do some dirty work for her and then, to ruin him. Alone and love-sick, Granger attends a poultry show in his aunts village, where he learns that some people have lost everything through investments in de Mersch stocks. Granger then returns to the oces of Foxs newspaper. As Fox is ill, Granger takes over his responsibilities for the night. That night, Callans report from Greenland comes in.
2
On this and other resemblances to actual persons cf. Knowles & Moore 174.
3.1 HUEFFER AND CONRAD, THE INHERITORS (1901)
69
It is not the expected eulogy of de Merschs system, but an indictment of the Greenland atrocities. This reminds Granger that when he was in the Paris salon, the Dimensionist woman was persuading the Greenland ocial to show Callan everything de Mersch wanted to hide. After dramatic deliberations, Granger decides not to stop the press feeling that if he helps the Dimensionist engineer de Merschs downfall, he will merit her love. Since philanthropy was his last trump, de Mersch is now completely destroyed, and with him Churchill. Granger realises that he has lost all his friends in one way or another. He returns to live alone in obscurity, and can see the Dimensionists influence in the political developments of the world. One of the most striking comments on Heart of Darkness in The Inheritors is the treatment of race and evolution. Where Heart of Darkness alludes to Darwinism through a reference to the prehistoric man (37), The Inheritors explicitly takes up this theory and questions the assumption of European racial superiority not by postulating that all races are equal, but by suggesting that if human Darwinism stands up, then there are no guarantees that whites are at the top. The Dimensionists intend to treat Europeans as [Europeans themselves] treat the inferior races (13). The woman says this while walking through the English countryside with Granger, who remarks that [t]here was something of the past world about the hanging woods (13), making his own place and time appear old or obsolete. This verbal echo of the primeval forest (Heart 29) explicitly reinforces the reference to Marlows perception of the Congo. Grangers attitude towards the Greenlanders is extremely Darwinist: God knows I had little of the humanitarian in me. If people must murder in the by-ways of an immense world, they must do murder and pay the price. But that I should have been mixed up in such was not what I had wanted. [. . . ] It didnt very much matter to me. One supposes that that sort of native exists for that sort of thing to be rooted out by men of good-will with careers to make. The point was that that was what they were really doing out there rooting out the barbarians as well as the barbarism. (110) Just as Granger feels that what is deemed a lower race is inevitably bound to become extinct, the Dimensionist feels that her sort must fatally (3) supersede three-dimensional humankind.3 [Y]our ancestors were mine, she explains, but long ago you were crowded out of the Dimension as we are to-day, you overran the earth as we shall do to-morrow (10). However cynically Granger justies his lack of concern by embracing ideas to which Marlow only alludes, these ideas were not unusual at the time. Researchers
3
For details on the contemporary idea of fatal superseding and extermination see Lindqvist.
70
were discussing whether or to what extent human races were a biological factor, and some scientists considered it possible that some races were doomed to go under. What was unusual was that this novel presented the idea of a hierarchy of races in which Europeans are only an intermediate link, and may themselves be next to be quietly crowded out of the dimension of the living. References to skin colour, too, echo Heart of Darkness. While Marlow predominantly and insistently describes dark skin, Granger often mentions whiteness although there is no necessity for this distinction, because no acting character in the whole book is any colour other than white (and the Esquimaux are far away). This insistence on whiteness does, however, alert the reader to the unresolved question of whether Dimensionists are physically dierent from humans. Biologically-based racial theory is skilfully called into question by this puzzle. In each of the three Dimensionists, Granger only recognises a strangeness after he has been told about their identity. The Dimensionist woman might be whiter than others or even glow in the dark and otherwise defy the laws of optics Granger sometimes describes her face as shadowless (206) or as the last white gleam (14) visible after sunset, but in each case this might just be due to the light or to his infatuation. She might well be telepathic, as she often answers his thoughts with syntactically and semantically matching sentences, repeats verbatim what other people have told him, or predicts future events, but there is a tiny chance that she is just very intelligent and perceptive, has heard people say similar things before, and that her guesses are as lucky as they are politically informed. She might well inhabit a fourth plane, as she enables Granger to see three-dimensional space out of perspective for a moment (7-8), but there is a chance that he is just dizzy after an exhausting walk in her charming presence. Her voice is sometimes too mechanical, and her facial expression slightly unusual, but not more than might be possible in a human being. Granger initially assumes her self-description to be an allegory for membership in some new clique. Najder (260) and Knowles & Moore (173-75) come to the conclusion that The Inheritors does not convincingly develop a physically dierent race and that the Dimensionists represent tough, ruthless humans who push their politics through without regard for others. This judgement completely misses the way the novel grapples with Darwinism and the dierent possible denitions of race. Consistent with the state of the art in human biology at that time, it is ultimately left open whether the Dimensionists are what they say they are. Grangers short vision of the fourth plane directly evokes evolution: the rudiments of the sense are there (8), the Dimensionist explains to him. The idea of race is explored on several other levels as well. The noble Etchingham Granger aunt is the last of a race (132), seeing her family as both a genetic and a cultural entity. Interestingly, Arthur Granger, though genetically related to her, does
71
not seem to be a member of this race, because his father left its cultural folds before he was born. The genetic-cultural dynasties ruling before the French Revolution, which Aunt Grangers salon ostensibly seeks to reinstate, are evoked as examples of past groups that have gone under to new ones. Granger insistently mentions peoples or groups that might be considered races Americans, Australians, Semites, Sclavs and Circassians, Prussians, Choctaws, negro[es] and Hindoo[s], Persians, Esquimaux, European races nding their identity in the new nations (5), and others. His many racialist value judgements are often quite arbitrary. While for him one of Foxs employees is a mad Welshman, whose method is to feign inconceivable stupidity, the sort of black stupidity that is at command of individuals of his primitive race (180), another is a son of an Irish peer with magnicent features and a weird intermittent genius (181). Again, the conclusion by Knowles & Moore (175) that Grangers racist and anti-Semitic remarks will strike modern readers as gratuitous and inexcusable misses the point. Grangers indubitable racism and anti-Semitism provide the context that makes the possibility of a Dimensionist race meaningful and even necessary. This novel presents an explicit discussion of some implications and dangers of racism that is missing from Heart of Darkness, where racist judgements are at least equally numerous. Grangers racism and anti-Semitism, though he never overcomes them, are occasionally called into question, sometimes by himself, sometimes by events. He himself muses that [w]hat was repelling in [the Dimensionist when she rst explains her origins] was accounted for by this dierence in national point of view. One is, after all, not so very remote from the horse. What one does not understand one shies at nds sinister, in fact (7). After assuming that his papers Paris correspondent, a Jew, is eusive and familiar, as the rest of his kind (102), he later nds that this man has been slightly too invasive or sycophantic not because of his origins, but because he knew something that Granger had not grasped: I began to understand everything; [. . . ] the deference of the little Jew the man who knew. He knew that I that I, who patronised him, was a person to stand well with because of my my sisters hold over de Mersch (112). In context with the question whether the Dimensionists are a truly dierent race, Granger also explains imperialism on a level outside race: [p]erhaps it was only the condence of the superseder, the essential quality that makes for the empire of the Occidental (16). His aunt epitomises the self-righteousness of another, emotional brand of imperialism, as she has set her own village so much in order that there remained nothing but the setting in order of the rest of the world (113). What is clear is that a superseding race need not be a morally superior one, as European conquerors claimed to be. The callous Dimensionists feel that beliefs, traditions; fears; ideas of pity. . . of love (10, ellipsis in the original) are diseases they can contract from humans.
72
A strange idea of race is evident when the Greenlanders, who are otherwise called Esquimaux, are referred to as blacks (162) or niggers (42). Assuming that two authors and at least one publishers reader would not have let this slip through as a simple error, and that Hueer did not feel he had to remind readers who the Greenlanders stood for, this confusion remains puzzling. Granger is disoriented with regard to the world beyond his own life, but not that disoriented, and the word blacks is actually used by an elderly lady in the village of Etchingham and the word niggers by Fox. The strange confusion might refer to an us and them feeling where everyone who is not white, is black. It could also point to the arbitrariness of racialist preconceptions about persons one has never met. Grangers outside view of faraway events resembles the perspective of a potential contemporary reader of Heart of Darkness. He even reads an article by Radet (Conrad) reminiscent of Heart of Darkness, in which a dun band that had cast remorse behind penetrates into a long, winding inland valley in Greenland to spread desolation desolately (109). First and foremost, Granger is busy with his own life. His main interest in the Dimensionist is his wish for her to go native with him. She cleverly exploits his masculine fantasies to make him work for her. To do this, she possibly plays on the physical differences of her race to the human race, reminding one of Kurtzs claim that we whites [. . . ] must necessarily appear to them [savages] (sic) in the nature of supernatural beings (50). Just as the advent of a colonising race into Europe reverses the usual racial roles of the time, the advent of a woman coloniser reverses gender roles. Kurtz has a lover from the colonised race, Granger courts a coloniser. Marlow feels that women [. . . ] are out of it (49), Granger keeps repeating that he himself is out of it, sometimes because he wants to be, sometimes not.4 The Dimensionist and two impressive aunts (Grangers and Churchills) are driving forces behind politics, along with other women like the energetic mature ladies in Etchingham village. Marlow, though he relies on the help of an influential aunt himself, feels the need to assert his own masculine qualities and those of the colonial project. Granger is quite happy to be out of it and to flaunt his weaknesses. After thinking in a Marlow-like t of misogyny that [w]omen are like that. She had been attracted [by de Merschs wealth and aristocratic attitude] and didnt know what she was doing (112), Granger immediately expresses a similar feeling about himself on the very next page: I was like a cub in love, with a mans place to ll. Grangers position sheds a dierent light on Marlows. Marlow also feels that [t]he essentials of this aair [lie] [. . . ] beyond [his] power of meddling (40). The reader is driven to consciously or
Inheritors 115 (I felt as outrageously out of it), 143 (wanted to be out of this), 161 (I have been so long out of it and Youve been well out of it), 201 (There came the desire to be out of it), etc.
4
73
unconsciously compare Marlow and Granger, with regard to the white view of self, to the passive complicity of those who go to the colonies and those who do not, and to the conflict between the (apolitical) individuals private preoccupations and the political developments surrounding him. Both Marlow and Granger have to deal with questions of complicity, betrayal and responsibility. Grangers idea of betrayal is outstandingly muddled. He feels that his primary allegiance is the one that binds him to his employer, Fox, whose paper is subsidised by de Mersch. What makes Granger betray this material bond and publish Callans information about the Greenland atrocities is his desire for the Dimensionists approval, not any feeling about the Greenlanders themselves. He never feels that he may be betraying the Greenlanders by collaborating with de Mersch. Even after reading Radets article, he has no strong feelings towards de Mersch, and no urge to nd out more: The thing interested me so little that I never quite mastered the details of it. I wished the man no good, but so long as he kept out of my way I was not going to hate him actively (136). By considering himself marginal and insisting that his main aim is to win the Dimensionists love, Granger successfully avoids having to go into moral questions. If anything, he sees himself as a victim rather than a collaborator a victim of love, and a victim of his need to earn a living by writing for a dependent newspaper, which he believes is the fate of an unappreciated literary genius. To compensate for his feeling of marginality and for the humiliation of working for Foxs second-rate newspaper, Granger consoles himself with an exaggerated view of the power of the press, especially as represented by himself: I saw the apotheosis of the Press a Press that makes a State Founder suppliant to a man like myself (99). For that night I had the power of the press in my keeping (184). When Callans report comes in, Radet has already exposed the Greenland atrocities in French, English newspaper reports have enabled villagers in Etchingham to discuss them, and Europe is rmly in the grip of a nancial crisis. In spite of all this, Granger feels that his publishing Callans information in Foxs British newspaper is decisive in bringing about de Merschs fall, the end of Churchills policies, and the achievement of Dimensionist aims. In fact, the Dimensionist has earlier encouraged him to see the struggle between her competitors as a duel between Fox, the Journal-founder, and Gurnard, the Chancellor of the Exchequer (29), implying that to attack humankind, the two male intruders consider it best to select positions in politics and in the press. Hueers analysis of the power of the press is somewhat prophetic. At the time he was writing The Inheritors , only a few occasional indictments of Leopold had been published in the British press and been largely ignored or forgotten (Lindqvist 27; Hochschild 185). The press was not as powerful as Granger believes it to be, though this would change with the rise of the Congo Reform Association (Hochschild 209-16).
74
Behind the back of the apolitical narrator, the author gives a clear analysis of Leopolds intentions, of his political methods and of the situation that permitted him to take possession of the Congo. Hueer displays a good deal of inside knowledge or intuition for Leopolds bribing of the press, paid travel reports and personal habits. He seems to oer the reader some political ideas that Conrad discussed with him, but that he omitted in Heart of Darkness for artistic or other reasons. Descriptions like the following were not widespread at the time (Najder 140-41), years before the Congo protest movement was born, and long before a critical stance towards colonialism became common: No one of the great powers would let any other of the great powers possess the country, so it had been handed over to the Duc de Mersch (Inheritors 31-32). For its investments, the British public was to be repaid in casks of train-oil and gold and with the consciousness of having aided in letting the light in upon a dark spot of the earth (32). De Mersch was seeking to make a fortune large enough to enable him to laugh at half a dozen elective grand duchies (136). Such statements are made by Grangers interlocutors, while the purely ctional part of political events, the nancial crisis and fall of governments, is narrated only by Granger and remains in the realm of vague allusions and possibilities. The appearance of Conrad as the influential writer Radet shows that Hueer considered Heart of Darkness an important contribution to the contemporary political discussion. On the other hand, Grangers reaction to Radets article is a desire to write as well as Radet, to go back from populist journalism into quality writing. His dreams of a literary career are not deflected by humanitarian outrage or ideals. The priority Granger gives to form over content can be seen as a criticism of writers in general, not excepting Conrad. These two opposed evaluations coexist in the text. The irony and satire of this unusual hybrid of political roman ` a clef , romance and science-ction resemble those in Heart of Darkness. Biting irony is directed against the ruler who masquerades as a philanthropist, and against the pretence of false motives. The ironic attack also covers the population of Etchingham village, for whom devaluation of stocks seems to be a far worse crisis than the crimes against Greenlanders. At the same time, the irony helps avoid the necessity for denitive answers. The reader is left to decide whether that sort of native exists for that sort of thing (110). The device of a weak or questionable (if not unreliable) narrator, clearly discernible in Heart of Darkness, is developed here to the point of making Granger a caricature. Any attempt to identify with this anti-hero is foiled by his extremes. Some self-centredness and vague indierence to politics are understandable and perhaps easier to take than activism peppered with moral perfectionism would be, but Grangers navel-gazing and passivity are enough to make the reader angry. One cannot help feeling that if this is the
75
kind of person who reads Heart of Darkness, then there isnt much hope for ctional Greenland, for Leopolds Congo or for European society. This, in turn, prompts the readers to question their own reactions to Heart of Darkness. In content and in some formal means, The Inheritors is a direct descendant of Heart of Darkness, and is openly presented as one. The link to Heart of Darkness is further reinforced by verbal echoes, including references to light and darkness, crowds, horror, ideas, words and their hollowness, and adjectives such as immense. Colonial atrocities are detailed in Heart of Darkness but not here, so that there seems to be the tacit assumption that the reader will relate Radets description to Marlows. The direct response is characterised by the desire to provide additional explanations and thoughts that are felt to be missing from the original text. Apparently, in his attempt at creating a companion volume, Hueer felt that Marlows racism needed some elaboration and could at least in part be interpreted as a stumbling-block for the reader, and that an analysis of Leopolds methods and a description of peoples increasing disillusionment about him would add to the understanding of Heart of Darkness. Hueer also oers one possible explanation for the omission of names and other points of reference from Heart of Darkness: [d]id I say anywhere that you were responsible? Radet asks an irate Greenland ocial in the Paris salon, [i]f it [Radets report] resembles your particular hell upon earth, what is that to me? Radet explains his fear to speak up while in Greenland, pointing to the possibility that you would have hanged me, perhaps (119). The Inheritors proves that even one of the rst readers of Conrads novella felt the need to add to it and develop its thoughts. It is interesting, too, that Hueer felt the need for a rewriting although he does not express a dierent attitude to the basic issues from that presented in Heart of Darkness. The Inheritors is an addition rather than an answer or opposition. While Hueer wrote most of the text, by giving his name (among other things, to help get the book published) Conrad showed that he fundamentally agreed with Hueers reading and explanation of Heart of Darkness. It is interesting that Hueer mainly concentrated on the two aspects of Heart of Darkness that are receiving special attention today: race/racism and the Europeans political and psychological stance towards imperial activities at the time.
76
3.2
Leonard Woolf, Pearls and Swine (1921)
Leonard Woolf (1880-1969) read Classics, and from 1904 to 1911 worked in the upper ranks of the Ceylon Colonial Service.1 He left the Service both out of a growing distaste for colonialism and because of his marriage to Virginia Woolf. In addition to writing ction and directing a publishing house, Woolf became an important anti-imperialist political thinker, organiser, writer and journalist in Britain. Pearls and Swine (written c. 1912; published 1921) is narrated in the masculine comfort of a hotel smoking room in Britain, where ve men are enjoying a nightcap, and is related by one of the listeners. It is the story of a pearl shing camp in India, which has been set up by shermen and traders of diverse ethnic and cultural origins. The main narrator, who works for the British administration at the time, supervises the proceedings and collects two thirds of the catch as taxes. The only other whites at the makeshift temporary camp are Robson, a freshly graduated young employee whose grandiose, abstract ideas on how a colony ought to be run come straight out of school books; and White, an alcoholic who arrives out of the blue, after swindling and begging his way through most of India at the expense of Indians and Europeans alike. The other two whites disapprove of him, but accept him into their hut because he is white. While Robson indulges in his ideas but increasingly loses his grip on the situation, White eventually dies an undignied death while suering from delirium tremens, tied to a post for physical support and restraint, shouting that he wants to kill people and to have sex. His death is contrasted with that of an Arab sherman, who dies during a courageous dive and is mourned by his friends and his brother with dignity and deep emotion. Mr. White(!) can be seen as a more run-of-the-mill Kurtz: the story stresses that not every white man who becomes violent and goes under in the colonies needs to be as extreme or invested with such weighty philosophical questions as Kurtz. Succumbing to the temptations of the power and respect a white man commands in the colonies can be a very prosaic, everyday matter. The horror Woolf evokes in the description of Whites death (428) is as intense, but intentionally not as exceptional and symbolic as that of the near-mythological Kurtz. Woolfs narrator stresses that his experience at the pearl shing camp is not a nightmare (like Marlows experience), but a quite normal event in the colonies. He feels that his experience is too real to make any such comparisons (425). Only the delirious man perceives the shermen as devils of Hell sent to plague and torture him (428).
Biographical information stems from Mantex.
3.2 WOOLF, PEARLS AND SWINE (1921)
77
White is described both as a Kurtz and as a quite typical member of European civilisation. His alcoholism is an extreme emanation of the widespread faint civilised aroma of whisky and soda (415) that the frame narrator ironically notes in the smoking room. Like the listeners in the room, and like Kurtz, Mr. White is a talker who has views (421). During his stays away from civilisation, in the jungle villages [he has perpetrated acts of] cold, civilised, corrupted cruelty (427). As with Kurtz, it is an open question whether he goes under because Indias got hold of [him] (423), or because of his own weak civilised personality. In some respects, young Robson, too, echoes Kurtz, or he represents someone who has read too many grandiloquent ideas like those in Kurtzs writing. Robsons abstract ideas prove inadequate in the face of reality, to such an extent that [h]e just sat down at last [. . . ] and cried like a baby (426). The main narrator sees his oversoftening as one of the negative characteristics of Europeans. While the shermen are savage enough to beat each other to death over a few oysters, Robson and White are very dubious members of civilisation. One of the listeners in the frame situation feels that Europeans ought to spread the light (417). The main narrator on the other hand remembers, symbolically and ironically, the faces of the two inadequate whites at the camp illuminated by the same small and flickering light (426), reminding one of Marlows claim that we live in the flicker of declining civilisation (Heart 9). By contrasting facts and ideas, Woolf brings up the question of epistemology.2 The main narrator insists that having observed the complexities of life in India, he can only oer facts but no views or ideas (and, as readers of Heart of Darkness will infer, certainly not a redeeming one). Both the frame narrator and the main narrator are retired colonial ocials, and they each feel split (or doubled) into one identity for India and another for Britain. This corroborates Marlows impression that stepping outside the routine of ones own culture changes a persons perception of life. The listeners who have never been to the colonies do not feel the same split or destabilisation, and they are sure of the views and suggestions they base on Orientalist knowledge. They claim that this knowledge is universally valid precisely because it is neutral or abstracted from the individual facts of direct experience. They also believe in the task of Europeans as the superior race (417). The narrator points out the absurdity of a ladder of races on which Indians have stagnated for hundreds, thousands of years but can be quickly elevated by colonisers who treat them as inferior brothers. He also doubts the validity of a concept of races because, among other reasons, there are more races in India than people in Peckham (422). Echoing Conrad, he uses darkness as an image for
For the discussion of facts, age-old populations and sheltering civilisation cf. also the notes in Boehmer, Empire Writing 469. Cf. also Chiu.
2
78
the listeners lack of understanding in the last sentence, a Tamil proverb: When the cat puts his head into a pot, he thinks all is darkness (430). His use of Tamil underlines his double colonial self. The narrator feels that even people whose ancestors have lived in India for hundreds of generations do not claim to wholly understand the subcontinent, so that for Europeans such a claim is futile and presumptuous, and that armchair colonisers who think they know how to run a country are ridiculous gures. Although he thus values Indian knowledge and does not believe in the ladder of races, Woolfs narrator sees people in India as a population dating from the beginning of time (418) just as Marlow talks of prehistoric man (Heart 37). He feels that they just [watch] the things happen quietly, unastonished (425). According to him, this is at least partly because they do not try to be in control. For instance, he claims that instead of learning to control electricity, Indians are governed by the times of sunrise and sunset (426). This judgement refuses the colonised adult or masculine status, while, like Marlow, white men feel that they are in the colonies in order to work and to be in control. The narrator simultaneously respects what he cannot understand, believes that the colonised are too limited to understand, and feels that India is intrinsically so mysterious that not even Indians understand it. These conicting feelings, which he does not relate to each other, may be connected with his split into a (discourse-oriented) British and an (experience-oriented) colonial self.
3.3
W. Somerset Maugham, Mackintosh and The Fall of Edward Barnard (1921)
W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965), a British writer who spent much of his life in France, qualied as a doctor but soon abandoned medicine for writing.1 Among his numerous journeys after the First World War was one to Samoa and Tahiti, which he used as the basis for several of his works. Maugham wrote novels, short stories and plays. Mackintosh is set on an island in the Samoan archipelago. It is the story of the islands administrator, Walker, who has been in power for a quarter of a century, his assistant Mackintosh, who has been there for two years, and of emerging social forces and ideas in the population of the island that are embodied mainly by a young leader, Manuma. In relative isolation at a distance from the authorities in Apia, the capital of the archipelago, Walker rule[s] his small kingdom (151) despotically, but with complete success (148). He does not use methods as drastic as Kurtzs impaled skulls, but he has been known to [thrash] a native with his own hands (159), and he feels that he has
1
Biographical information stems from Liukkonen, entry W(illiam) Somerset Maugham (1874-1965).
3.3 MAUGHAM, MACKINTOSH, THE FALL OF EDWARD BARNARD (1921)
79
a right to do any damned thing [he likes] on this island (165). Walker does not make a prot except an emotional one, the pride he takes in his achievements. He has given the islanders useful roads and fresh-water pools, protects them from exploitative traders and from missionaries of whom he disapproves, and provides a very rough-and-ready justice and even amateurish medical treatment, in both of which he does not permit the experts from the central administration in the capital to interfere. He routinely refers to the locals as his children, and he believes that they look upon [him] as a father (173). They actually [fear] the fat sinful old man with his devilish cunning (162). He has also had numberless adventures (149) with local women. Mackintosh, his assistant, hates Walker for his self-righteousness and because Walker teases and ridicules him as much as he can. Walker, however, believes that Mackintosh is a good dog and he loves his master (151). This state of aairs lasts until Manuma, a chiefs son who has received his education in Apia, realises that Walker has been paying the locals far too little money for road construction. In fact, Walker has not used most of the budget assigned to him for that task, because he wants to impress the nancial administration in Apia, and because he thinks that the locals should more or less volunteer their work on the roads that he feels will be to their benet. Knowing what amount would actually be fair, Manuma incites his village to go on strike in order to obtain this sum for a projected road segment. Walker rejects the villagers claims, even after Manuma throws a dangerous knife, which narrowly misses him. Walker then pays the inhabitants of another area, unaware of the correct rates, to come and build the road for the old price. According to the Polynesian laws of hospitality, these builders are housed and fed by Manumas village, and they work slowly to enjoy this privilege for as long as possible. Seeing their food supplies dwindle, Manuma and the people from his village eventually ask Walker to send the strangers away and oer to build the road themselves, for free. Walker overdoes his joke (164) and asks them to pay the strangers the money for their work on top of all the food they have given them already. Mackintosh protests. When Walker rudely ignores him, he begins to hate him to the point of having fleeting murder fantasies. Manuma then visits Mackintosh, and in a silent and uneasy communication, Mackintosh puts Manuma in a position to get hold of his revolver. Mackintosh appears torn between accepting and rejecting Manumas plans. He warns Walker not to go out alone, but does not tell him why. When Walker ignores the warning, Manuma shoots him and quietly returns the revolver to Mackintoshs oce. On his deathbed, Walker tells Mackintosh that he has recommended him as his successor. He admonishes him to take care of his children and to make sure that nobody is punished, and he has him quote from the Bible Forgive them, for they know not what they do (182). Walker insists that the islanders who have gathered round his bed may remain, and they cry when he dies. Mackintosh goes out and shoots himself.
80
If one accepts the interpretation that Conrads Kurtz has (in his own opinion) found a way of realising a combination of the two colonial dreams, namely idealistic rule and economic power (Obendiek 58), then this short story can be read as an exploration of what could happen to such a system in the next generation, and how the next generation of colonisers may fail to deal with new developments. Walker and Mackintosh embody two types of coloniser personalities. Though the main action happens between Manuma and Walker, the focus is on Mackintosh, whose feelings and moral problems the narration follows most of the time. His experience is the real topic of the story. In contrast to Walker, who has an alcohol problem and is complacent and debauched, Mackintosh initially appears as a somewhat dull goodie. His exactness, his morality, his sobriety (150) are reminiscent of Marlows work ethics and aloofness. This moral stance begins to appear hollow when Mackintosh warns Walker about going out. By doing this, Mackintosh reassures himself that he is doing everything he can to protect Walker, but he does not tell Walker what the actual threat is, and does not try to avert it. At moments of moral stress, Mackintosh repeatedly feels that he is standing beside himself or that an extraneous power in himself is taking over (167-68, 174). The younger man feels his own hollowness and untruthfulness directly, not indirectly as Marlow sees his mirrored in Kurtz. Mackintosh turns out to be too weak for the situation. He simultaneously leaves the dirty work to Manuma and gives in to his own desires by letting Manuma have the revolver which would, strictly speaking, not be necessary, because Manuma already has a good knife at his disposal, but which gives Mackintosh a feeling of involvement. Consequently, it is Mackintosh who feels the horror (178) of Walkers death, not Walker. Walker regains power while dying: his self-assured assertions drive Mackintosh to suicide. Though he does not approve of Walkers patronising concept of Pacic islanders as children, Mackintosh eventually realises that there was some genuine emotion in Walkers misguided views. He sees that he has helped Manuma kill someone who was not all bad a self-righteous human but not a metaphysical extreme like Kurtz. Mackintoshs situation stands for larger questions of late colonialism that younger, progressive whites are addressing at about the time of the First World War. They still feel vastly superior to the colonised. The narrative voice describes the Kanaka (168) as picturesque (145), lazy (172), enjoying dirty talk (153) and gossipy (144), and Mackintosh feels that an indigene is not as t to talk with as a white or a person of mixed descent (168). Nevertheless, whites are beginning to wonder to what extent it is still realistic in that historical period to hope they can make the lives of colonised people their project. Mackintosh realises that the old approach is demeaning and exploitative to the colonised and that protest and self-defence are beginning to grow. The dialogue between the colonisers and the colonised, including an increasing bilingualism and some cultural
3.3 MAUGHAM, MACKINTOSH, THE FALL OF EDWARD BARNARD (1921)
81
assimilation on both sides, is incomparably more intense than in Heart of Darkness, and indigenous agency can no longer be ignored. In fact, Walker dies at least in part because he mocks it; and Mackintosh recognises in Manuma a man who should not be so crushed (167). As there is no question yet of giving up colonialism as such, the story raises the question of how younger white men can become strong enough for life in the colonies without losing their moral qualities. Mackintoshs suicide points to the diculties and paradoxes that come with a violent change from an older power structure with its emotional-social hegemony to a new one, especially while representatives of the old feelings and methods are still in power. Mackintoshs failure to provide a better model than Walker shows that a Marlow-like sensitive, critical person (and the story itself) can point out problems, but that more radical developments would be needed to provide a solution.
In the story The Fall of Edward Barnard, the motif of a white man going under to life in the colonies is explored from an angle dierent to the one in Heart of Darkness. A young man, Bateman Hunter, returns to Chicago from a journey to the Pacic, which he has mainly undertaken to nd out about his friend Edward Barnard. After a stay of two years, Edward had not shown any signs of wanting to return. Bateman, a rich young businessman, reports to Edwards wealthy, rened Intended that her anc e hasance fallen for the soft easy life on Tahiti. Having gone to Tahiti to make money and learn about business methods before his planned marriage, Edward has met Arnold Jackson, his anc ees uncle, who left America after spending time in jail for business fraud. Af-ancee ter initially thinking over dozens of ideas for making money on the island, Edward has learned from Arnold to enjoy the beauties of nature and the easy life supposed to be typical of the island. He no longer wants to introduce machines or methods to exploit tropical nature more eciently. Having been sacked from his managerial position in a white company, he now sells everyday objects in a shop belonging to a man of mixed descent. He does not want to come back, and plans to marry Arnolds American-Polynesian daughter. His long-term goal is to live o the land in the same old way they have done for unnumbered years (84), nding that the prehistoric makes him happier than a life among rich industrials in the US. Edward believes that the horror (80) is back in Chicagos rich business life and that, unlike the more Faustian travellers, he has found his soul and his purpose in the Pacic. Bateman and the abandoned anc ee feel thatancee Arnold has helped corrupt Edward. They see Arnold as an eloquent older mentor and source of evil influences (76), which Kurtz may be to the Russian and could have become to Marlow, who initially hopes to obtain explanations and meaning from him. Bateman, who believes in strict work ethics, feels that Edward has no backbone (77), just as Marlow claims that Kurtz was hollow at the core (Heart 58).
82
Bateman believes that he is telling the whole truth (53) to this Intended, but it is an open question whose truth is real, his or Edwards. The reader is left to decide whether rich life in Chicago had turned Arnold into a greedy and fraudulent person, so that Tahiti has actually saved Arnold and Edward from going under to what Bateman sees as the civilised world (52), or whether they have gone under to island life. Maugham pictures the interaction between whites, Polynesians and persons of hybrid descent in more detail and as a far more commonplace event than Conrad and the other colonial white writers discussed here. Whites had been there for some time when Maugham visited the islands, and the climate and fauna in Polynesia are not as irritating for Europeans as in Africa, so that they feel more at ease. Polynesians did not appear to them to be as dierent as people in Africa or India. Even Bateman, who experiences hauteur involuntarily towards everyone who is not white (62), compares the second anc ee to a European mythological creature (73), a sylph. In other stories in the South Sea Tales collection, Maugham sometimes compares the islanders complexions and features to those of ancient Romans or beings from Greco-Roman myth (102, 188, 207). It is especially interesting that Edwards second anc ee is the cousin of the rst (her uncles daughter). This undermines the binary distinction between Europeans and Pacic islanders. The second anc ees name is Eva, which points to an act of foundation or creation in their alliance.
ancee
ancee
ancee
3.4
Andre
Andr e Gide, Travels in the Congo (1927/28)
Andr e Gide (1869-1951) and Joseph Conrad rst met in 1911, when Gide was already an important writer.1 Gide admired Conrads works and soon took it upon himself to make them known in France, principally by translating some of them. He was an important friend in Conrads later years. The child of an old and prosperous family, Gide was to some degree interested in politics from an early age.2 In 1925-26, when he was 56, he travelled in French Equatorial Africa (namely in the French Congo, Oubangui-Shari [now the Central African Republic] and the Chad) as a special envoy of the French Colonial Ministry. In Travels in the Congo , Gide does not specify the tasks of this mission, though he once mentions informing Africans that he has come to defend the natives interests (261). The journey opened his eyes to colonial crimes and to social injustice in general, and made him turn more intensely to personal participation in politics. The publication of his African travel journals eventually led to legal reforms.
1 2
Information in this paragraph stems from Karl 706-10, 781. Information in this paragraph stems from the introduction Travels in the Congo and from Leroy.
3.4 GIDE, TRAVELS IN THE CONGO (1927/28)
83
Travels in the Congo is dedicated To the memory of Joseph Conrad, and explicitly refers to Heart of Darkness. Gide arms that his own African travels show him the value and truthfulness of Heart of Darkness (9 n, 241). His account of his journey appears to be intended for readers who feel that the ctional treatment in Heart of Darkness obscures Conrads actual experiences. Several times, Gide states that he wrote his journals on the spot on a daily basis and did not alter them afterwards. He explicitly relegates later thoughts and additions to footnotes, underlining the claim to authenticity and unedited perceptions (129 n, 175 n, 285 n). Gide describes his perceptions in several threads. The rst of these threads is a rather tourist-like encounter with African nature. Gide expects scenery, animals and plants to be exotic and is disappointed when some are not, explicitly reflecting that it is not their essence but their dierence from European ones and their novelty for the observer that make them attractive and, indeed, exotic (61, 63, 74-75). Moreover, he nearly always takes care to ascribe exotic, mysterious, gloomy or impenetrable qualities only to nature, and sometimes explains their origins in quasi-scientic ways. For instance, he attributes exotic aspects to a certain symmetry of plants (141), and the other three eects to a moonlit night (138) or to the density of vegetation (77). Gide also explains a certain type of forest, which, however, he seeks in vain, as primeval (51 n) in a technical sense of origin and age. This strategy shows the reader that it is flora, not human beings, that makes Africa exotic, mysterious or primeval. It invites one to reread Heart of Darkness with a view to the ways Marlow conflates his perception of nature on the one hand and that of persons on the other. Gide preserves some flowers and insects, taking them from their context to turn them into lifeless exhibits. He admires animals and regrets killing them, but his enlightenmentstyle eort to collect knowledge in several scientic areas makes him feel entitled to destroy a bit of nature for the sake of (amateurish) scientic progress. He repeatedly states that he travels in order to see exotic plants and animals and that Africa is an important and satisfactory site of such natural richness. This plenitude contrasts with Conrads use of African forests as bleak walls for his dark-tunnel eect, and with the emptiness or lack Europeans generally ascribed to the continent. The second thread consists of encounters with Africans, both as employees of the expedition and as inhabitants of the villages along the way. Ethnologising descriptions of their appearance, music and dance, visual arts and architecture, some of them quite technical, are one part of this thread; but Gide also seeks out more personal encounters. Along with numerous place names, he gives the names of many African acquaintances. He identies lovable, cooperative and noble Africans as well as lazy and corrupt ones,
84
Andre
along with rich and poor, well-organised and careless ones, stressing individual personalities and circumstances. On taking leave of his African Muslim boy Adoum, he feels great sadness and meditates on the oer of friendship or even love made by Africans and generally rejected by the colonisers, and on the failure of Europeans to understand Africans (241-44). This, however, is at the same time one of several passages where Gide relapses into seeing Africans as an indistinct crowd or flock, insisting that the reliable and aectionate Adoum is only one among many, more or less identical people. Undermining his own lifelong insistence on individuality, Gide sometimes searches for unifying and totalising explanations. After his return home he seeks authority in non-ction and turns to a Darwinist book entitled La Mentalit e Primitive . He nds in it reassuring passages on the rudimentary qualities of primitive brains and nervous systems that help him come to terms with unexpected traits he has encountered, such as an apparent inability to think in cause-eect relationships (198 n) or to react to accidents (145 n, 194 n). By referring to this book, Gide shows that he conceives of primitive man as a geographically unspecic being: he accepts an explanation given for Kamchatka as equally valid for Africans. He seems to forget the intelligence he has earlier recognised in many Africans (198), or their ability to be uplifted by Islam (129, 131). While Gide tries explicitly to refute many stereotypes about Africans, for instance about their laziness or sexual excesses, there is hardly any stereotype found in Heart of Darkness that he does not use at some point. These include the frenzy and lunacy of some dances (41, 64, 66, 183), or the assumption that African cultural forms are primitive and at the same level as early European ones (117, 160, 170, 179). The dierence to Marlows far more reductive representation is that Gide never applies such stereotypes to more than a few people or activities, often as part of detailed descriptions that foreground other qualities. Using categories similar to Marlows, he thus creates a far more complex image of Africa. Andr e Gide also relates African reality to Western cultural material similar to that contained in Heart of Darkness, such as to the entry into Jerusalem, Goethes Faust , theories of the sun going out, and hell;3 but he does not seem to subordinate African reality to such Western references. A related strategy that validates assumed African beliefs and yet simultaneously equates them with primitive (early, basic) Western cultural forms is the implicit pairing of assumed African thought with European myth. Several times, Gide refers to Western myth shortly after mentioning some supposed African belief. This induces the reader to draw a parallel that the text does not make explicit. To quote just two examples, the description of a village abandoned as cursed or
Cf. Gide 64 (Jerusalem, cp. Heart 32, the arrival of the Eldorado Exploring expedition), 73 (Faust : verbal echo the eternal feminine, cf. Section 1.4), 126 (sun, cf. Section 1.5), 129 (hell, cf. Section 1.4 on allusions to an inferno).
3
85
haunted or what not (90) is closely followed by disappointment about a dull landscape uninhabited by god, or dryad, or faun (91). Gide leaves the vicinity of another abandoned village, which has had a spell cast on it at the eerie hour when witches come home from their sabbath (104), reminding one again of Goethes Faust . Sometimes he describes Africans in terms of European myth, such as dancers whom sees as Bacchantes.4 This imagery continues a modernist search for ur-human symbols foreshadowed by Conrads use of myth. Finally, Gide reproduces the assumption that Africa is somehow about cannibals, but moves it onto a level of psychological imagery, describing some Africans devouring aection as cannibalistic (82, 107). Gide nds himself dependent on Africans for their labour, which consists mainly in porterage, and for their expertise in routes and other local facts. This dependence is so strong that at some points, he nds himself obliged to employ persons who have been recruited for him against their will (143, 252). He is aware of this. He decides to try and win his employees trust while retaining his authority over them, and to pay what he feels are just rates plus some extras, while he learns that most other Europeans pay far less than adequate prices for labour and food. Many of the European-African encounters Gide portrays are deeply influenced by money porters wages as much as tips and presents to village chiefs and inhabitants. Gide does not appear to feel uneasy about this factor in relationships; he takes it for granted that this is one of the ways in which the white man can buy aection, along with the administration of justice and the setting up of infrastructure. Though Gide occasionally realises that the delity of Africans who want to join his expedition is chiefly a matter of poverty (127), he does not seem to see anything strange in acquiring aection in such ways, and is unselfconsciously proud of winning these people over to France (110). He feels that Conrads assertion that Africans are not enemies is corroborated by the friendliness of an African who nds his labour unexpectedly rewarded (143, 143 n). A third thread consists of Gides growing awareness of social and economic injustice, which he unexpectedly nds turning into the chief interest of [his] journey (14 n). Among the whites, he nds doctors and administrators whom he praises highly for the benets they bring to Africans, and he nds men who grossly abuse their power. He identies the latter as individual cases in specic circumstances (75-76), and soon hopes to help free the colony from such cases. Far from becoming disillusioned and pessimistic like Marlow, Gide writes several letters complaining to those peoples superiors during his journey. He also tries to improve some Africans situations on the spot, by informing
4
Cf. Gide 93 (Bacchantes), 145 (the bull Apis), 146 (Arion on the dolphin).
86
local authorities of illegal working conditions (153-54), providing escort to a refugee (65), and persuading villagers to insist on correct prices for wild rubber (64). To add to the political impact of his diary, Gide names specic organisations, persons and structures as sources of abuse, and includes extracts from statistics and reports. The tone of this thread is somewhat emotional, but also concise and certainly not sensationalist. While Gide analyses the motivations of some cruel whites in a sober psychological way with results not unlike those Conrad oers for Kurtz, including a lack of moral strength and of supervision in remote stations (12), he does not invest these individuals with an abstract or symbolic signicance comparable to that of Conrads villain. He attributes other shortcomings of the colonial system to simple negligence, underfunding, understang and bureaucracy. Gide points out both positive and negative eects of the colonial encounter on Africans, to the point of a rather cynical juxtaposition of the claim that contact with our civilization [. . . ] has spoilt (306) two of his employees and made them careless, and the designation of the city in which he makes this statement, as an outpost of civilization (307). He does, however, assume that white [. . . ] superiority (243) exists, and mostly feels that the French occupation as such is to the benet of Africans. He even distinguishes between the necessary suering or deaths of African workers building state infrastructure such as railways, which he feels will eventually benet the African as much as the European inhabitants, and the unnecessary suering caused by concession companies, which serves private interests rather than the country.5 During the rst stage of the journey that includes visits to the Belgian Congo, one of the few explicit references to Heart of Darkness is to the Belgian-Congo railway. Gide believes that its construction was as devastating for the African population as Heart of Darkness describes, but maintains that it was necessary for the country and ultimately successful (9 n), rather than being futile as Marlow claims. Gides growing social awareness is related to a reassessment of his own aims and position as a writer. Having in his previous career intended to write high literature for posterity, he now desires to command a journalistic directness for his letters in order to achieve his aims (60). The reader can trace how Gides African journey opens his eyes to the social function of writing. In the area of (artistic) representation, Gide feels that language is insucient. He thinks that he can neither describe peoples qualities nor even architectural achievements adequately (243, 267). In order to overcome this problem, his only white travel companion, Marc, tries to lm Africans during everyday activities, but he selects and instructs them as if they were actors. A disappointed Gide nds that all of these lms look posed and do not capture what he nds important and real (147, 222).
5
Cf. Appendix to the Gallimard edition 200.
87
In the areas of social knowledge and power, however, Gide recognises language as an important factor. Because he is often given contradictory accounts of sensitive events, he becomes wary of hearsay and strives to base his social interventions on nothing but facts he has veried himself or at least extracted from trustworthy sources. He sometimes nds that Africans say what they think he expects them to say, because they have become used to adapting themselves to whites wishes. The absence of a common language with people and his dependence on interpreters, sometimes with a third intermediate language for lack of appropriate bilinguals, further hampers his attempts. He reads a Sango grammar and learns a few Sango words, but mostly stresses the necessity for Africans to learn good French. He feels that culture and its specic logic are encoded in language (198, 215), and assumes that an African may acquire French ways of thinking when he tries to educate himself and so draw nearer to us (244) by learning the French language. A fourth thread is about Gide himself. He meditates on the books he reads, on his advancing age, on friendships and homesickness, on his literary critics and on philosophical questions such as individuality or the nature of prejudice. He tries to be open to Africa and to feel the novelty of [his] own self in the midst of all this (13), experiencing his surroundings as intensely as he can and observing himself while he does this. Repeatedly, listening to African music opens up unexpected cultural possibilities outside his European frame of reference. Though open to learning and change, he does not feel destabilised or radically called into question by his journey. These four threads (exotic nature, encounters, social awareness/intervention and selfawareness) are interleaved, with abrupt, unmitigated transitions. Gide shows himself capable of listening to tales of suering, writing an intense protest letter to the governor or worrying about his overworked porters, and then immediately turning to the beauties of the forest or to a bit of comic relief describing an employees incorrect French. On the one hand, this coexistence of autonomous threads of content shows that Gide permits his travel account to tell itself. He is impressed by lifes facets and variety, and refuses to impose a unied plot or meaning on it. He goes much further in permitting the multivocal than Conrad and resists conflation of dierent aspects of his experience, in spite of his occasional relapses into stereotypes about the primitive mind. His journal resembles a stream of consciousness or an unedited hidden-camera recording. On the other hand, these threads do intersect on a deeper level, showing the hand of the literary author and admirer of symbolists. For instance, he describes nature in poetic phrases, which reveal the aesthete in the amateur biologist. Several times, he analyses African landscape like a painting, as if it were expressly designed for the pleasure of the spectator: [when it] becomes more formed, when it sets itself limits and attempts to be a little better
88
planned, [. . . ] elegance is achieved (111). At some point, Gide projects his impression that Central Africans lack individuality onto the formlessness of the landscape and vice versa (113). Gide has some quite universalist criteria for beauty, which he applies to humans, villages and scenery alike. He also sees some of his own intimate concerns mirrored in African nature: he correlates his frantic attempts at carpe diem to his ongoing chase for butterflies, and melancholy feelings about his youth that is lost and gone are echoed (sometimes in close textual proximity) in his repeated regrets about the butterflies that he has not been able to catch. The closing scene of Travels in the Congo is the only one that seems as if it might be an outright invention or at least intentionally and strongly edited to t the authors purposes. For instance, it is not clear how much the little boy says and how much is Gides addition. The scene contains strong allusions to Heart of Darkness: And, as [the little boy] added, with an air of authority, that they should be put an end to not the niggers, perhaps, and certainly not the people who kick them, but the bad musicians the little girl exclaimed indignantly: But then who will play for us to dance? This scene connects the threads of white self (the boy is strongly concerned with his place in the world), of music, of the relationship with Africans and of social awareness. It appears to be a white weakness, present even in innocent children, that whites, or white males anyway, always desire to exterminate some brutes or other, to assume the authority to put an end to something they happen to dislike. The little girl questions this strange desire, and points out that what one person dislikes may still be of great importance to someone else. This scene is also more obviously open to interpretation than the rest of the diary, a literary way of rounding the text o and pointing to the relations between its various threads.
3.5 CELINE, JOURNEY TO THE END OF THE NIGHT (1932)
89
3.5
Louis-Ferdinand C eline, Journey to the End of the Night (1932)
Journey to the End of the Night is narrated by its protagonist, Ferdinand Bardamu, whose viewpoint is that of a chronically poor white underdog. Bardamu is wounded at the front in the First World War and, shell-shocked, obtains his discharge from the army during his recovery in Paris. After this, he spends time in Africa as a commercial agent, then in the US as a factory worker. Back in France, he takes a medical degree, and works as a doctor in a seedy Paris suburb. There, he nds it hard to charge people for his services because he does not want to exploit the poor. He gets involved in a murder case, and moves on to work at a psychiatric clinic that uses some dubious methods. C eline is the pseudonym of Louis-Ferdinand-Auguste Destouches (1894-1961).1 WhileCeline roughly following the stations of the authors own life, the novel can be seen as a panorama of various oppressive living conditions of his time. It seems that C eline himselfCeline was not as nihilistic and certainly not as poor as his protagonist. After being wounded at the front during a voluntary, courageous action, he spent time in the French-occupied colony of Cameroon in 1916-17 as an agent of a concession company. There, he worked at two isolated stations where he was the only white person within several days walking distance. He organised the stations well and made a good prot, enjoying a feeling of autonomy (Vitoux 105-06, 111). After taking his medical degree in France and unlike his character Bardamu, C eline went back to Africa in 1925-26 as an epidemiologist for theCeline League of Nations to tackle problems he had seen. With a group of doctors, he briefly visited a US car factory to do research on its working conditions; he did not work there as a down-and-out illegal immigrant like Bardamu (Vitoux 155, 158). C elines novelsCeline tackle social problems, and many of his non-ctional pamphlets concern medical and sociological aspects of life in Europe and the US. In this and other ways, he volunteered generous social commitment. Later, looking for an explanation for the injustices of the First World War and fearing a second one, C eline identied the exploitative ruling classCeline with Jews. This caused him diculties after the Second World War. There was however some controversy about the seriousness or intention of his anti-Semitic statements (Blank 85-96). For the present discussion, the most important part of the novel is Bardamus stay in Africa (pages 104-67, roughly 15% of the text). There, he follows a geographical trajectory comparable to Marlows. He lands at a coastal city, whose white society he describes
Unless otherwise indicated, biographical information stems from Blank 1-3, 75-117, 317; Ducourneau; Mondor.
1
90
in detail, while Conrad deleted the description of Boma (the seat of the government) from his manuscript presumably because it would not t his symbolic use of Africa as the site of prehistoric wilderness and isolation (Heart 18 n). A smaller ship takes Bardamu to a half-way station, from where he goes on by canoe to an Inner Station isolated in the rainforest.
Celine
Lagercrantz argues that C eline lls in details that Heart of Darkness leaves out (19697). However, these details are not descriptive like Gides, and Bardamu does not even situate his stay geographically. His places bear invented names. To add to the confusion, the name of the general area alternates between Petit Togo (130, 131) and Petit Congo (120, 151); most place names are invented with a view to slang connotations of sexuality or decay (Glossary). The details Bardamu gives are of a psychological and sociological nature, grotesquely exaggerated, somewhat in the style of a comedy of manners. His account implies several explanations for whites going under in the tropics. These have to do with nature, especially the climate, diseases and fauna, and with a white tendency to laziness and alcoholism. Even on board the ship that takes him to Africa, he nds that as soon as the humid heat of the tropics takes over, we saw, rising to the surface, the terrifying nature of white men, exasperated, freed from constraint, absolutely unbuttoned, their true nature, same as in the war. That tropical steam bath called forth instincts as August breeds toads and snakes on the ssured walls of prisons. In the European cold, under grey, puritanical northern skies, we seldom get to see our brothers festering cruelty except in times of carnage, but when roused by the foul fevers of the tropics, their rottenness rises to the surface. [. . . ] Its a biological confession. Once work and cold weather cease to constrain us, once they relax their grip, the white man shows you the same spectacle as a beautiful beach when the tide goes out: the truth, fetid pools, crabs, carrion and turds. (106) In addition to these factors, much like in Heart of Darkness [a] man doesnt stay honest long when hes alone without societal control; and animals such as hyenas, crickets and termites cause enough noise and destruction to drive whites to despair. Like Woolf, C eline stresses how normal and unspectacular it is for whites to go under in the colonies. He does not attribute their downfall to an encounter with Africans. At most, Africans, who do not suer from the climate as much, are lively and contribute to the general noise that exasperates the whites, they provide cheap prostitutes, and the opportunity to brutalise them brutalises the coloniser. Otherwise, the coexistence of black and white is quite supercial. Colonisers do go native sexually, but sex is a commodity rather than a mystery for them, and they do not fear it will aect their personalities.
Celine
91
This novel heralds a general development from the modernist fear of a Mr. Hyde lurking in the self to a postwar assumption that everyone is born with a heart of darkness, which surfaces especially in certain circumstances including war and economic exploitation. Such circumstances can also bring out dierent degrees of moral or emotional hollowness, and Bardamu has always worried about being practically empty (186), just as Kurtz was hollow at the core (Heart 58). In this novel, the notions of an absurd world and an inherently irrational, animal (white) self amount to a new kind of Eurocentric layer of meaning imposed on an African background. The whole journey of Bardamus life is an initiation into the depravity, greed and cowardice that, in his view, make up the human condition. Even before his colonial experience, he gets acquainted with the horror in the soul of man (19). He nds darkness, death and destruction (30), nightmare (79) and brutes (37) at the beginning, not at the end of the book like Marlow. Having gone to Africa to get far away from France and the war, he soon realises that rich, corrupt and hypocritical whites exploit poor ones like himself, and both together exploit and harm the Africans. This hierarchy resembles the one perceived by Marlow, with the dierence that Bardamu does not try to preserve any work ethic and personal integrity. He admires Africans for retaining enough dignity to work only when forced by the club or whip, while poor whites have been indoctrinated by their civilisation so much that they work voluntarily, dreaming of wealth and ascent (124, 130). Without being explicitly Marxist, Bardamu interprets the world from a materialist angle. In Africa as much as in Europe and the US, he sees a permanent dichotomy of mankind into two very dierent races [deux humanit es], the rich and the poor (78, Gallimard edition 81). He feels that the exploitative upper class keeps the others in a state of poverty, under-education and depravity. He envies the rich their luxuries and their lives without work. Bardamu himself always looks for little jobs that [. . . ] didnt take too much out of you (202). While Marlow nds that European civilisation may oversoften whites but is overall a desirable achievement, Bardamu analyses it from a materialist point of view and nds a civilisation like that of Ancient Rome, which extracts tribute by physical violence, and a modern one that exploits people both as workers and as consumers. The French use both models in Africa (146). In such a world, lies and cheating are necessary means of self-preservation for the poor. Where Marlow sees a taint of death, a flavour of mortality (Heart 29) in lying but needs a lie for his emotional survival (Kramer), Bardamu proclaims openly that he needs lies and cowardice for his physical and emotional survival: [y]ou have to choose: death or lies (183). Given the general futility of the search for true happiness, lies are also a means of easing communication. Gender comes into play here. Bardamu with his exaggerated masculinity is mostly interested in sex without commitment. He is the lone male moving
92
restlessly from stage to stage of his life. Having learned that most women are interested in courageous men and in emotion, he feels that they just require lying to. Apart from a few tough working women, mainly sex workers, women are out of it altogether, because of their biology (85) and because of other factors such as not having to be soldiers. Most women are additionally being kept out of it, the coveted rich ones even more so than the poor ones: The women of the rich, well fed, well lied to[!], well rested, tend to be good looking (294). Encounters with Africans, though not as much of a focus as Bardamu himself, are described in more detail than in Heart of Darkness. Without irony, Bardamu feels sorry for groups of porters working like vertical ants (121), where Marlow notes that construction workers moved about like ants (Heart 18). However, most encounters are satirised and bizarre, such as the one implying that the only African complainants to benet from the whites flawed justice are masochists who want to be whipped (145). The possibilities of protest open to Europeans do not seem to be more promising than the means of justice accessible to Africans. Letters denouncing atrocities against Africans are sent to the authorities anonymously and are only intended to serve white rivalries (137); they have no eect. When a petition is made to the governor, it is about the price of alcoholic drinks (119). Gide, who was in a social position to make himself heard, shows that intervention can be fruitful; C eline demonstrates that it can be abused. Much of white work, such as road construction, is as futile as in Heart of Darkness (125-26). All social functions whites exert in Africa are portrayed as irreparable failures. Africans who trust a white person are necessarily deluded, such as the militiamen at the half-way station who see in their boss the unquestionable signs of kinship, of fellow membership in the great family of the innately, incurably poor (141), while the boss cheats them out of their pay. Bardamu himself is satirised when he considers that boss something like a saint for bringing up an orphaned niece in Europe with the money he makes out of his illegal doings in Africa. In addition to thus showing how little African well-being really means to him, Bardamu cynically declares himself [w]ell entertained by these various incidents (145) and nds the station all in all agreeable(147). Bardamus stance towards Africans is ambivalent. Though he does not explicitly endorse racist theories, contemporary racism is visible in his repeated assumption of dietary cannibalism and a few other common stereotypes. While he names most of his European acquaintances, and perceives Africans both as crowds and as individuals, he does not name any Africans. Bardamu assumes a Darwinist scale of Africans, where those at the lowest end have the strongest instinct (128) to run away from whites. On the other
Celine
93
hand, Bardamu is not as explicitly racist as some colonisers he meets, and he is the only one who learns something important from Africans, making re without matches (16162). He asks for native medicine, whose white opponents he nds Afrophobic (165). Considering himself insuperably poor and victimised, Bardamu nds that colonised Africans are in a similar situation: theyre just like our own poor people (132). Well acquainted with the human desire for self-enrichment, he recognises attempts at social climbing, and is aware of changes in African society brought about by the white occupation. An African shop assistant addresses a rst-time customer with the words You no savvy money? You savage? [. . . ] You missing link, eh?2 and helps the white representative of the conquerors trade (129) dupe this customer. In Bardamus Africa, there are no healthy or happy Africans. The ones who have not been massively aected by colonialism suer from innumerable tropical diseases. Bardamu himself falls ill at the Inner Station like Kurtz, and struggles with death on his way from Africa like Marlow. His African neighbours serve him, try to cheer him up and heal him, and nally carry him to the coast where they presumably conrm his assumption that everyone has egoistic motives, by selling him into the dream sequence of the slave galley that takes him to America in a kind of Middle Passage set around the time of Ancient Rome (162-69). Dream and nightmare are embedded in the narrative without being distinguished from reality, though the psychological analysis of dreams is later held up for ridicule at the Paris psychiatric hospital (371). At the Inner Station (named Bikomimbo), Bardamu meets his alter ego like Marlow. This is a man suggestively named Robinson, who always turns up before Bardamu leaves a stage of his life journey. At Bikomimbo, Robinson is Bardamus predecessor, who leaves the station because he is fed up with fever and administrative forms. Robinson can in some respects be seen as the worse part of Bardamus ego just as Kurtz of Marlows. Later in Paris, in an attempt to obtain money without having to work, Robinson commits murder. Bardamu sees his own self-destructive desires mirrored in Robinson. He sometimes feels attached to Robinson, and sometimes wants to get rid of him. Bardamu is not shocked by Robinson as Marlow is by Kurtz, and he quietly tries to help him out of tight spots. He closes his eyes to the murder and generally tries to make the best out of his coexistence with his mirror image. Though Robinson may be even more work-shy and irresponsible than Bardamu, other doubtful character traits such as machismo are more strongly assigned to Bardamu, and the two mens degrees of moral strength are not suciently polarised to see them as an ego and its id. A personality
The French original is even more direct: Toi, y a pas savoir argent? Sauvage, alors? [. . . ] Toi y en a gorille encore hein?, Gallimard edition 137.
2
94
ancee
is thus not assumed to consist of clearly separated good and bad qualities, or moral impulses and egoistic desires, but of a more complex interplay between more or less conscious, more or less problematic characteristics. By the time Bardamu meets him in Africa, Robinson has not yet done anything bad. Bardamu does not even remember him straight away. At his trading station, Robinson has built a shack that Bardamu takes over, and he has given up working after initially acquiring some rubber and ivory. He is ill, and he feels exploited by the company. In this, Robinson is ahead of Bardamus development. Bardamu has already identied work ethic as an indoctrination, but still works up a pathological fear of the companys retaliation for his missing accounts; and the more assertive Robinson strikes him as an out-and-out rogue (155). Robinsons talk is more racist than Bardamus. In a playful allusion to exterminate all the brutes he wants to shoot the whole lot of them if [he] werent so tired because their drumming disturbs him at night, but he nds it even better to put cotton in [his] ears, so his aversions are not serious (153). He relates to his young male domestic sta (155) by giving them homosexual attentions, and exchanges goods and neighbourly help without using money, though he calls it mutual robbing. At the end of the book, Robinson is shot by his own jealous anc ee an energetic liar who betrays him sexually with Bardamu, not a pale Conradesque Intended. Bardamu feels that his times of travelling and unrest end with Robinsons death, but he neither dies like Dr. Jekyll nor [lays] the ghost (Heart 49) like the modernist, humanist and ultimately forward-looking Marlow. There is no safe emotional stance to return to in Bardamus world that is going nowhere. For Bardamu, there are no idealistic hopes and no redeeming idea at any point of his journey, and there is ultimately no real dialogue between people even within one and the same culture, in the sense that dialogue cannot overcome loneliness or connect people (260, 262-63; cf. Blank 108-14). Narrating the story of his life to an unspecied audience, Bardamu freely admits that he has told and retold it and that it has evolved in the process, made suitably literary, amusing (364) and sometimes containing many more adventures than [his] travels had ever provided (376). He does not believe that his tale can establish real communication with his listeners, and does not try to convey his intimate feelings like Marlow or to claim the authenticity of a witness like Gide. It is interesting that with the people of Bikomimbo, whose language he is too ill and tired to learn, Bardamu [a]s a sign of perfect understanding [. . . ] exchanged signs (162). Like sex and aggression, this form of body language can convey some deeper message in which lying is not as easy as in spoken language, because its referent usually needs to be immediately present.
95
Satirical as it may be, Bardamus tale is hammered into the reader through the chopped rhythms of quasi-spoken language to the point of conveying a tangibly depressive outlook on life. C eline found it important to gain access to the spontaneous poetryCeline of natural speech as opposed to sti, articial written language. He also thought that literacy influenced peoples spoken language for the worse (Blank 80, 115). Bardamu notes in Africa that white mens voices [are] aggressive and articial (123). He does not explicitly address the orality of Central African cultures, but values it at least implicitly. The end of the night of the title is not particularly associated with Africa. Bardamu explains it to be whatever it is that scares all those bastards so (200), and what he sometimes feels he is searching for. Words such as darkness and night occur remarkably often in the whole book, though not as frequently as in Heart of Darkness; they do not occur for Africa more than for other settings.3 Only Robinson, whose speech is markedly more racist than Bardamus, compares skin colour and night once (154). The use of the words black and nigger is the translators choice; the French original has n` egre or petit n` egre, where the latter was a heavily patronising idiom but not an outright insult at the time. The translator chose nigger sometimes for use by vehement or racist speakers. It would be an interesting project for a linguist to nd out whether the lexicon and some syntactic features of Heart of Darkness have influenced the translations of the two French rewritings. With Gides Travels in the Congo , one gets the impression that the translator tried to approach the English text more closely to Heart of Darkness than the French original is, for instance by rendering peuple as crowd several times, or le pays as the heart of the country.4 In Journey to the End of the Night , for instance le beau milieu de ma for et is rendered as the heart of the jungle.5 The story ends with mist, a river and an idea the only kind of idea Bardamu values, that which has conducted Robinson to his death. This satire takes despair with the human condition radically further than Heart of Darkness. There are, however, rare glimpses of hope, such as Bardamus utopia of a poor persons purpose in life, which he proers half-mockingly, not noticing how serious he really is, and which he conceivably means for people the world over: some attempt to jettison all the lies and fear and contemptible eagerness to obey they were given at birth (333). His own stance as a not-really-participant observer and an increasingly non-indoctrinated poor, and his thorough analysis of the situations into which he is thrown by the powers that be, can be seen as initial steps of that project.
Blank (107 n) mentions studies that claim an increase towards the end, while I have the impression that a lot of darkness and actual night occurs at the beginning, in the war scenes. 4 Gide 50 (le pays), 57, 81 (peuple); Gallimard edition 62, 69, 97. 5 C eline 139; Gallimard edition 148.
3
96
3.6 Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter (1948)

Graham Greene (1904-91) read Modern History and worked as a newspaper editor and critic.1 He spent most of his time writing novels, short stories and screenplays. Greene had long been interested in Roman Catholicism when he converted in 1926 to marry a Catholic. Many of his novels mirror his intense reflections on this religion. Greene travelled throughout his life, often to regions in political upheaval where he could nd adventure as well as material for his writing. His project of measuring inherited Africanist discourse, including Heart of Darkness, against his own experience is already manifest in his Liberia travelogue Journey without Maps (1936).2 During the Second World War, he worked for the British Foreign Oce and was stationed for some time at Freetown in Sierra Leone, a harbour town and long-established meeting place of many cultures. This place and time make up the setting of The Heart of the Matter . In The Heart of the Matter , Henry Scobie, the police major of Freetown, is not promoted to commissioner as his wife Louise has been hoping. Feeling ostracised by the white society of the city, she leaves for South Africa. To pay her fare, Scobie secretly borrows money from Yusef, a rich Muslim Syrian trader. This puts him in a delicate professional situation, because Yusef is under police observation suspected of bribery and diamond smuggling. Scobie falls in love with Helen Rolt, a white British victim of a shipping accident, and they begin an aair. When his wife comes back from South Africa, he feels trapped between the two women he loves. This is made worse by his belief that a Catholic must not commit adultery and must not go to communion while in a state of sin. To conceal his aair from Louise, he does go to communion, which in his belief amounts to mortal sin. Scobie learns that he is going to be promoted to commissioner after all. Feeling that this prospect of higher public visibility exacerbates his problem, and fearing that his formerly trusted, long-standing boy Ali may be selling information on him, he seeks help from Yusef. While Yusef is comforting Scobie and oering help, Ali is murdered on his way to Yusefs. This may or may not have been Yusefs intention. Feeling guilty for this murder and not wanting to hurt either woman by leaving her for the other, or Jesus by going to communion again, Scobie decides that it is better to commit suicide, another mortal sin, and go to eternal damnation. He tries to make people believe that he has died from angina, but soon after his death, his suicide is recognised by Wilson, a secret agent who has been trained to pay attention to details.
Biographical information stems from Speaking of Stories. Cf. Greene, Journey xii, 7-9, 30, etc.; for discussions of Journey without Maps cf. D oring 26-27, 30; Boehmer, Literature 163-65.doring
2
3.6 GREENE, THE HEART OF THE MATTER (1948)
97
In connection with Heart of Darkness, the most prominent topic is that of lies. Where Marlow senses a taint of death (Heart 29) in lies, Greene pursues his exploration of the consequences of gender-related protective lies to the actual death of a character. All of Marlows lies are for the (assumed) benet of others, though he does not state this explicitly. Specically, his lie to the Intended, told out of innite pity (Heart 75), is protective, and is meant to preserve her belief that she has been loved. The main trait of Scobies personality is his feeling of pity for the women in his life, which makes him wish to protect them. Pity for suering, ugliness and failure is what awakens his love and desire. Out of pity, he has made a private vow to ensure Louises happiness throughout their marriage even after the initial attraction has subsided. Similarly, he promises to Helen, a troubled convalescent, that he will always be there when she needs him, fully aware that his promises are contradictory (186). Having got himself into this situation, Scobie does not fully communicate with either of the two women: he talks about everything with them except about what matters most to him, which is his dilemma between the two of them. Scobie does not inform his wife of his aair because he does not want to hurt her by giving her painful information. This prevents Louise from being involved in the decision about how to solve his situation, because she (ocially) does not know that there is a problem. Scobie does not involve Helen in his decision either, presumably because he does not want to hurt her by telling her that he has vowed to keep Louise happy (276). Finally, he does not talk to the community priest about his understanding of sin because he is afraid of hurting the priests feelings (259), so that he has no chance of overcoming his religious misconceptions. Instead of seeking out communication and shared problem-solving, he takes all decisions alone, which means that he has complete power. Scobies wish to protect the ones he loves, mostly from himself, is connected with assumptions of power and responsibility that border on a pathological delusion. He feels that whether he wants it or not, he has the power to shape womens lives and personalities. He thinks that these changes have not been to their benet so far, so he enters a vicious circle in which he feels more pity and assumes more power (which he thinks is responsibility) by trying to solve all problems alone. He even decides what is best for God, namely, to be rid of him with the help of eternal damnation. The way Scobie excludes Louise and Helen from knowledge ultimately means that he does not take them seriously. This exclusion can be reinterpreted following the argument Kramer (140-42) uses about Marlows lie to the Intended: unconsciously, Scobie may be protecting himself from the insight that Louise and Helen might be as strong as himself and might suggest viable solutions to his dilemma. Marlow claims that he wants to preserve the Intendeds saving illusion (Heart 74), but he also gives another
98
explanation, of which Scobie does not seem to be capable: women [. . . ] are out of it [. . . ]. We must help them to stay in that beautiful world of their own, lest ours gets worse (49, emphasis added). If Scobie talked about the issues that matter to him, he himself would lose his illusion of total responsibility, and he would lose the privilege of having two women (as well as the privilege of not deciding between them), although this is not the way he sees his situation. His fear of hurting Louise gives him the impression that he is weak and even trapped or victimised (256), but it induces him to let her have no say. He has not even told Louise that he has long ago vowed to keep her happy, which means that he has not asked her whether she wants to be kept happy by him and she might well not want it, because she takes some trouble to get far away from him, and she responds to Wilsons advances as soon as her husband is dead. The situation between Louise and Scobie is all the more disconcerting because they are both intelligent, open-minded adults who are otherwise capable of open communication, even about sensitive issues such as Wilsons crush on Louise. After Scobies death, it turns out that Louise had heard about Helen and had come back to nd out. Both Louise and Scobie are virtually fully aware of the situation the whole time. Though he sometimes deceives himself by projecting his own needs as those of others, Scobie is aware of his own substitution of pity and responsibility for love or honesty, as much as Louise sees through that substitution and through most of his comforting lies (254). Louise for her part is caught in the gender role of the passive or seemingly passive woman, who communicates indirectly through insinuations, waiting for others to react and to follow through what she only implies. She asks Scobie for her fare rather than trying to borrow money herself, and she never asks him who his creditor is, though she knows that the bank has refused him a loan. (Scobie probably borrows from Yusef because he is not able to confront his wife with disagreeable facts in matters of nance just as he cannot in matters of love.) She asks him about Helen indirectly by making him go to communion, and she conceals that she is aware of his reluctance to take the sacrament. The two are stuck on the threshold of truthful communication, but never cross it. Likewise, Helen is quite clear-sighted but does not approach Louise or otherwise work towards full communication. Eventually, Scobie takes the lonely decision that it will be easier for both women to get over a death than over a separation. Wanting to spare them the pains of knowledge, he inflicts a far worse, irrevocable pain. His resolve is reinforced by his assumption that during communion, Jesus is totally at his mercy, and that by taking communion with an unabsolved sin, he hurts Jesus to a degree that he visualises as physical violence. This idea is not part of Catholic dogma, but results from Scobies personal psychological makeup applied to genuine Catholic teachings, such as that of Jesus presence in
99
the communion wafer. Also, the assumed automatism of mortal sin is not established doctrine, as Catholics believe that forgiveness can always be obtained and that humans cannot know with certainty who will be damned. After Scobies suicide, the community priest gives some explanations that implicitly expose his religious misconceptions. Just as for Marlow, facts for Scobie do not mean historical or mimetic information. While for Marlow, facts are what helps him preserve a feeling of reality as opposed to his emotional nightmare, Scobie feels that facts are what arouses pity, and that they may be hidden under a seemingly peaceful or agreeable surface: If one knew, he wondered, the facts [about the beautifully glittering stars], would one have to feel pity even for the planets? if [sic] one reached what they called the heart of the matter? (139). As much as the heart of Marlows darkness is a psychological one, the heart of the matter for Scobie is his misguided, boundless pity. Scobie feels that his love for the two women forces him on a journey (227) towards growing pain. Scobies is a purely inner journey. Greene does not include anything comparable to Marlows projections of his feelings onto Africa and onto his alter ego Kurtz. Scobie does not feel split, he sees himself as one personality with multiple allegiances. In spite of his belief in God and the devil, he does not feel that the distinction between good and evil helps him nd a direction in life. He feels that his love and pity for humans lead him to sin against God, and that his religion requires him to hurt humans. In spite of this confusion, Scobie thinks in absolute categories, such as absolute responsibility or an imperative to inflict no pain at all. He cannot simply accept his dilemma as part of the human condition, study it with more distance, or permit a solution that involves everyone and hurts everyone within reasonable limits. Louise calls his death a horror (320). Scobie gives in to something destructive, like Kurtz, but his ruin is caused by purely psychological issues and not even potentially or ambiguously related to Africa. His nightmare is in his love (293), not in his relationship with Africa. An experience like Scobies can take place anywhere in the world. However, Greene situates it in a specic colonial context. This suggests that it can be read as a mirror image of the stagnating communication in that context. Like Scobies marriage, colonial coexistence in Freetown has settled down into a routine. The white authorities are busy with their own bureaucracy and rituals, and with the war that has come across from Europe, much more than with the encounter between cultures, which remains supercial. For instance, Scobie and the other Catholics, in spite of their interest in religion, do not seek to learn about other religions and their possible fresh perspectives. Conversely, though there are missionaries making converts
100
in remote places, both Scobie and the priest feel no kind of missionary zeal to teach their religion (212-13, 319), and Scobie rejects books that have been left over from the missionary impetus of earlier generations (143-47). Sexual encounters between members of dierent groups take place, but are not accompanied by strong emotions. The local brothel serves every mans lust alike and is an important economic asset, but going native emotionally is not an issue. Scobie has become aware of the physical attractiveness of African women and has so much attuned to the visual experience of a dark-skinned majority surrounding him that he sees light skin as albino (10, 12), that is, as abnormal and ugly; but he does not feel enough closeness or pity for any non-European woman to sleep with her. To whites (and to the impersonal narrative voice), all others remain largely nonunderstood or incomprehensible. Scobies main non-European acquaintances are Ali and Yusef. Ali is of local Temne descent, and of unspecied age and belief. Also, there is no mention of his private life. Though Scobie dotes on him, Ali remains a boy, not a friend. When Scobie prefers an outing with Ali to his home and wife, his happiness lies in a feeling of being peacefully alone and momentarily free from responsibility, not in male bonding. For that, Ali is too much of a servant. He remains quietly in the background, preparing Scobies bed and holding his fever-ridden head to help him drink tea; and he sometimes even sleeps on doorsteps waiting for his employer. When Scobie begins to lie and to lose trust in himself, he projects this onto Ali and doubts the Africans trustworthiness. Scobie recognises that it is a projection, but he does not feel sure of Alis loyalty again. This means he is aware that his relationship with Ali is subordinate to his own primary concerns, but he does not try to change this condition. Yusef is represented as an inscrutable and devious Oriental, full of pathos and rhetoric. He blackmails Scobie and exploits his dependence to involve him in smuggling, and thus contributes to the other, minor site of Scobies ruin, that of lies connected with his loan. As Yusef stands outside the white networks, Scobie feels it is easier to ask him for help; but no understanding takes place, and Alis murder is at least somehow connected with this attempt. It is impossible to decide whether the lack of understanding is caused by Yusef or by Scobie or both. To add to the feeling of routine, Greene does not portray the African city as viewed by a traveller, for whom everything would be new and surprising, but by a long-time inhabitant. The dierence from a travellers tale like Heart of Darkness is that the environment is taken for granted. For instance, whites view social problems, such as a rice shortage or the corruption of colonial society, as facts of daily life; they arouse neither astonishment nor outrage (31). Economic exploitation is not described as connected with overt violence at this time and place. Africans have lower-ranking jobs than
101
Europeans, Syrians are expected to be sly traders and are therefore regarded with special suspicion (100), but this distribution of roles is not discussed any more. The narrative voice does not always mention skin colours, but implies them by a persons occupation or language. Residues of discourses epitomised by Heart of Darkness have been casually incorporated into the attitude of whites and sometimes surface, such as a minor characters wish for non-whites to be in their place (Heart 36), i.e. not Westernised, migrant or hybridised (Greene, Heart 3-4), Louises somewhat comparable preference for the unspoilt authenticity of rural Africa over the city (79-80), Scobies comparison of an inland river to the Styx (92) or assumptions about beliefs in some devil of the bush (152), and certain stereotypical ways of describing African bodies (15, 196, 276, 290). Racism has subsided into something habitual and structural, far less conspicuous than the explicit, ceaseless grappling with Darwinism and shared humanity in Heart of Darkness. Instead of the cannibals and prehistoric jungle savages of a rst Central African encounter, Africans are more subtly seen as they with their pushy ways (12), who can be Christians or Frenchmen (35) or have English surnames and yet remain profoundly Other to the white norm. Numerous details show that whites have found new ways of Othering non-whites and not taking them seriously, even while they live together with them far more closely than in Marlows situation. Scobie has long since given up many of his attempts at police investigations, namely in cases where neither opponent is white. He feels that there is no need for him to take up the position of a partisan (11), as he is usually confronted with routine cases in which both sides are somehow at fault and will come to routine solutions without wasting money on a police investigation. More importantly, he nds it impossible to understand people of the numerous non-European groups in the city. He feels that they make it impossible for whites to separate a single grain of incontestable truth, and feels aection for people who use so simple a method as their self-defence against an intrusive, alien form of justice (160). This appears as their reaction to what Marlow calls the outraged law [that] had come to them, an insoluble mystery from the sea (Heart 19). In spite of his conscious decision against interference where he thinks it pointless, Scobie tries to work consciously and carefully. It is important for him to be accepted in the public opinion of all ethnic groups. Like Marlow, he upholds some idea of work ethics in a situation he considers hopeless. Scobie never mentions to anyone how he feels about colonial life in Freetown and about his tasks there. Instead of discussing with anyone whether it makes any sense for him to administer justice under these conditions, he just goes on doing it. This is not out of any feelings of protectiveness, but out of undisguised weakness (which may provide a comment on his weakness with regard to the women). He has given up trying
102
to improve the situation, but does not feel that he is in a position to discuss it or to end it either. Moreover, he overlooks the possibility that he may not understand nonEuropeans because he does not take them seriously, just like he eectively does not treat Louise and Helen like adults. He does not trust the women to be strong enough to live with the truth and to come up with creative and meaningful solutions, and similarly he would never ask the non-Europeans of Freetown for solutions to the unsatisfactory situation of his police investigations. The comparison with Scobies personal situation suggests that the power whites are maintaining in Africa at that point ultimately results from weakness, from an inability to address the obvious problems, and also from a (white masculine) psychological barrier that keeps them from seeing and respecting the agency and capabilities of others. There is no (meta-)dialogue about the important issues in his marriage, and similarly there is no (meta-)dialogue about his position as a coloniser. Scobies marriage parallels the white drama: the dominant (Scobie/colonisers) think about how hard the situation and their perceived responsibility are on them, but not how much they prot from the situation or how they are oppressing others to keep it intact. His suicide can be read as an ultimate refusal to communicate, as turning himself dead to communication. To continue with rewritings by white Western authors, skip to page 133. To continue with Images of Africa, skip to page 115.
3.7
Charlotte Jay, Beat Not the Bones (1952)
Charlotte Jay (1919-96), a widely travelled Australian, wrote crime thrillers and popular novels, the latter under the name of Geraldine Halls.1 In 1949, she worked as a clerk of the court in Papua New Guinea, then a Territory under Australian authority. Its administrative capital, Port Moresby, is the model for Marapai in Beat Not the Bones . Beat Not the Bones is set in about 1952. David Warwick, an anthropologist working in the administration in Marapai, is shown golden ornaments that a well-known criminal, Mr. Jobe, has appropriated in the indigenous village of Eola in the rainforest. Jobe wants to prospect the area for gold. When Warwick refuses him the necessary permission, Jobe threatens him. Emma Warwick, who has recently married David, is still in Australia taking care of her invalid father. She is in her early twenties, much younger than her husband. David writes to her that he is travelling to Eola to research the cultural meaning of the ornaments, and also mentions Jobes threat. Emma learns of Davids return to Marapai only when her father receives a letter from him. Emmas father throws the
1
Biographical information stems from Moss & Tolley.
3.7 JAY, BEAT NOT THE BONES (1952)
103
letter in the replace and, dying of a stroke caused by the shock, tells her that David thinks he is going to be murdered. When David is reported dead, she flies to Marapai to nd Jobe. There, people tell her that David has committed suicide because he was in debt, but she does not believe it. She meets three colleagues of her late husbands, the brothers Trevor and Anthony Nyall and Philip Washington. All of them withhold information from her. Anthony Nyall, Philip Washington and Trevors alcoholic wife Janet seem to be on the brink of nervous breakdown. Trevor Nyall, a jovial and fatherly oce-boss type, initially appears to be helpful. At some point however, Emma realises that he is blocking her eorts to travel to Eola, where she thinks Mr. Jobe may have returned to nd more gold. When she learns that Sereva, the brother of the Papuan secretary Hitolo, died on Davids expedition to Eola, the village becomes interesting to her in its own right. Emma nds out that Philip Washington accompanied her husband to Eola. Anthony Nyall falls in love with her, conrms that there is something in her suspicions, and promises not to hinder her search. He is not willing to help her actively, because he fears the consequences. She confronts Trevor Nyall again and manages to get his permission to travel to Eola. Washington is suddenly eager to go with her. Hitolo does not get permission to accompany them, but comes anyway. The three people are taken up a river in a police boat, and then have to walk through the forest for three days. Hitolo and the hired Papuan porters and policeman flee before arriving in Eola because they are scared of the men of Eola, who have the reputation of being powerful sorcerers, and possibly because Washington plays on this fear. Washington plans to kill Emma out of irrational hatred, a part of his urge to free himself from his past and his fears, but has an emotional breakdown on approaching Eola and is not able to do it. She leaves him behind and goes into Eola, where she nds only skeletons. She realises that the whole village has been killed by a festive meal of bully beef with poison injected into the tins. This has also killed Hitolos brother. Emma hears pistol shots and returns to Philip Washington, to nd that he has killed himself. Hitolo is standing next to him, his whole body painted with complicated patterns. Having regretted his flight, he has come back. Washington, not recognising him and scared, has rst tried to shoot him and then has shot himself. Emma breaks down with shock and fever, and Hitolo helps her reach the nearest settlement. She can now reconstruct what happened: her husband had debts with Trevor Nyall. Trevor blackmailed him and Washington into stealing the gold from the village, and provided the poisoned food that enabled them to do so. Back in Marapai, her husband shot himself out of feelings of guilt, and Washington developed an overwhelming fear that the dead Eolans would take revenge on him by sorcery. Emma realises that she no longer feels bound to her late husband because it was cowardly of him to send a letter to her father to clear himself of the taint of suicide, a letter which actually killed her father. She and Anthony decide that there is nothing they can do
104
about Trevor, as they have no proofs and he is too powerful. Simultaneously, Trevor, who has given the gold to the authorities to erase the traces, is being blackmailed for money by Mr. Jobe. This novel relates to Heart of Darkness in building up the atmosphere of the tropical city and forest. Soon after her arrival in Marapai, Emma feels that the intense light and luxuriant vegetation make the place appear as an inferno (cp. Heart 20). This is clearly traced to her own state of mind. Recently widowed, she feels unable to experience joy over the beauty and richness of the place and therefore concludes that its intensity must be evil (40). Later, when she feels secure enough to enjoy it, she decides that she would like to live in Marapai. Unlike Conrad, Jay describes the equatorial zone as beautiful. It is an inferno only when white people cannot stand it, or because of the destruction they bring. This insight interprets Heart of Darkness by representing a choice between several possible explanations oered by Marlow, who leaves it open whether the place and the indigenes, European colonialism or psychological projections cause the infernal state. The rainforest is perceived as a mirror of fear. Approaching Eola, Emma feels that the forest will move when it [wishes] beyond the accepted limits of plant life. She feels that it is more animal than vegetable and can take revenge on the intruders in some hungry, primordial fashion (156), like Marlows [riverbanks] brooding over an inscrutable intention (Heart 36). Emma initially thinks that a process of annihilation (156) begins for herself and her companions when they enter the forest. Washington, who similarly sees his fear reflected in the forest, gives in to it and shoots himself. For both of them, the forest intensies, but does not originate their states of mind. Again, Jay decides between possible interpretations of Heart of Darkness: Marlow feels both that [t]he wilderness [. . . ] had taken [Kurtz] (49) and that he was hollow at the core (58) previously to its influence. The journey into the interior, at whose destination Emma nds the horror that was in Eola (191), is modelled on Marlows journey. This shows to what extent the structure of Heart of Darkness is that of a mystery novel. Suspense in Heart of Darkness is more complex and less determined than in genre ction because Marlow is looking for the intellectual and emotional gifts of Kurtz and not for the solution to a known crime. In fact he nds the complex crime of colonialism, in symbolic form, without sleuthing even for a simple one. Emma goes looking for a simple crime against one white man, and nds a large-scale, colonial crime against Papuans. This crime, in turn, has destroyed the minds of white men.
105
At the source of this destruction, she nds Trevor Nyall, who turns people into manmade monsters (131). Trevor is a cold, unemotional bureaucrat who remains behind his desk and kills people by remote control. He would never dirty himself with direct physical violence (203), and his face is smooth and content, not marked by fear, guilt or nightmares. His facade is as clean as that of Kurtzs report. Like Kurtz, he is hollow at the core (Heart 58): on one occasion Emma looks at his face and retains the impression of having looked into nothing, of having turned her gaze, not upon a mans face, not upon eyes and lips, but upon a kind of void (92). To Mr. Jobe, he looks like a dummy in a Sydney shop window (10), just as the accountant resembles a hairdressers dummy for Marlow (Heart 21). While Heart of Darkness leaves open the possibility that Kurtzs extreme violence has been ignited by his contact with indigenous life, Beat Not the Bones situates the centre of destruction with a city-dwelling high ocial, who never meets non-Westernised indigenes. Trevor manipulates people by making them indebted to himself in dierent ways, nancial or otherwise, and then making use of their dependence. Manipulation of several kinds is one of the central themes of this novel. Most importantly, the Australian characters use a number of discourses about Papua New Guinea and its people, and it turns out that they employ practically all of these discourses to hide other motivations. Trevor coldly uses everything to his own advantage. Both Mr. Jobe and Emma soon realise that he uses the ocial politics of respect for Papuan culture only when it suits [him] (23, 137), mostly to keep other people away while he is doing what he wants. Moreover, he argues that the country itself destroys whites, not only by its climate but also by the diculty of the colonial task, which he thinks consists in fast-forwarding a primitive (63) people through history. However, he says this to convince Emma that her husband has committed suicide out of an inevitable, general moral disintegration (64), and thus to discourage her from inquiring. Anthony, too, makes use of the idea that the place [gets] you down (88) to hide that he knows what is really getting Washington down. Otherwise, Anthony is the only one of the white men who does not manipulate discourse, and explicitly does not want to inuence people, although it takes Emma some time to discover this. Anthony initially tried to be a productive and creative coloniser and sent some young men from the interior to a coastal school, where they all died because they were not immune to the diseases common there. He then decided not to do his work any more, because he feels that everything done in a colonial context is destructive. Instead, he sits at his desk in the administration oce and makes flower garlands to pass the time innocently. When he falls in love with the energetic Emma, he realises that to do nothing in life is not a solution, but there is no indication of what he will do.
106
cliche
Washington is the most complex character with respect to discourse manipulation. Starting out as a sensitive man, interested in Papuan art and thinking, he has turned into a paranoiac who sees sorcery and imaginary Papuans with white face paint everywhere. Washington genuinely believes that all tropical areas of the world make specic demands on the peoples who live there, and that those peoples have learned to adapt to those demands, which always includes a belief in some kind of magic. He argues that though whites may not understand the Papuans survival strategies, it is best not to try and change them because they work. This discourse is more respectful and innovative than many others. However, Washington believes in this discourse, confuses it with his delusion, and uses it to deceive other people: he sometimes consciously employs it to hide that his nervous state and fear of magic are really due to his experiences in Eola, and not only to his imperfect acclimatisation to the tropics. To justify his fear of Eola to Emma, he falls back on the clich e of the dangers of the jungle. Washington also abuses political and ethnological arguments to try and justify the killings in Eola. He tells himself that the killing is no worse than the things we do all day (187), which include forbidding the Papuans their dances but teaching them to gamble and drink, or infecting them with diseases and greed. He also tries to believe that it is not as bad to kill a few or even a whole community of Papuans as one white person, because he sees them as nearer to natural law one with rock, river and tree, bird and sh, and destined therefore for the same relentless struggle and violent extermination (169), given that like all hunters [they] must accept the possibility of being hunted (168). The situation into which Trevor has forced Washington is too much for him, and turns his sensitivity into self-deception, confusion and hatred. Finally, there is Mr. Jobe, who is initially marked as a bad person by his blatant racism. Nevertheless, he has very clear insights into power structures, and he turns out to be small fry compared to the bureaucrats whose use of language and discourse is more deliberate. Jay initially uses the characters discourses to manipulate the reader. The impersonal narrative voice sometimes echoes them to create false trails, as when it introduces Marapai as a site with brutal and savage agency (5). Of course, this is a characteristic feature of whodunits, but in the colonial context, it is more than that. The novel shows how much words can be used to mislead, and how this can make people (try to) believe on a conscious level what, on a more or less unconscious level, they know is not true. The (Conradian) idea that the tropics act as the nemesis of white intruders, and that the climate and vegetation as well as indigenous rites have their share in this, is commonly accepted in white Marapai. Every emotional breakdown in the book is blamed on it by some character or other, while the reader later learns that none is actually caused by it. Instead, in this novel, personal breakdown, fears and lies are engineered by people
107
who want to make use of them. Some white characters also demonise the interior of the country and the contact with the Other population in order to hide a secret. In fact, if whites go under, it is either due to manipulation or to reasons within their own personalities: their latent nature [. . . ] burst[s] out because they no longer feel bound to the rules of conduct (6) of their countries of origin, a lack of societal control that is also central to Heart of Darkness. Jays is an early analysis and rejection of the discourse that blames the intruders deeds on the corroding influence of the tropical environment, which is one possible reading of Heart of Darkness.2 The narration centres on Emmas journey into the self. She recognises that she has been brought up to be a naive, dependent woman. Her father and her convent education have ruthlessly kept her out of it. Emma is as much a descendant of the Intended as of Marlow, but relinquishes the role of a weak woman. In her quest for the information that has been withheld from her, and for justice and truth, as she repeatedly calls it, she proves herself, in human society as much as in the rainforest. While Marlow is in danger of losing himself, she starts out even more weak and confused than him, and nds her own strength and determination. There is a second character who grows stronger and proves himself in the forest, and that is Hitolo. In Marapai, the Papuan boys talk practically like mentally retarded people. When Emma rst meets Hitolo, an educated and multilingual secretary, he does not condole her on her husbands death, but tells her with a big grin that David: came to my wedding and made a speech. It was a wedding in a church just like white people [. . . ] We had sandwiches ! She felt a little of the dierence in him then (76, emphasis in the original). Papuan employees either talk like this, or not at all. However, after Emmas discovery in Eola, Hitolo suddenly turns out to be a hero. By returning to Emma and Washington, he proves stronger than his fear of death and sorcery. He gives Emma a detailed account of Washingtons death and rescues her, all but carrying her for the last days march. It is highly symbolic that when Hitolo accomplishes this, he has taken o his Westernising clothes and put on indigenous bark and body paint. He is a hero when he is what appears to be his true self: more of a Papuan and less of a white mans secretary. This also gives the key to the behaviour of the Papuans in Marapai. One can infer that they act as if their grip on reality were weak because that is what white people expect from them, or because it suits them to keep their distance by this means. Hitolos mourning over his brother Sereva is deep and true, and he presumably overcomes his fear of Eola to investigate his death. Sereva may not have been killed accidentally but because he is a witness, which would imply that the white men take him seriously enough.
On this discourse cf. Schwerdt (27), who however comes to dierent conclusions regarding Jays novel, and Singh.
2
108
Washingtons boys have analysed their employer well: he tries to be condescendingly friendly with them, but thinks that their emotional and intellectual capacities are vastly inferior to his own. Consequently, they put on a stupid and still (55) facial expression when it is to their advantage. In spite of these complexities, the Papuans are mostly represented as Other and as unknown or hard to know. Most white characters talk disparagingly about them. The narrative voice tries to remain more neutral, but cannot go beyond some condescending ideas, for instance of primitive (155, 180) (as opposed to Westernised) or grunting (130) indigenes. (The 1992 edition, revised by the author, leaves out some statements that are now regarded as stereotypes. An example is the idea that the native mind does not believe in accidents but in retributive justice (Jay 194-95; Jay, Das Gift der neuen Welt 226). This text transfers much of Conrads critical assessment of colonialism to the interventions in Papua New Guinea. At that point, anticolonial discourse has matured, as Anthonys and Washingtons opinions show, but many people still believe that [g]ood comes out of [colonising]. . . Or it will, one day (187, ellipsis in the original). Even while Emma says this (before Eola), it seems that she is trying to convince herself of it against the evidence given her by Washington, because it would be too unsettling not to believe it. This book creates the impression that many whites are hanging onto the colonial idea by their ngernails. While Emma vaguely associates herself with plans of taming and development of this wild land (5), there is no indication that the author endorses this view. Interestingly, this novel repeatedly refers to Australia as the centre of power and culture, and Papua New Guinea as the margin (62, 73), a case the seminal Australian work The Empire Writes Back does not cover. This novel enables a wide audience to gain historical insight into life and colonial structures in this marginal place. In passing, it adds some criticism of Australia itself, where whites have pushed their natives o into the middle of the desert (12).
3.8 WHITE, VOSS (1957)
109
3.8
Patrick White, Voss (1957)
Patrick White (1912-90) was the great-grandson of British immigrants to Australia. He moved back and forth between Australia and Britain several times.1 During his education in England, he had to struggle against the maxim that only the British could be right, and that Australian reality was unimportant and sub-standard. In his later years, living in Australia, he publicly supported socialism and Aboriginal rights. For a long time, his critical portrayals of Australian society made him less popular in his home country than with readers abroad. White was the rst who achieved international recognition for Australian writing. Johann Ulrich Voss is based on the historical explorer Ludwig Leichhardt, a German who set out on three expeditions in 1844, 1846 and 1848. The last expedition party vanished completely, and many legends have grown up round its fate. The novel merges some known facts about the dierent expeditions and adds ctional material. In the novel, Voss is nanced by some rich Sydney merchants. While in Sydney, he meets the niece of his principal sponsor, Laura, for a few hours. They measure their strength of character against each other, both feeling self-sucient in dierent ways. After leaving on the expedition with six white and two Aboriginal men, Voss sends Laura a proposal, which she accepts, but further letters are lost on the way, and soon the expedition is far from all means of communication with the settlers. The elder Aborigine soon returns home, feeling that if he has to die, it must be where he belongs. While the expedition plods through dry country and occasional abundant vegetation, Laura and Voss experience a mystical or visionary connection, in which they continue to communicate about personality, and experience symbolic sexual union in interactions between elements of nature. The narrative keeps switching between the expedition and Laura in Sydney, who adopts the fatherless daughter of an ex-convict maidservant when the servant dies. During the rainy season, the expedition shelters in a cave, where they nd drawings of local religion on the walls. After they have left the cave, local Aborigines begin to be more intensely present. They kill a white member of the expedition who tries to approach them to communicate, and a white shoots one of the aggressors before Voss can stop him. When hardships become too great, three white members defect. The four remaining members are taken as prisoners by Aborigines. The whites are enclosed in a specially-built hut, where one of them commits suicide and another dies of hunger or illness. The indigenous expedition member, Jackie, is adopted by the Aborigines. They eventually force him to kill Voss. Jackie obeys, but out of great emotion, he runs away
Biographical information stems from the introduction Voss; Liukkonen, entry Patrick White; Boehmer, Literature 214; Hansson. Information on Leichhardt stems from Reilly.
1
110
that night and takes to roving. He becomes a spiritual medium and spreads the tale of the expedition in Aboriginal society. Of the three whites who have deserted, two die of hunger and the third one lives with a group of Aborigines until he is found by whites twenty years later. He is invited to the unveiling of a statue of Voss in Sydney. Laura and her family are present at this occasion, and Australian identity is discussed both in speeches about Voss and at a subsequent party. Laura has remained single and become a head teacher, and her adopted daughter is still with her. This novel depicts a multitude of discourses about Australia and Australian identity, some of them in decline, some emerging. It shows how dierent discourses struggle and interweave, transforming and absorbing rather than simply superseding earlier ones.2 One of the imported European discourses, or clusters of discourses, which are available to Whites characters is the one that was epitomised by Heart of Darkness after their time. Voss is set in about 1845-70, long before the publication of Heart of Darkness. Like Marlow, Voss sees the journey into the centre of the new continent as a journey into the self. He and the white members of his expedition work through childhood memories and personality traits. Vosss initial view of himself echoes Kurtz, who has kicked himself loose of the earth (Heart 65). Voss wants to be God (144, 268): independent of other people, independent of the needs of his body. He thinks of himself with words like divinity (144) and apotheosis (178), while his hubris makes him appear demoniac (64) or like a Devil (69) to some people. However, Voss does not retain this Faustian and ultimately destructive self-image. In the course of his journey, he learns to accept himself as a human being with human needs and a specic position in time and space, and with limits to what he can achieve. This is brought about partly by Laura, who sees feelings of absolute self-suciency and aloofness (including her own) as dangerous, and therefore repeatedly asks Voss to be humble, both in actual and in visionary communication. In addition, Voss realises that he is not stronger than the physical hardship caused by his surroundings and that he cannot control either the white expedition members or the Aborigines by his mental strength, as he had hoped. While Kurtz indeed becomes the venerated ruler of his Congolese followers, Voss initially hopes that he can communicate with the Aborigines, whose languages he does not know, and become their charismatic ruler by the strength of his mind and by what he sees as his friendly intentions. He sees all Aborigines as subjects of his kingdom (189, 191, 273), and he feels that his benevolence should be enough to transcend the language barrier. This old, deep-seated white dream of obvious, innate superiority and power over primitive man (335) proves to be untrue, as the Aborigines met by the expedition do
A general, comprehensive discussion of dierent discourses in Voss is given by Seaton, however without mentioning Heart of Darkness.
2
111
not react to him the way he wishes. They neither understand his condescending oers of friendship, nor do they want to be his friends, or at least not on his terms. They even appear almost godlike (341) themselves. In this sense, they put him in his place and help him realise that he is not God. Through his death, Voss enters into several discourses, some of which are far more human and habitable than his Kurtzian attempt to be God. Dierent people remember and interpret his expedition in dierent ways and even misremember it, which points to the discursive nature of historical knowledge. Some white Australians embrace his erstwhile view of himself and see his acts as heroic or as a selfless sacrice for the nation (440). They turn his doomed expedition into a success story, which becomes a national founding myth or epic. Some whites see Voss as a person who continuously learned and tried and changed, as they themselves have to do if they want to inhabit the new place. Others again view him as crazy or evil, and reject his particular method of relating to the place (443-48). Moreover, Aboriginal religion states that spirits of the dead inhabit the land. This implies that whites who die in Australia intensify the white connection with the land, an idea which Laura appropriates and communicates to the settler community (448). Through Jackie, who travels and tells about his experiences, Voss goes down in Aboriginal history (420-21). Both Voss and Jackie learn that they undergo radical changes when they leave their own civilisation. Robinson (150) relates this to Marlows fears and to Kurtz and the Congolese helmsman, who both, away from home, have no restraint (Heart 51). Jackie moves further away from his own civilisation than the other Aborigines, and gets closest to the white travellers emotionally. Later, he does not manage to realign himself with his old civilisation. His head is heavy with thoughts that [are] other mens (364). Though the white discourse about leaving ones civilisation is thus extended to Jackie, he remains a minor character. Many other situations and passages in this novel might be seen as echoes of Heart of Darkness as well, but with most of them it would be hard to decide whether they are specically echoes of the novella itself, or more generally of the discourses that it condenses. This uncertainty creates the impression that Heart of Darkness is somehow synonymous with a certain cluster of discourses. The novella is associated with certain colonial ideologies as much as some colonial discourses evoke the novella. Examples include a rst encounter with Aborigines showing them in their place (Heart 36) or belonging (Voss 99, 115), a blank map symbolising a map of the self (23, 296), the interpretation of many colonial realities as symbols, Vosss belief in an idea or the Idea (44) of his vocation (20) and other whites fears of going under (40). A coloniser who has gone under is shown, Boyle of Jildra. He is an alcoholic and crudely avails
112
himself of the work and sexuality of Aborigines, who appear to be cooperative. One can also nd an echo of exterminate all the brutes in the attempt to substitute foreign plants for the indigenous ones, which [Lauras aunt] can only wish all cut down (222), small literal citations such as centre of the earth (Voss 149, Heart 16) and many more. Another strand from Heart of Darkness is the perception of Australian nature as hell (43, etc.) and as actively hostile. However, this is only one of many perceptions of the land. Australia is not exclusively viewed as a psychological abyss, as the darktunnel Congolese rainforest is by Marlow, but is portrayed variously as healing and as threatening. Patrick White insistently and frequently describes a mutual influence between people and nature. They seem to take over and mirror each others moods, expressing white as well as indigenous relationship with the place. Most conspicuously, the agency of nature with its hardships and unexpected phases of abundance shapes the explorers lives and bodies, and helps Voss modify his self-image from that of a conqueror to that of an inhabitant of the land. Nature symbolically reflects the union between Laura and Voss. Intense communion with nature is not restricted to the expedition, and takes place in Sydney as much as in the outback. Light, darkness and shadows are the most frequent and intense verbal echo of Heart of Darkness. Much like the other elements of nature, they influence and reflect peoples feelings. There is no metaphysical darkness as for Marlow, and darkness is not generally equated with something bad. Both light and darkness are sometimes associated with familiar and sometimes with dangerous circumstances, but above all they appear habitable, and all people can relate to them. The same holds for immensity or vastness. Moreover, White describes the expedition into this nature as a journey backward in time, into virgin (46) or eternal (197, 288) country. He does not represent this condition as stagnation in a place without a history like Marlow, but shows the sojourn in the cave as a new creation or initiation into the new land (282; cf. Seaton, par. 1522). This is partially supported by the Aboriginal creation myth, which the explorers begin to understand from the cave paintings and from Jackies explanations. According to this myth, the world was created during a form-giving beginning or Dreamtime, and is newly created every morning. The white discourse of a journey back in time is thus reinterpreted as positive. Dreams support both the thought that whites can enter the continuous process of dream-creation and thus form a new connection with the land, and the mystical union between Laura and Voss. While Marlow nds a nightmare on his quest, Voss and his men nd a tradition of dream discourse that appears to provide an opening for them. They begin to dream about the rainbow serpent that is at the centre of Aboriginal creation myth, or talk about the spirit of the land. As these can be seen as archetypes in an Australian collective unconscious, dreamtime is merged with the Western, Jungian discourse of dreaming.
113
By transmitting local discourse and knowledge to the intruders, Jackie facilitates the white entry into Australian space. Although other Aborigines eventually force him to kill Voss, they cannot prevent white expansion. The Aborigines have already achieved the condition of belonging to the place that the whites try to achieve not least by appropriating their religion, but the whites do not respect their ownership (169). Some whites however are self-conscious about their own presence on the continent and feel compelled to legitimise it when talking with Aboriginal people, saying Where do I belong, if not here? (364), Blackfellow white man friend together (365) or [exploration will] do good all of us, black and white feller (170). Dierent white members of the expedition have vastly dierent degrees of prejudice, contempt or openness for Aborigines. Sometimes, they nd themselves dependent on their guides expertise, but they hardly acknowledge it. They refer to indigenes as black, and the perception and representation of Aboriginal people are strongly influenced by those of African and other colonised people. Both the characters and the impersonal narrative voice invest Aborigines with stereotypes including violence, unreliability, femininity of males, instinct, innocence, resistance to all progress (421) and closeness to nature. Sometimes, they see them as shadows and gures, as dark bodies or disjointed body parts. Some whites assume that the Aborigines are cannibals, but this is implicitly disproved at least for the people encountered, as they do not eat the bodies of their prisoners. In some situations, the whites and the narrative voice conjecture beliefs and motivations of Aborigines. Rarely, the explorers even learn about them. Mostly however, like the Africans in Heart of Darkness, Aborigines are seen as enigmatic and dangerous. Unlike Heart of Darkness, this novel does not mention the suering and decimation of indigenes, and ultimately shows them as killers. It is not explained why they kill members of the expedition; conjectured motives include curiosity about white bodies, revenge or self-defence (342), and a severing of the magic (365, 394) tie that makes Jackie a servant and emotional dependent of Voss. Both the third defector who spends 20 years with Aborigines and the whites appropriation of indigenous discourse show that togetherness can be habitable, in that an approach to indigenes does not necessarily entail a Kurtz-style going under, and that some degree of white hybridity may be possible. This possibility, as well as some tentative communication mainly with Jackie, coexists with the dominant image of the mysterious native. The whites relationship with the indigenes is far less intense than that with nature. The half-understood Aborigines (Robinson 154) remain profoundly Other, but are recognised as a voice in the emerging Australian multivocal society. The lives of both Aboriginal expedition members are told up to their deaths; the narrative does not lose sight of them when they leave the white men, which shows that they are considered important in their own right.
114
Voss as a German adds another distinctive, marginal voice to the polyphony. Unlike Marlow, but like Conrad himself, he is considered a foreigner but helps dene the discursive eld of the place. His foreignness helps him resist attempted univocal or mainstream discourse such as that of Anglicanism, flag and Queen. It also makes him realise the problem of languages as a means of communication even more poignantly than the others, for instance when he needs to communicate with Jackie in a language that is foreign for both of them. The older, more solipsistic scepticism about language to express a personal truth (216, 237, 360), as felt by Marlow, is present simultaneously with the newer, dialogue-related problem (274). The masculine colonising project is complemented by a feminine project that was not present in the Congo. White women are being kept out of it in many respects, but their project is to populate their new place and inhabit it emotionally by shaping its settler society. These women, who mostly combine stay-at-home femininity with powerful form-giving agency and strong voices in educational and social matters, blend older and specically British discourses of womanhood, of flowers and dresses, with a new sense of purpose and the distinctly colonialist intention of expanding by having many children. Laura, whose spiritual marriage with Voss remains her secret, asserts her power to choose a career. Like Voss, she moves from delusions of self-suciency to an acceptance of human limits and of contacts with the people around her. Her adopted bastard daughter (439) Mercy resembles what the whites see as a bastard Australia, a place (or society) with no proper pedigree that they have to accept and love. Laura herself is an orphan, which symbolises the complementary need to construct an identity in the absence of a parental tradition. The settlers emotional appropriation of Australia is shared between Voss and Laura, between man and woman. The novel stresses that representation of history, historical myth and local identity are fluid and are determined by many voices, with both struggle and cooperation between the dierent members. To continue with rewritings by authors from white settler colonies (Australia), skip to page 166.
3.9 ACHEBE, THINGS FALL APART (1958)
115
3.9
Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (1958)
Chinua Achebe (1930-) was born in the Igbo region in southeastern Nigeria, the son of deeply religious evangelical Protestant converts.1 He graduated in English, History and Theology in the British-run school and university system of colonial Nigeria, and worked in broadcasting in Nigeria and Britain. Achebe wrote his rst novel, Things Fall Apart , during Nigerias struggle for political decolonisation. It was published two years before independence. He later participated in Nigerian politics, and from about 1969 divided his time between university posts in Nigeria and the US. Achebe now lives in the US. Things Fall Apart , set in roughly the last decade of the 19th century,2 is the story of Okonkwo, an Igbo man who is the prosperous head of a big family and strives for influence and position both in peace and war. Events centre around him, but also include less privileged individuals. Okonkwo rises to the status of a war messenger and an elder who takes decisions, administers justice and carries out religious functions. He is entrusted with the care of a young boy, Ikemefuna, whom another village gives to the clan as part of a conflict settlement and in whose killing, prescribed by a religious oracle, he later takes part. When Okonkwo accidentally kills a clansman, he is banned from his own village, Umuoa, for seven years, during which he and his family live in his mothers village. During that time, white and black Christian missionaries and representatives of British government rst arrive in both villages. Okonkwos son Nwoye leaves his family to join the Christians. When Okonkwo has returned to Umuoa, an Igbo Christian convert provokes the members of the traditional religion by unmasking an elder who embodies an ancestral spirit. The elders, including Okonkwo, destroy the church in retaliation in accordance with their justice system. As this clashes with the District Commissioners ideas of justice, he has six of them taken hostage until the village has paid a large ne. In prison, they are humiliated by his non-local African employees. The morning after the elders release, the village men hold a meeting, which one of the same employees of the Commissioner tries to stop. Okonkwo has for some time felt that his clans solidarity is breaking up and that the clan is no longer strong and willing to defend itself. He confronts the man on his own and decapitates him. When the meeting breaks into tumult instead of action (165) and allows the other messengers to escape, Okonkwo becomes sure that his clan is not willing to go to war. He kills himself, which according to his religion is one of the worst possible transgressions.
Biographical information stems from Liukkonen, entry Chinua Achebe, and from D oring 43-45.doring 2 The novel ends in 1900 or 1901, as it refers to District Commissioners, who were introduced in 1900 (D oring 50), and Britain still has a queen (Things 157-58). The storys events span 3 years with Ikemefuna and 7 years of exile with at most a few years in between.doring
1
116
Doring
Things Fall Apart , though not the rst Anglophone African novel published, is the rst one that became suciently famous with both African and overseas readers to be regarded as starting the tradition of African writing in English.3 The most easily recognised level of Achebes writing, which remained the main focus of criticism for a long time, is his desire to reconnect with silenced precolonial and early colonial Nigerian history. He wants to help Nigerians free themselves from internalised European thought and regain belief in themselves, and also to promote intercultural dialogue with other readers of English. In many essays and interviews, Achebe has insisted that African writing cannot be art for arts sake, or centre on the individual experience and genius of the writer, but needs to provide teaching and social leadership.4 Achebes novels have acquired the status of secure ethnological sources. He has proclaimed that the representation of Africans by white colonial authors prompted him to offer a counterrepresentation, with the intention of showing Igbo precolonial culture as a coherent, highly organised and eminently livable society.5 Achebes novels have been seen as rewritings of several Western works and the discourses they embody. D oring reads Achebe as a rewriter of Joyce Cary; Carroll relates him to Hardy and Golding (59-60). While there are many historical dierences between Leopolds Congo and Igbo life, numerous facets of Achebes representation can be seen as direct answers to Heart of Darkness. Achebe represents Igbo rituals as speakable rites in the sense that he never describes them as mysterious or impenetrable, but always as grounded in a clear, structured religious or social order. This shows that secret rites such as those of the ozo society or egwugwu masked spirits are not metaphysical secrets, but just some peoples secrets. There are a few scenes spaced out throughout the book that take over Joseph Conrads vocabulary, especially for descriptions of frenzied or yelling crowds. All these crowds assemble during social functions where they are plausible and necessary. For instance, the crowd deciding on retaliation against Mbaino has assembled to reach a public consensus. At this meeting, yelling is a necessary device for large-scale direct decision making, so it is obviously not inarticulate or barbaric. Gestures and clenched teeth serve a controlled rhetoric, giving way to a clear, unemotional voice (23). Other occasions for the assembly of crowds with appropriate group dynamics are a wrestling match, at which some people are in fact employed to [keep] order (48, 49) or be judges (50), the public dispensation of justice, an important burial, the destruction of the church and the subsequent meeting. Achebe describes crowds not as indistinct but as consisting of individuals. His Africans are round characters, not flat ones like Conrads; and they are
On the reception history of Things Fall Apart cf. D oring 63, 65-70, 189.doring E.g. Achebe, Africa and Her Writers, The Role of the Writer in a New Nation, The Novelist as Teacher. Cf. D oring 40-41; Ashcroft, Griths & Tin 125-32; Benson & Conolly 15-18.doring 5 E.g. Achebe, African Literature; Duerden & Pieterse 4. Cf. D oring 3, 10.doring
4 3
117
often in conflict with each other, so that they never form a homogenous crowd even where the word crowd is used. Similarly, words formerly abused by white writers, such as mysterious (116) or wilderness (134), or indeed rite (104, 109), are not avoided altogether, but used in contexts where they make sense from an Igbo point of view. Okonkwos excitement about an assumed impending ght is even described as childlike (161), but this is clearly the opposite of a stereotype, because it applies to a situation in which he is on the point of diverging from his clans views and acting rashly, i.e. of diering from his cultural norm. Another echo of Heart of Darkness are distant drums. The members of the social network can always decode their meaning. They have a full set of information on this Doring network as opposed to the snippets European writers picked up (D oring 123). Nature is represented as habitable, and as the site of familiar sights and sounds. Humans are neither identied with nature as in Africanist discourse, nor is there a modernist antagonism between the two. Animist religion establishes a relationship between humans and (symbolised) nature even when nature is perceived as frightening. African knowledge is shown to be much larger than whites had assumed, with known history going back at least 200 years, a sense of time and of the variance of customs across time and space, complex tools and procedures, numeracy and written number symbols. Rather than being an isolated or prehistoric space, Igbo land has had outside exchange and influences for a long time before the arrival of the British, including guns and cannons, reports about coastal slavers and, surprisingly, a predilection for biblical numbers (which of course may or may not be an import). Achebe renders the Igbo language as an elevated level of speech ornate with elaborate proverbs, images and stories. In a somewhat cynical reversal of Marlows perception of African speech as short grunting phrases (Heart 42), the people of Abame at rst equate the fact that they did not understand their rst white man with the assumption that he did not say anything, and on second thoughts he seemed to speak through his nose (116). Language is thus one of the few aspects in which Igbo reaction to whites is symmetric to white reactions to Africans. Interpretations that foreground ethnological representation have often claimed that Achebe describes Igbo society from the inside, i.e. that the narrative voice is part of what it narrates. The recognition that this is not true opens up the level of more literary, complex interpretations. The hybridity of the narrative voice mirrors Achebes own position as a bilingual and bicultural, who consciously bridges gaps between experiences and languages. He had to retrieve the Igbo history of his grandfathers time, and grew up with the outside perspective of a Christian with Animist neighbours. Achebes narrative voice knows far more about Europeans than writers like Conrad knew about Africans. Like
118
Doring
Doring
Doring
Doring
the interpreter character, who wisely (155) and creatively mediates between languages and between communicative expectations, the narrative voice creates a new discursive space between Igbo reality and Western or Westernised readers (D oring 149-50). The orientation towards readers unfamiliar with Igbo culture is apparent in the need to name Igbo referents for which no appropriate English words exist. This is partly done by using and explaining Igbo words (e.g. obi , egwugwu) and partly by importing approximate words from quite disparate contexts, such as past and present Europe (e.g. shrine (24), king (21, 123)) and other colonies (e.g. medicine-man (24, 71), taboo (129), caste (130)). This barely adequate renaming is explicitly pointed out when the word palaver (156), which usually has a colonial connotation, is marked as a linguistic import brought by the District Commissioner. The narrative voice sometimes identies itself as Igbo, for instance by using similar expressions as the characters, including the image of a grain of sand that would not nd its way to the earth (97, 162; cf. D oring 124). Sometimes however, it uses distance markers such as the Ibo or these people (20) or the explanation that there is a man behind an egwugwu mask, which a traditional Igbo would never acknowledge openly (D oring 171). The perspective sometimes changes from that of the traditional clan to the young church (128) or camp of the faithful (153) who go forth into the Lords vineyard (149), as if the narrative voice endorses their aims for a moment. Though such shifts of perspective are short and may be ironic, they remind the reader that this church insofar as it is embraced by some Igbo, is becoming a part of African history. The narrative voice itself shows a process of hybridisation in that it picks up some of the words of the new religion, such as church (119) instead of shrine (24), or even a sin (128) against the earth goddess instead of the earlier evil (37) or nso-ani (38) (D oring 171). Such linguistic features and changes of perspective show that the narrative is self-reflexive in the sense that it is on some level also about how it is told. In Heart of Darkness, this reflexivity is created by Marlows explicit distrust of words. Furthermore, Things Fall Apart can be seen as a hybrid between a more Europeanstyle character study and a more African-style community portrait with Umuoa and its people standing for a broader history, between written and oral traditions, and between European-style linear time or development and African-style cyclical time experienced as seasons and repeated experiences. The novel refers to Westerners including Yeats, Shakespeare, Tennyson and Conrad.6 It thus situates English as a language that has a history of its own as much as Igbo has. These citations do not casually agree with the pre-texts cited, like the playful small
Book title and epigraph from Yeats 1920, The Second Coming, v. 1-4; method in the [. . . ] madness (146) cp. Shakespeare, Hamlet , Act II, Scene 2; nature [. . . ] red in tooth and claw (25) cp. Tennyson 1850, In memoriam, st. 4; crowds etc. cp. Conrad (see above); cf. D oring 139-40.doring
6
119
verbal echoes found in older white writing, but in this context rather act as stumbling blocks and unexpected intrusions. Although citations may claim some kind of membership in the valued English culture, they are reinterpreted to t the Igbo context, thus inviting the reader to reflect on similarities or dierences in world views.7 A similar tension between what all humans may have in common and what is historically specic is established by the fact that like Heart of Darkness, Things Fall Apart contains layers of meaning, some of which refer to Western traditions. The choice of words such as Oracle (24, 27, 71) or orator (23, 163) relates Igbo culture to the Romans, whom Marlow sees as bringers of civilisation. Okonkwos fear of becoming like his father can be seen in the Freudian terms of an Oedipus complex; and his belief in work to counter this fear or other distressing emotions reminds one of Marlows therapeutic work ethics. Igbo animal fables can be compared with fables and myths around the world. The descriptions of alienation, ruptures of identity and incipient fragmentation of culture, as well as the model of layered meaning itself, parallel techniques of literary modernism. Some philosophical paradoxes resemble those in Heart of Darkness, such as the idea that Igbo norms hold society together and yet facilitate its breakdown when faced with change (cf. Section 1.6). While Marlow situates layers of meaning exclusively in his own experience so that they obliterate or background Africa, Things Fall Apart situates them in Africa. Without claiming that the facets are the same as Western ones, this makes it clear that Africa is as complex as any other place. Appropriating another method from Heart of Darkness, Achebe develops Conrads delayed decoding (cf. Section 1.2) into an intercultural variant that will mostly have an eect on the non-Igbo audience. The reader learns about elements of culture in an incomplete way and begins to fantasise about them, to be given an explanation later. An example is currency, which is rst introduced with the word money, evoking all the associations a reader has with money, before it is explained as cowries (18). This discourages the reader from looking down on a cowrie-shell currency as less advanced than coins and bank notes, because everything one associates with the concept of money is already there before the shape of this money is revealed. Another example is the Evil Forest (28). It is repeatedly mentioned without an explanation, which gives the reader the surprising impression that Africans consider the African forest intrinsically evil just like Conrad did. The amazement lasts. Only in the last third of the book does one learn that only specic forests are seen as evil (123), in the context of religious, social practices. The non-Igbo reader is thus made aware of the intercultural learning
D oring interprets the use of the Tennyson quotation nature [. . . ] red in tooth and claw as an ironic comment on the white view of nature as the binary opposite of human culture (139-42).doring
7
120
process and reminded of his or her position as an outsider looking in on a rich and complex culture, with a residue of what cannot be explained or understood and needs to be respected as such. The invitation of thoughts and fantasies before or instead of explanations in the text also reminds one of Conrads explicitly introduced halo around the story in the sense that it invites the reader to bring a lot of thought and extraneous content to the story. Certain expectations that white readers may have (or try to push aside) are at rst conrmed, and brutally so, and are later relativised when actions are embedded in a social context or when comparison is invited with white behaviour. A rather simple example of this is given when the Umuoans are said to be scared of darkness (22). At rst, the reader feels that this conrms Conrads light/darkness symbolism. This is instantly relativised by the explanation that this fear is mostly due to rational, factual reasons such as nightly predatory-animal activity. A similar eect is achieved by the introduction of Okonkwos solid personal achievements (17) as a wrestling victory. The appeal of this for intellectual readers may be limited. As the story evolves, it turns out that Okonkwos fame is actually based on several other, more generally acceptable achievements such as hard work, property and social influence. The wrestling match is thus reinterpreted as symbolic of his general masculine achievement rather than a single disconnected event. European readers may feel that they are being invited to think about their own culture the initial amusement at the social status of wrestling leads one to reflect on the status of wrestlers or football players in the West who cannot, as a rule, boast as many other achievements as Okonkwo and whose sporting successes are hardly as symbolic. Okonkwos victory is used as a historical and religious symbol, which redescribes the founding of a town as an act of wrestling with the spirit of the place. The most startling references to Heart of Darkness in the rst pages of the book are Okonkwos bringing home a human head from war and drinking from it, communally endorsed out-of-doors sex, and a yelling crowd with a thirst for blood and a leader who gnashes gleaming white teeth like Marlows helmsman and who has a sinister smile (23). Is this an African author endorsing white prejudice or at least selecting all those details for the lead-in into his book that most match Africanist ideas like Conrads, one wonders? Does he exploit white voyeurism to draw certain readers into his text, simultaneously criticising such readers by pointing out what they will be most interested in? Is Achebe implying that Kurtzs fondness of human heads is African-induced after all? Again, these questions are partly resolved or relativised later, and partly invite the readers to bring certain excess content to the book themselves. The issue of war trophies is relativised when one learns that an Igbo war the Umuoans consider important and bloody is in fact one that has claimed 14 victims, while the British and their African soldiers wipe out a whole village in one attack and in retaliation for one death, in a
121
situation where the Igbo would have negotiated for a peaceful settlement, as Ikemefunas displacement shows. Is it more shocking, the reader comes to wonder, to take home the head of one dead body as a symbol after a war felt to be just (24) than to leave three thousand dead bodies to rot with no meaning at all? Is a religious oracle that endorses war worse than the mad logic of the Trinity (122) with its own past of crusades and inquisitions? Such questions are part of the narrative halo evoked by Things Fall Apart . Thoughts of comparison about who did worse are invited by this book as much as by Heart of Darkness, and an answer is given in the novel itself on a meta-level, by an egwugwu : [o]ur duty is not to blame this man or to praise that, but to settle the dispute (82), i.e. to nd a future modus vivendi for all. Other problematic cultural elements are demonstrated around Ikemefuna. His status is indirectly named as that of a slave, in that he carries Okonkwos bag and seat to meetings and this is identied as a task of sons or slaves (48), though his slave status is far closer to that of a son than to what Europeans call slavery. The scene of Ikemefunas death is described with overtones of Heart of Darkness. Silence and distant drums, giant trees and climbers which perhaps had stood from the beginning of things in the heart of the forest and a pattern of light and shade (57) on the path as verbal echoes link the boys death to the setting expected by a Conrad reader. Earlier, Okonkwo had told the boys about his head trophies in darkness (53). Such elements of culture are thus singled out as the ones with which a white reader is familiar from Africanist discourse, while there are hardly any Conradian overtones in scenes of peaceful everyday life. Expectations raised by books like Heart of Darkness are both used to awaken the readers interest and confronted head on to create a full picture of an Igbo village. This image neither plays down problematic elements, nor does it equate them with savagery or reduce Igbo society to its downsides. Achebe makes the obvious, but courageous claim that every people has a right to some problematic issues in its past or traditions. Nwoye is the character who is most aected by these issues. He feels intensely disturbed by certain elements of Igbo culture, namely the religiously motivated killing of Ikemefuna and of twin babies, and by his fathers idea of masculinity. The surface rhetoric or poetry of the [Christian] religion gives him the idea that European culture is more humane (122). As this is also what many white readers believe, the story of Nwoye again addresses their expectations. His admiration for Christian values is disproved by the role the new church plays in the destruction in Umuoa. Moreover, his quest for the dierent helps readers explore what is historically specic and what may be a common human condition, especially around the diculties of masculinity. Though a non-Igbo reader can hardly distinguish between the ethnological and the literary level of gender depiction, it appears that the Igbo are surprisingly similar to white societies of the time. While they
122
generally identify as masculine a striving for power, money and public acclaim as well as a certain self-deception with respect to emotions, the role of women is more ambivalent: they appear both as subdued housewives and as priestesses, choosers of husbands or dispensers of immediate justice in certain situations. Ironically, the custom of a bride price, which white readers may see as an archaic or demeaning rite, is common to the Igbo and the Intended, who may have caused Kurtz to go to the colonies and earn enough to be acceptable to her. While the white perspective on Africans is evoked in certain contexts, the arrival of the British is narrated from a strictly Igbo perspective. It is rst described by Obierika, a man who has heard about it from the survivors from Abame, the village wiped out in retaliation for a white mans death. This and other small framed oral narrations show the reactions of contemporary Igbo multivocally, in addition to the reactions of the narrative voice. The frame eect is reinforced when Obierika calls his own report a story (115). He tells this story among other news, not in panic and not as the rst topic of the conversation. The white mans arrival does not take centre stage at once, and the focus remains on the Igbo. The choice of Okonkwo as a protagonist foregrounds a life that does not centre on the whites, but which they approach from its fringes. Whites are given a quantitatively marginal role. They are in Igbo land for about one third of the book, but even then they are not a central theme until the nal climax. This reverses the roles in white writing.8 The Afrocentric choice of priorities makes it clear that there is far more to Igbo lives than the encounter, even while it is becoming gradually more important. To rewrite or reject pre-texts like Heart of Darkness is an aspect of the novel, but not its rst priority. Achebe resists open anger and similar reactions to white discourse. The encounter itself is not represented as sheer antagonism. Initially, rumours arrive about the white man as one among many Othernesses, including people with dierent customs and people with leprosy. The villagers hear the rumours with disbelief and some laughter. Later, they try to interpret whiteness and integrate it into their world view. Just as whites applied their own pet theories like Darwinism to blacks, the Igbo have their pet empirical and religious theories and explain their rst white man as behaving like a harbinger of a locust swarm, or as an albino soul gone astray on its way to albino land, an analogy perhaps to the mythical race of stunted men (54) said to guard the locusts. When whites have come to stay, the image of the Other becomes that of individuals whose names and personalities are known, namely the missionaries Brown and Smith. (Perhaps, however, Achebe chose these two very common names to show that these men also represent generic types.) Africans and Europeans begin to communicate with each
8
D oring sees such reversals as a major feature of rewritings (112).doring
123
other, and more dialogue is provided than in earlier white writing, which mainly portrays European views of Africans. Dialogue is not easy. An interpreter is needed as a cultural mediator. In fact, the only deep emotion described between a black and a white person is the gratitude the missionary feels for his interpreter. Gradually, it emerges that dialogue is not symmetric, because whites intend to use it as a power tool. For instance, the missionary uses his friendly exchanges with Akunna to optimise his conversion strategies Doring (D oring 109-10). For a long time, the Igbo are tolerant of the whites. Their culture accepts and integrates Otherness easily. It prefers to let the kite perch and let the eagle perch too (29), because what is good among one people is an abomination with others (117). Even after conflicts, the elders tell the missionary that he can stay and worship his own God as long as he does not attack Animist religion, and that they might think each other foolish only because they do not know each other (154-55). This latter point is latent in Heart of Darkness and explicit here; the Igbo mean it as a fact, they do not see the whites as intrinsically mysterious. The Igbo preference to let opposites coexist and complement each other calls some of the colonisers fundamental assumptions into question. Such assumptions are reflected in the second missionarys binary rhetoric of light and dark, sheep and goats, wheat and tares, which is directly reminiscent of rhetoric Marlow hears in Brussels and from Kurtz. Kurtzs idealistic words and demagogic influence are also echoed in the Christian tunes that seduce Nwoye, and in the District Commissioners talk about justice during the perdious imprisonment of the elders, who do not listen to it. The missionarys exhortation to leave your wicked ways (120) sounds like a suppression of savage customs (Heart 50). He makes the ogbanje rite (a religious reaction to high infant mortality) appear as a savage rite by imposing his interpretation on it (150-51); and his belief in slaying the prophets of Baal (150) is reminiscent of exterminating all the brutes. Correspondingly, the church is introduced with some irony. When Obierika reports that the missionaries have taken root in Umuoa and Nwoye has joined them, the narrative voice considers these circumstances [. . . ] less happy (119) than his earlier report that whites have wiped out all of Abame. With similar irony, the word fetish (124), which has mostly negative connotations for white readers, is used for the white mans religion but not for Igbo Animism, whose religious objects are called symbols (26). Paradoxically, however, Christianity is demeaning and enabling. Some people including the efulefu , osu and Nwoye are temporarily better o. Similarly, it is recognised that with the white occupation, Umuoa earns from palm oil, and some other Africans, like the court messengers, enjoy economic advantages.
124
The influx of European religion and culture intensies the Igbo characters existing traits, and partially triggers their emotional development. Like Marlow, Nwoye is already emotionally destabilised when he meets the Other. Nwoye turns to the Other, a reaction which Marlow only hints at when he [turns] to the wilderness (Heart 62) for relief and chooses the hybridised European Other, Kurtz, over the pilgrims. As with the whites in Heart of Darkness, most notably with Kurtz, it is not clear with Nwoye and Okonkwo to what degree their psychological development is determined by their own personality, by their culture or by the encounter with the Other. The balance between the importance of internal developments in Umuoa and that of the encounter is an important topic of the novel. Although the new beginning is intimately connected to things falling apart at the point when the colonisers arrive, it is still a founding moment within Igbo history. Even if this novel is an inverse or paradoxical foundation myth, it depicts a period in African history that will eventually shape the Nigerian state in its current borders. The Umuoans and the narrative voice locate far more agency in Africans than white texts like Heart of Darkness, which mostly describe Europeans as active bringers of change and Africans as their victims. After whites have destroyed Abame, the Umuoans nd fault with the Abame men in two dierent ways, stating that they have killed the white man without communicating with him rst, and that they should have armed themselves after the incident. These considerations take priority over discussions about the aggressors. Africans who collaborate with the whites, and who initially come from outside Umuoa just like the whites, are at least as important for the Umuoans as the white men. (Marlow briefly recognises one of the reclaimed and his ambivalent position as a product of the new forces at work (19) but does not follow up on the subject.) The shifts brought about by the colonisers and missionaries enable a new stratum of the African population to rise in power, which would not otherwise be as powerful. The court messengers are hated and ridiculed, and they exploit their power to insult and whip the six hostages and to make dishonest prot (158-61). They exaggerate the threat to the hostages, and shout at Obierika when the Commissioner does not (167). The meeting after the conflicts in Umuoa begins with a discussion of the Umuoans who have broken the clan (164) and are now ghting against it. Eventually, it is Igbo agency as much as extraneous agency that destroys Okonkwo, as the nal conflict is caused by over-zealous Igbo converts who no longer have a moderate (white) missionary restraining them (151). Okonkwos original concern at the nal meeting is to counter the influence of Egonwanne, a villager who he assumes will canvas against war. This assumption triggers his decision to ght with or without the backing of the clan.
125
While Umuoans assume that white power would not win without African support, and that the young Igbo have gone [. . . ] soft (31) even before the arrival of the British, it is also implied that whites do have very ecient strategies for winning Africans over and using them against each other. The seductive tunes and gifts of the missionaries and the oer of participation in power are supplemented by pressure and blackmail. The whites make it clear that resisting them has its disadvantages. The rst missionary argues that a village that will not send some of its members to school will be ruled by literate strangers. The choice is thus to embrace the white mans knowledge and actually promote his system as a court messenger or clerk in order to preserve some Igbo autonomy, or to lose it altogether (Ashcroft, Griths & Tin 80). (This ambivalence mirrors Achebes own need or choice to appropriate the English language as a tool of power even while trying to strengthen Igbo identity.) People are forced to redene their strategies and identities for or against the colonisers, they cannot remain aloof. Yet the choice of reaction to the white intrusion remains with the Igbo, and the importance of Africans is further stressed when Okonkwo kills an African, not a European during the nal meeting. During this meeting, convened to discuss the DCs recent taking of hostages, no white character is present, only villagers and (later) the DCs African messengers. Nevertheless, the white perspective bursts into the novel in voice, actions and lexis. This part of the novel incorporates a shift in perspective that reminds one far more directly and intensely of Heart of Darkness than anything before it, and that, for all the Umuoans know, may or may not have come to take over and stay. This irruption takes place in three steps. It begins when the rst speaker wants to root out this evil (164) (Christianity and related detractors of clansmen), which is reminiscent of exterminate all the brutes and represents a sharp turn in Igbo strategy, as the speaker himself acknowledges. This development shows the extent to which the colonial intrusion has already changed and brutalised some of the colonised. The second step occurs when the court messengers try to stop the meeting. The narrative voice suddenly adopts a style resembling Conrads: [t]here was utter silence. The men of Umuoa were merged into the mute backcloth of trees and giant creepers, waiting (164). After Okonkwo, himself brutalised by his imprisonment, shortcuts the public decision-making process and kills the messenger, the waiting backcloth [jumps] into tumultuous life (165). Such colonialist perception appears to be part of the package that comes with white rule, which has just won a victory over the Umuoans who do not feel up to ghting against the new masters.
126
Doring
The third step includes the complete last chapter. Though the narrative voice remains in control, which suggests that the white perspective may not have come to stay forever, the District Commissioner re-interprets the preceding events as The Pacication of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger (168).9 This title reminds one of Kurtzs pamphlet and its postscript. Okonkwo is to be given a reasonable paragraph (168) in the DCs book. Like Conrad, the DC decides to be rm in cutting out details (167) about Africa and to stress (168) his own activities instead, in his case the [toil] to bring civilization to [. . . ] Africa (167-68). This choice of priorities is ironic, considering that the DC himself is only given a reasonable paragraph in the Igbo world of Things Fall Apart (D oring 112). Moreover, his whole enterprise is ironic because the reader of Things Fall Apart already knows that such a colonialist book will be of little comparative ethnological and mediatory value. Achebe situates books like Heart of Darkness politically by showing that the victor writes and reinterprets history. However, Okonkwos friends seem to accept the DC for a while, and are surprisingly cooperative with him at the end. They explain customs to him in scholarly detail. After the sullen and silent prisoners have moped shortly before (158), this communication shows that some clan-wide cooperation with whites can no longer be avoided. Moreover, Okonkwos friends oer to pay the DCs men to bury Okonkwo. This shows a mixture of forced submission and original Igbo willingness to interact with an Other, as their cultural norms explicitly prescribe seeking the help of strangers for certain burials. The mixture of struggle and cooperation is the subject of Achebes later books. His second novel, No Longer At Ease , is read by D oring as a rewriting of several European works. It describes how a Nigerian student of Achebes own generation tries to construct his image of Westerners from Western texts. The young man includes elements from Heart of Darkness in his attempt to understand his white superiors colonialist identity, which however has become obsolete with Nigerian independence. D oring points out that No Longer At Ease contains a parodic imitation of Conrads layered method, in that so many literary references are evoked as possible frames of understanding that they obscure rather than clarify their object (131-34, 154-64). Caminero-Santangelo shows how the novel uses Conradian elements to question Nigerian neocolonial elites. To continue with Achebes third novel (rewritings by authors from colonies of occupation: Africa except South Africa), skip to page 138. To continue with Images of Africa, skip to page 133.
Doring
Doring
D oring reads this retitling of the text as a comprehensive critique of writing (164-74).doring
3.10 HARRIS, PALACE OF THE PEACOCK (1960)
127
3.10
Wilson Harris, Palace of the Peacock (1960)
Wilson Harris was born in 1921 in what was then British Guiana, as a descendant of Afro-Caribbeans, Arawak Amerindians and Europeans.1 He graduated as a land surveyor and in this capacity spent much of the 1940s and 50s in the Guyanese rainforest, which greatly impressed him. In 1959, he moved to England where he still lives as a writer, critic and lecturer. Harris is often compared to Conrad because of his emphasis on the contradictions in human life and on the importance of the creative imagination (Ramchand 124). Over the centuries, people came to Guyana voluntarily or involuntarily from Europe, Africa, India and other parts of the world. Colonial rule changed hands between the Spanish, Dutch, British and French until the country achieved independence in 1966. Todays population reflects this history, with only about ve percent Amerindians, as they are called in Guyana (Vereecke 1994). Christianity, Hinduism, Islam and other faiths are practised. Palace of the Peacock is a poetic, symbolic and mystical-visionary tale of a crew of men going up a river in Guyana. Using historical facts but disregarding historical sequence, Harris describes these men as close descendants of dierent groups of immigrants who came to Guyana over the centuries. The tale is not set at any specic point in time, but merges dierent epochs. Only after some time does the reader discover that the whole tale represents one or more dreams, dreamt by the rst-person narrator and by crew members. It begins with an Arawak woman, Mariella, shooting and killing the main character, Donne, because he has raped and whipped her. However, Donne next appears as the captain of a ships crew whose members have the same names as those of a crew that drowned some time before. The men spend seven days going up the river to a Mission (early-colonial forced settlement of Amerindians) called Mariella. This place is identied with the woman Mariella, who lives there and whom Donne has originally seduced and loved, and later made into a servant and mistreated. The crews aim is to reach the Arawak folk (38) of the place Mariella, whom they need as cheap labour on their plantations and as a source of information about the land. When they arrive at Mariella, the folk come to meet them but flee upon seeing Donne, possibly because he is known to be dead or because of his treatment of the woman Mariella. The crew decide to go on beyond the place and look for the folk. They capture an old Arawak woman, the only person who has not taken flight from the Mission Mariella, and force her to act as a guide. Only one crew member, Schomburgh, knows her language. With a historically hybrid ship, which has both paddles and an engine, they go up the river
1
Biographical information stems from Buhle.
128
to the frontiers of the known world (75). Several crew members die on the way, falling victim to the dangers of the river or to conflicts in the crew. Others simply disappear. When a waterfall keeps the remaining three men from moving on by boat, they climb the huge, wall-like clis that hem in the river. The clis have steps built into them. They also have windows through which the men see a carpenter, who acts as a creator, re-creator and self-creator corresponding to Donnes desire for spiritual renewal; and a woman with a small child, who perhaps represents a longing for a home and for feminine seduction [. . . ] warmth and existence (107). The climbers eventually fall and die. The seven days beyond Mariella are explicitly compared to the seven days of Biblical creation. On the last day, all crew members, resurrected, are reunited in the Palace of the Peacock, a visionary structure that is a building but also has the shape of a peacock and is made up of stars and other symbolic components. Each man stands at his own window, recognised as representing his own perspective on the world. One crew member makes music that represents or causes deeper spiritual insight. The men learn that one needs to acquire a balance between spiritual and material desires, and they recognise that they have needed each other but can let go of each other. Possibly the folk have led the crew to the palace or even created it for them, in response to the crews increasing awareness that they need Arawak help. However, it is not clear whether the folk, Mariella or the old woman are even present in the palace. This novel appropriates an important genre of colonial expansion, the journey into the unknown as an initiating adventure, and changes it from the inside. Harris erodes realism or rationalism with dreams, and acknowledges the Western principle of linear history but subordinates it to the fragmentary and incomplete knowledge of history available in the Caribbean. Believing that there is a creative impetus in catastrophe, Harris also adapts the model of a wheel of life (Palace 82), originally a Buddhist concept, according to which people and society are reborn or resurrected after each destructive act. Some characters die and return at least three times in the novel (57). This symbol promotes a vision of the Caribbean as re-creating itself from its traumatic history rather than stagnating in recriminations (Ashcroft, Griths & Tin 150-51). The (post)colonial journey into the past or timelessness is undertaken not by one self, but by a group of characters who may all stand for aspects of one self or society. Bonds of adoption and paternity, some of them uncertain, unite the men into a cross-cultural, hybrid web in which no simple ancestral aliation or delimitation is possible. Carroll, described as black, turns out to be the possible son and/or nephew of Schomburgh, whose great-grandparents include a German and an Arawak (and who might be a literary descendant of Conrads Schomberg in Lord Jim , Falk and Victory ). Carrolls stepbrother is the black-haired, Indian Vigilance (25). Cameron, related to Schomburgh
129
and knowing of Scottish and African great-grandparents, is described as born from a close fantasy and web of slave and concubine and free, out of one complex womb (39). This womb is a symbol of a new, syncretic view of Guyanese society and nation championed by Harris as a counter-model to existing tensions between ethnic groups (Ashcroft, Griths & Tin 199). The ancestry and appearance of some characters remain undetermined. These are Wishrop, who used to mine for gold and diamonds, Jennings, the modern-day engineer with a Marlow-like sense of aection and duty for his ship, and the main character Donne himself, who at some point claims a state of belonging to the place while [pointing] to his dark racial skin (Palace 51). One of the daSilva twins of Portuguese extraction (25) has fathered a child with a woman of the Arawak folk at Mariella, and retains a vague bond with her. The other daSilva twin may be imagined, projected or a dream inside the dream. He simply disappears; Vigilance forgets his existence until he later encounters him as a kind of vision. Similarly, the narrator, who describes himself as Donnes brother and who initially may or may not be a crew member, disappears for a long time (between pages 65 and 110) and is quietly replaced by an impersonal narrative voice. This backgrounding undermines the convention that a story told in the rst person focuses on its narrator (Ramchand 125). Palace of the Peacock can be read as a very direct reworking of Heart of Darkness, which retells the story of the river journey towards a desired aim. However, the novel also rewrites a host of other texts, many of which are not obvious to the Western reader. To name only a few, the recurrent image of the spider or spider-human stems from Akan (African) myth. Harris uses it to evoke a recrossing of the Middle Passage (Ashcroft, Griths & Tin 35). Images including the storm, the walking trees and butterflies have their source in local pre-Columbian myth, and the expression of spirituality in music is inspired by the Carib bone-flute. The palace can be read as a spiritual counterimage to a material El Dorado (Harris, Authors Note 8). The numerous epigraphs stem from the Bible and from British and Irish authors including John Donne, after whom Donne may be named. Each author quoted in an epigraph pioneered some methods that provide sources of inspiration for Harris. Conrads modernist model of multilayered meaning lends itself to incorporation into the creative syncretism Harris nds appropriate for the Caribbean. Like Conrad, Harris attempts radical innovation while showing a full command of accepted ideas. In a similarly syncretic vein, he blends elements from several religions, to arrive at a belief without embracing any one traditional religion.
130
Marlow sees the journey up a river and into the self as a nightmare from which he eventually goes away, back to Europe, to free himself by realigning himself with European value norms. The men in Palace of the Peacock make a similarly traumatic journey but will not go away afterwards, not being based in any other place. All of them were born in Guyana. They discuss their state of belonging, with opinions ranging from Nobody [of the crew] belongs yet (52) to Im as native as they [the Arawak] (51). The journey intensies the crews relationship to the land and to each other. The narrator, who presents himself as a rather gentle and responsible man, nds his own violent and egotistic side in his brother Donne, like Marlow in Kurtz, but has to make his peace with Donne. Just as he cannot relinquish the land, he cannot relinquish his own problematic characteristics. Dreaming is thus positive or visionary, unlike Marlows feeling of nightmare that keeps him from establishing a relationship with the place. Dreaming enables the crew to reach and inhabit their symbolic space. As in Whites Voss , travelling and dying in the land are seen as acts of connecting with it. The crew know that they have died before, and that they are dreaming. The men do not all have the same dream, and they are aware of the dierences in perception and the tensions that they have to negotiate, for instance when some of them see parrots, some vultures (86-87). They are bound together in [. . . ] dreaming enmity (96). All of them aspire to the same harmony at the end but know that they have dierent outlooks and limitations. These limitations are brought about partly by material desires that conflict with spiritual desires and self-knowledge. Desires of dierent kinds are very important for the men. Each has the ambition to carve out a home for himself and cultivate the land. Harris represents this ambition as plausible and legitimate, unless it leads to an egocentric perspective of my estate, my new rice planting, my cattle (53) reminding one of Kurtzs [m]y Intended, my ivory, my station, my river, my. . . (Heart 49). Such a wish to rule the world (Palace 23) entails a desire to use the Arawak population as cheap labour. Schomburgh feels guilt about this (40). Donne judges his own rule over the woman Mariella and over his plantation workers as a horror and a hell (101) more than once, but his desire for it is too great to give up. The narration acknowledges and analyses material desires, both as part of the human condition and for the mens situation as descendants of immigrants. Rather than splitting o material desires and Othering them into a Kurtz-devil like Marlow does, the narrator concludes that spirit is bound by the tragic bond of a material nexus (114) The Arawak of the novel were immigrants a millennium (61) ago but are now the settled population, while others invade and occupy. Though some tensions exist between crew members, the signicant gap is that between the crew and the folk. As far as
131
the Arawak are concerned, Palace of the Peacock echoes and transcends what Harris describes as the frontier novel aspect of Heart of Darkness (Frontier 263). Harris nds that Conrads novella ironically points out demeaning old actions and discourses but does not oer any new approaches. In his own novel, he gives a similarly pointed or parodic description. Stereotypes about the stoic and patient as well as irresponsible Amerindians abound and are cast in such traditional, clich e-ridden language that thecliche irony cannot be overlooked. The situation in which members of all other groups rely on the Arawak for forced labour is not an actual historical constellation. It is part of the dream and helps create a setting in which stereotypes about the stillness and surrender of the American Indian of Guyana (61) can be discussed together with exploitation for labour (which, after the rst settlers attempts to exploit the Arawak, was the fate of several immigrant groups). Donne sometimes feels the Kurtz-like desire to be an allpowerful protective and fatherly ruler over his Arawak workers (22), which means that he does not consider them self-sucient adults. The Arawak of the novel stand for the historical Arawak, but also for pursued and exploited populations in general. Like Conrad but far more explicitly, Harris gives importance to historical fact and simultaneously subordinates it to social and philosophical messages. The novel reproduces, but also questions, the assumption that some kind of instinctive subservience makes the nameless unflinching folk (110) willing to help and guide. The folk acts as an aid and a backcloth just as the crew desire, when it leads them to the palace to give them a spiritual home in the land, although the folk itself is not seen in the palace. The dangerous way the Arawak are pushed into the background of the story is emphasised by the fact that each crew members youth is briefly portrayed, but not those of Mariella, the old woman or any other Arawak. In the striving for mystic unity, the narrator blurs the boundaries between pursued and pursuer to such an extent that he describes their conflict as a childs game of a besieged and a besieging race (114) or as incestuous cruelty and self-oppression (64) between twins and brothers over land that has always been theirs to rule and take (114) for all of them. If this is read as ironic, then it is a warning that such a minimisation of factual power dierences cannot be at the basis of a new harmony, however desirable it is in itself. Another aspect in which Palace of the Peacock reproduces a surprising and presumably ironic degree of stereotype is its treatment of gender. The novel represents a purely masculine perspective. Even more than in Heart of Darkness, the land is identied with a woman or with the feminine, including muses and furies of the place and a scene in which the old Arawak woman (who might incarnate Mariella) merges with the river as one force (62-63). Women are seen as weak and domestic or as instinctive mothering
132
helpers, unless they bewitch man or nature. The nal spiritual music speaks with the inner longing of woman and the deep mastery of man (113), reminding one of Marlows equation of masculinity with control. Palace of the Peacock invites deconstruction of its dierent currents, especially with regard to race and gender. The folk are not necessarily seen as weak or helpless. When the crew have lost their strength and ammunition, they are afraid that the Arawak may turn to ght or chase them; and indeed Mariella has shot Donne, which may foreshadow an increase in feminine and Amerindian self-esteem and striving for power. The Arawak also have strong legal titles to the land (41, 51). This was not yet the case in 1960 when the novel was published (Vereecke, par. 58-60), so that it shows another use of nonlinear time. In addition to the layers of meaning and the coexistence of contradictory views, Palace of the Peacock also adapts or extends many of Conrads formal techniques. Synaesthetic eects and cinematic sequences capture an atmosphere of the river and the rainforest. The concept of eternal or prehistoric nature, sometimes endowed with a personality, is insistently evoked, and is merged with the symbolism that connects the seven days of creation to a process of spiritual re-creation. The words devil and devilish are initially often used for Donne, a Faustian self-made man, and for nature or as expletives. They are eventually superseded by descriptions of the spiritual beauty of the palace. Some symbolic or atmospheric words are repeated insistently: to give only a few examples, nameless is used to generalise and merge experiences, an eect which Conrad tried to achieve by simply leaving out names; and blind describes both a reaction to the sensually overwhelming rainforest and the duality between sensual and spiritual perception, the dead seeing material eye and living closed spiritual eye (20). This eect is reinforced by a copious use of words like light, dark, shadow and gloom (for sensual impressions, not moral judgement). Similarly, the word mysterious is often repeated, as well as numerous negatives like inexplicable (65), implacable (68), inevitable and unconscious (76), inscrutable irony of a spiritual fate (82). Often, adjectives appear in non-standard semantic collocations, which draw further attention to them. Abstract words such as love, freedom, eternity, which evoke deep emotions or ideas, are used perhaps even more frequently than in Heart of Darkness, contributing to an intense but imprecise or universal feeling. An emphasis on music links dierent elds of art. Harris develops the narrative halo or practice of evoking several things at the same time into a technique that is often explained as an undermining of the Western logic of language in which binary opposites exclude each other. Harris lets incompatible events happen at the same time, such as Donnes death by shooting and hanging (and perhaps lassoing), or makes it impossible to distinguish whether sound and atmosphere are created by a storm or by Donnes words (Ramchand 120; Ashcroft, Griths & Tin 49-50). Marlows
3.11 GREENE, A BURNT-OUT CASE (1961)
133
scepticism about language is embraced on the level where art and life (76) and music [are] beyond [. . . ] words (113). On the level of language as a tool however, the crew can communicate in their dierent non-standard varieties of English, and some of them feel that dreaming language [. . . ] is the same for every man (52), so that language is not a crucial obstacle in developing a group structure and identity. However, the language barrier with the Arawak woman remains a problem. In his theoretical text The Frontier on Which Heart of Darkness Stands, Harris calls for new, more hopeful approaches. The new approach he oers at the end of his own novel is the vision of spirituality, even if it does not include the Arawak. The journey beyond Mariella can be read as an explicit reference to Heart of Darkness, showing that the crew go beyond the Inner Station that constitutes the symbolic limit for Marlow. The image of being hemmed in by high riverbanks reminds one of Conrads conflation of the river with an emotional dark tunnel, but in Palace of the Peacock , the travellers eventually relinquish the tunnel for the palace overlooking the land. In the palace, the men recognise the conflict between material rule and spiritual harmony, but they do not yet make any attempts to solve that conflict this is a frontier novel on a new, moved frontier, the precise moment of explicit recognition of old structures and new possibilities. In the palace, the crew meditate on their pursuit of people and money, and may decide to pursue spiritual values and a more modest home instead. To continue with rewritings by Caribbean-born authors, skip to page 178.
3.11
Graham Greene, A Burnt-out Case (1961)
A Burnt-out Case is set in the Belgian Congo shortly before its independence. Travelling to nd settings for his texts, Greene spent time at leprosy stations in the Congo and in Cameroon. He insisted, however, that the leprosery in the novel and its location are ctional (A Burnt-out Case , dedication vii). The British architect Querry, famous for his designs of churches, has decided that he has lost interest in his work, in human contact and in sex; religion has not meant anything to him for a long time. He takes the next plane to as remote a location as he can nd, and ends up in a leprosery run by Belgian monks and nuns near a tributary of the Congo River. He makes friends with the station doctor, an atheist, and gets along well with the pragmatic monks. Querry compares himself to the burnt-out cases, lepers whose illness has run its course and has left them mutilated but is no longer active. He takes one such man, named Deo Gratias, as his boy and establishes a delicate but
134
deepening communicative relationship with him, in spite of his belief that he does not care about people. The monks persuade him to design a simple, cheap hospital building for the station. His incipient interest in Deo Gratias and in the doctor begins to renew his hold on life. A populist British journalist, Parkinson, comes to the Congo to cover the independence struggles in the capital, but needing another topic seeks out Querry and builds him up in the international press as a noble, selfless helper. Querry makes it clear that he hates this image. He goes on with his life at the station, and the doctor gradually comes to think that his emotional burn-out syndrome is cured. Querry wants to stay there for the rest of his life. A young white Belgian woman in a loveless marriage nds herself pregnant and claims that Querry is the childs father, hoping that her husband will reject her and let her return to Europe. Though she has in fact been faithful and her claim is a lie, her husband believes her and shoots Querry dead, and the journalist portrays Querry as a fallen saint in his next article. This novel is part of the struggle over the representation of Central Africa in the West. This includes the image of Europeans who live in Africa. A Burnt-out Case operates on a meta-level in that it is about representation as much as it itself represents Africa. The dierent images it contains refer to Heart of Darkness in dierent ways. Each of them endorses some of Marlows ideas but not others. Querrys idea of the Congolese rainforest is wholly dierent from Marlows. Where Marlow nds adventure and initiation, Querry comes for peace and quiet and to get away from his fans, who want to force him into the role of a devoted and religious architect. Querry does explicitly not intend to search for himself or for encounters in Africa. Parkinson disregards this personal motivation and prefers a clich e that sells better. In an article, he calls Querry a Hermit (153) and a Saint (156) in the footsteps of Albert Schweitzer. Where Marlow looks for an idea behind white activities in Africa, Parkinson claims to have found one. He builds up an extreme, stereotypical image of a good, selfless and faith-inspired white man in the jungle. He practically claims that Querry embodies the philanthropic white man evoked in the rhetoric of Kurtz (and of the numerous models for him). The only people on site who accept this image are the only monk who grapples with religious problems, and the young womans husband, a failed priest, who both in one way or another nd it advantageous to their own unstable self-images. The newspapers in Europe on the other hand eagerly buy Parkinsons articles. Querry, the doctor and the emotionally stable monks see their work at the leprosery as that of humans with human motives, including coincidence, routine, a desire to feel useful and needed, an interest in medical research and in general progress, or a wish for deep contact with the human condition. They are aware that the helper image devalues lepers, and possibly Africans in general, as untouchables (154) and cases for
cliche
135
the horror museum (25). The men reject doubtful motivations for the stereotypical helper career. These include a leprophil [. . . ] attraction (17) to the handicapped as weaker or exotically dierent persons, masochism, and vocations of doom (140) that connect an attraction to disease with a death wish, i.e. a desire for a slow suicide by infection. Another, implicitly rejected motivation is the desire for public attention and admiration, like Kurtzs. The pragmatic approach of those working at the station sets real life against such images. They see themselves as people who have found a place in life and become familiar with it and like it there. Most monks even feel that it is more mature to get on with ones medical or technical work than to search for its religious motivations or to develop a missionary zeal and try to change Africans lives. The doctor fears that when the Congo gains its liberty, his own liberty to lead the life he enjoys will be over. On the brink of decolonisation, Greene reminds his readers that there has been a good life for some whites in Africa, too, not only the darkness on which Parkinson insists and that motivations are not always what they appear to be. After Querrys death, Parkinsons representation of him switches from that of a great philanthropist to that of a well-meaning man who has gone under morally in the tropics, an image he may have borrowed from Marlow. Apparently, the journalist cannot think of any other roles for whites in the Congo than that of a benevolent helper or of someone infected with brutishness. Much like the role of whites in Africa, Africa itself is depicted in two basic ways, Querrys and Parkinsons. Parkinson enjoys casting himself as Stanley. His articles persistently evoke Stanley as an intrepid traveller through the dangerous unknown, with a few faithful African followers. Parkinsons repeated references to the heart of darkest Africa (120) or the heart of the dark continent (133) remind one both of Stanleys and of Conrads style (cf. p. 5). In an article, he mentions that he has penetrated what Joseph Conrad called the Heart of Darkness (154), without any further discussion. This is the only explicit reference to Heart of Darkness, and he uses Conrads title as a clich e or familiar expression rathercliche than relating to the content of the novella. The eternal forest broods (110) according to Parkinson, and he tries to capitalise on one of its dangers, malarial fever, by casting himself as a suering hero and insisting on being carried ashore for a photo. Parkinson evokes Stanleys and Conrads texts to claim their authority, although he sometimes misuses them Conrad already rejected the image of the philanthropic helper that Parkinson still accepts. In addition, his daily speech is studded with other quotations quite randomly, from Virgil to Shelley, with which he aims to show o his knowledge and to situate himself in the great traditions. Querry feels that Parkinson is too intelligent to believe in his own stock images but uses them to sell his articles, cynically
136
ignoring their social implications. Querry explicitly rejects Parkinsons import of hackneyed metaphors and pre-packaged ideas into Africa, and points out factual errors in his citations and comparisons. He rejects both the Africanist pre-texts and Parkinsons brash use of them, especially his references to Stanley. In describing Parkinson and his articles, Greene makes generous use of satirical exaggeration. The second image of Africa is that constructed by Querry and by the impersonal narrative voice, which mostly follows his perspective. They try to present a realistic, straightforward and unprejudiced image. Querrys (involuntary) inquiries into himself are aided by his various encounters. His encounters with Africans are more limited than those with Europeans. What restricts the ability to communicate are no longer white essentialism, prejudice or outright racism as at Conrads time. Instead, people like Querry recognise that the limiting factors are dierences in areas of experience such as culture, belief, education, habits, philosophical assumptions, symbolic order or value system. While communication is often hampered by language problems, this book is far more dialogic than The Heart of the Matter . The doctor and the monks rely both on their knowledge of at least one local language and on interpreting; and Querry, whose interest in his surroundings does not extend to language learning yet, takes advantage of the limited French of Deo Gratias and other Africans. As part of his emotional awakening, Querry takes over the symbol of Pend el e from Deo Gratias to stand for a happy and undisturbed place that one yearns for but cannot nd. The two men construct this symbol between themselves. For language reasons, Querry is not totally certain of its original meaning when Deo Gratias rst introduces it which is also the rst time Querry really listens to an African. Querry gives the word a meaning of his own, close to what he has understood, and plays that meaning back to Deo Gratias. This intimately shared, evolving symbol shows both the limits and the (creative) depth of the intercultural relationship. Though it is still presented as normal that whites give new names to Africans, Africans are described as having their own private lives and agency far more than in The Heart of the Matter . Indigenous and Christian religion coexist or merge, and are sometimes compared at least on a supercial level where both use fetish objects such as statuettes on an altar (4). However, the Christians do not seem to learn from the Animists. Hybridity is almost exclusively on the side of Africans; be it in religion or in a political rejection of the whites while wearing the caps with which they advertise their beer. Most whites consider racist language a thing of the past. Where stereotypes do come to the mind of white characters (apart from Parkinson), they usually recognise them as overgeneralisations and discuss their origin. An example is the idea that Africans may
Pendele
137
destroy imported machinery that is unknown to them, because of their gullibility when some trouble-maker among them starts a rumour that these are torture machines. The doctor explains this by actual incidents that [justify] all possible belief in European cruelty (44). It can also be taken as a comment on the gullibility of white newspaper cliches readers with respect to the clich es Parkinson propagates. The narrative voice, which tries to give a close image of Africa without stereotypes, also alludes to Heart of Darkness, in a more implicit and more complicated way. Its new discourse contains numerous echoes, fragmentary and in part perhaps purely linguistic, of Heart of Darkness. Querry thinks of peace as a nut at the centre of the hard shell of discomfort (1), while Conrads frame narrator muses on meaning [. . . ] within the shell of a cracked nut (Heart 9). At the enraged husbands palm-oil factory, abandoned boilers rot, and palm nuts look like dried and withered heads (161). The leprosery is what Marlow calls the farthest point of navigation (Heart 11). The stream carries boats and flotsam out of the heart of Africa (Burnt-out 23), while for Marlow, the brown current ran swiftly out of the heart of darkness (Heart 67). Greenes forest appears as a wall, creating a shadow, or as a grey and green immensity (137); and it bars a transport way by dropp[ing] trees across the way (27) as much as Marlows forest [. . . ] stepped [. . . ] across the water (Heart 37). People appear as black gures, but, unlike for Marlow, also as white ones (107, 108). On the river steamer, Querry feels alone with the white captain in spite of the African crew (1, 106), while Marlow claims that Kurtz feels alone in a small dugout with four paddlers (34). Just as in Heart of Darkness, Darwinism and a last cooling of the world are cited as cultural staples, along with the idea of Africa as a site of age-old nature and humankind. A monk thinks that Querry is a remarkable man (93), the words that rst describe Kurtz to Marlow. Querry feels that he has in the past persuaded [him]self to believe almost everything (203), like Kurtz, who could get himself to believe anything (Heart 71). Some characters are afraid that there may be something terrible, especially by way of motivations, deep in humans (18-19). Such fragments and echoes evoke Heart of Darkness. The technique reminds one of a slide fading over into another one, or a mosaic containing some older tiles. This device acts like a mind-map of contemporary readers and writers, who are actively making the transition from inherited content of previous generations to new ideas; or for whom older knowledge comes to mind automatically even while they try to construct a new discourse of their own. This process is shown to be unconscious at least sometimes, such as when Conrads Intended talked, as thirsty men drank (Heart 74) but is misremembered to yield a Querry talking as a hungry man eats (45).
138
This kind of citation does not claim the authority of the pre-text, but reminds one of what was once powerful and considered valid and may still appeal to the imagination, but whose grip on contemporary minds is being loosened. It also makes it especially explicit that literature reacts to literary tradition at least as much as to experienced reality. Although this novel analyses and rejects many stereotypes about Africa, it remains within the limits of the white drama. Just as Marlow takes the Congo as the site of his dream journey into the unconscious, Querry sees leprosy as a symbol of his own psychological state, so that an African issue is again subordinated to a European one. The Congo serves as a site of withdrawal and as a catalyst for Querrys healing. The riots in Kinshasa and Kisangani (5, 7, 43, 189), which mark the beginning of an important transition that does not centre on whites or on representation, are mentioned, but they are not central to the novel; the doctor and the narrative voice describe the men who bring them to the leprosery as trouble-makers (205). In spite of some important quantitative changes, the discursive frontier on which Heart of Darkness stands (Harris) has turned out to span more than half a century. To continue with rewritings by white Western authors, skip to page 185.
3.12
Chinua Achebe, Arrow of God (1964)
Arrow of God covers about seven months in 1921-22 and is set in Umuaro, a group of six villages in the neighbourhood of Umuoa. The protagonist of the novel is Ezeulu, Priest of Ulu. Ulu is the deity made in the past when the villages allied to form a stronger union against slave raids, with Ulu as the highest god presiding over the six village gods. Ezeulus story centres on his complex family life, with two wives who are jealous of each other, four sons and an unspecied number of daughters, and on his religious-political conflicts with several men from the six villages. These conflicts go back to a land dispute between Umuaro and the nearby village of Okperi. They are fuelled by Nwaka, a prosperous Umuaro man and supporter of Ezidemili, priest of the village deity Idemili, which unlike Ulu was there at the beginning of things. Nobody made it (361). During the dispute, Nwaka led a group of villagers who wanted to go to war against Okperi. Ezeulu opposed them. After some conflicts, the men from the villages divided between support for Ezeulu or Nwaka, and the Nwaka faction did make war. Captain Winterbottom, the District Ocer, ended this war abruptly, broke the guns in Umuaro and gave the land to Okperi, where he and four other British men reside. All of this happened ve years ago, but the enmity between Ezeulu and Nwaka is continuing to divide the villages. Umuaro has more strongly resisted the attempts of the white
3.12 ACHEBE, ARROW OF GOD (1964)
139
administrators and missionaries than the surrounding villages and towns. However, the British are building a road between Umuaro and its enemy Okperi. Ezeulu feels that the white mans knowledge will be important in the future and that acquiring it will add to his familys power. Though he is not interested in Christianity as such, he is therefore sending his son Oduche to the Christian school. Ezeulus friends and enemies do not approve of this decision. Oduche takes his newly-acquired learning seriously and locks a sacred python in a box in an attempt to kill it, an action which the Christians have suggested in order to show the impotence of Animism. Everyone in Umuaro soon knows that Oduche is responsible for this desecration of the symbolic animal associated with Idemili. Ezidemili and others urge Ezeulu to punish his son, but Ezeulu does not do so because he does not want to be ordered about by them. The incident further fuels the divide between Ezeulu and his enemies. The focus switches several times between Ezeulus compound and the white administration at Okperi. As Igbo society does not have individual chiefs but only councils of elders and titled men, and Lord Lugards concept of indirect rule requires native kings as puppet rulers, Winterbottom is under orders to appoint such a chief. After negative experiences with a mission-educated Christian whom he instated at Okperi and who abused his position, Winterbottom thinks of Ezeulu, a traditional and middle-aged Animist, as an alternative. Although the two men live in completely dierent social worlds, Ezeulu thinks of Winterbottom as a friend. Winterbottom holds Ezeulu in some esteem, because in the land case, Ezeulu was the only man from Umuaro who stated that the people of Umuaro had no claim to that land, which Winterbottom felt to be the truth. Winterbottom sends messengers to Ezeulu asking him to come to Government Hill at Okperi. At rst, Ezeulu feels that it is beneath his status to follow this request. However he calls an urgent meeting of elders and titled men, and following their advice he does go the next day. After giving orders to detain Ezeulu and teach him respect for the administration because he has not gone to Okperi with the messengers, Winterbottom falls ill. Ezeulu dreams that the elders of Umuaro reject Ulu. The dream makes him content to stay away from Umuaro, hoping that this will provoke Ulu to ask Umuaro questions (484). The Assistant District Ocer informs Ezeulu that the British would like to make him a ruler. Ezeulu declines to be a white mans chief (499, 509). This angers the colonisers, and they keep Ezeulu on Government Hill for several weeks to punish him. His religious tasks include counting the months by eating a consecrated yam at each new moon, and announcing the dates for all celebrations in the six villages. Having spent time on Government Hill, he has two yams left over and argues that Ulu wants him to announce the feast that marks the beginning of the yam harvest two months later than usual. Ezeulu compares himself to the arrow in the bow of Ulu. The villagers begin to run out of food, and their yams are deteriorating in the ground. The catechist,
140
a Nigerian from the coast, sees his chance and tells the people that if they bring a sacrice for the Christian God, they can begin their harvest and the powerful new God will protect them from Ulus revenge. Ezeulus son Obika runs through the villages as a masked spirit while suering from fever, and dies. Ezeulu goes mad from pain, and is thus spared the knowledge that the people take his sons death as a sign that Ulu has chastised or abandoned his priest. Many people, desperate to harvest their yams, accept the catechists oer. The strategies with which Things Fall Apart responds to Heart of Darkness in representing Igbo society are not as intensely present in this book. The representation of the Igbo villagers appears far more autonomous than in the earlier novel. One message of this may be that it is no longer necessary to reply as directly to Western representation, because the earlier novel has already established that African reality is a self-contained whole, which does not need to be described by contrasting it with the Western pretext. Indigenous concerns are predominant and include the encounter as one among many issues to think about. While the encounter clearly prompts or catalyses the Igbo internal breakup, Arrow of God mainly shows how it is reflected in Igbo society through middlemen and in more or less indirect contact, rather than how it takes place directly between black and white. This book reveals some aspects of Igbo life that are more shocking for white readers than those in Things Fall Apart . They include references to human sacrice. However, such references are made by characters who talk about the past or use them as a symbol of large personal sacrices (456-57, 490, 534). There is a similarly symbolic, disapproving evocation of cannibalism by an Igbo character (471). These are thus not shown as common practice but as extreme and mostly verbally evoked actions. Both the shrine of Ulu and certain war drums are decorated with skulls. Winterbottom has encountered an unspeakable rite, a man buried alive in order to be attacked by vultures, which, together with some abuses of power, he takes to mean that Africans are hopelessly and essentially cruel. His conclusion is not challenged directly, and the reader is left free to embrace it, although it is made clear that there is much more to Igbo society than this. The white characters, mainly in the chapter that introduces them, are modelled directly on Heart of Darkness, barring Marlows scepticism. Hearing the distant throb of drums, Winterbottom would wonder what unspeakable rites went on in the forest at night, or was it the heartbeat of the African darkness? in what he considers [t]his dear old land of waking nightmares (349). Like Marlow, he cannot decode the drums, and confuses them with sounds of his own body. Appearances, such as stylistically perfect verbal justications, are of great importance to whites. Like Marlows accountant, Winterbottom thinks it imperative [for whites] in such a lonely outpost as Okperi
141
[not to] lower themselves in the eyes of the natives as well as to dress in a starched shirt and tie as a general tonic which one must take if one was to survive in this demoralizing country (351). Marlow talks of African men as raw matter (19) or as an improved specimen (38), and nds their architecture pathetically childish (23). Winterbottom feels that his Small Boy is a ne specimen who was absolutely raw initially (354); and that though capable of a big savage war (355), the natives are like children (357) in certain respects. The ways in which Achebes whites see blacks are taken over from colonial discourses, such as the cunning native (377), or the weak native in need of defence against white agency (485). Whites see local workers as bone lazy men who will only respond to severe handling (396). They address them as you black monkeys (403) and simultaneously consider them as loyal as pet dogs (396). Europeans expect Africans to acculturate, but not to become too much like themselves, which would make them into uppity natives (398) they would no longer be in their place (Heart 36). Some white characters in Arrow of God read the book that the District Commissioner plans to write at the end of Things Fall Apart . In that book, among high-flown colonialist rhetoric, Nigeria is described as a site of deadly fertility and an old land, home to backward races (352). The DCs book itself refers to pre-texts, including the history of exploration and Rome from Heart of Darkness, and a mans task of playing his best in the game of life (352) from Newbolts Vita Lampada. The memorandum with the order to instate native rulers boasts an endeavour to purge the native system of its abuses to build a higher civilization, and Winterbottom perceives it as Words, words, words (375), which reminds one of the style of Kurtzs report and Marlows reading of it as words only (Heart 50). Like Marlow, the colonisers think that Africans are inferior, but that whites should not harm them (376, 485). Among themselves, they vie for power and status like the pilgrims in Heart of Darkness. The black characters are modelled on the pre-text less than in Things Fall Apart , the white ones more: even more clearly than Achebes earlier novel, Arrow of God uses Heart of Darkness to obtain an image of whites, stressing that certain discourses belong to whites and whites alone. The European characters are constructed from elements of a pre-text, like African characters in colonial ction are made up from Africanist knowledge and layers of white thought (D oring 133). Heart of Darkness is usually readDoring mainly as part of certain discourses about Africans. Achebe rereads it to obtain a similarly schematic discourse about Europeans. This ironic use of the pre-text creates white characters who are plausible and typical, but one-dimensional. They are reduced to their function as colonisers rather than shown as complex human beings. Compared to the strands of the story set in Igbo society, the white strands are quite reductive, though not nearly as reductive as Heart of Darkness is about Africans.
142
Doring
Though there is only one narrative voice, the dierent perspectives are clearly discernible. The parts set among the British are written in a style that imitates white pre-texts. For instance, when describing the whites perception of African nature, the narrative voice pictures this nature as strange and overwhelming and seeks to compare it to European referents (348-49; cf. D oring 125). For a long time, the British and the Igbo strands are only indirectly connected by Christians and middlemen. They slowly approach each other through Winterbottoms plans to appoint Ezeulu chief. In this sense, they never really meet, because Ezeulu meets other British men but not Winterbottom. Each strand is multivocal in itself, as dierent characters express dierent views about people and events. The last two pages of the book establish closure for each character or group of characters. Like Things Fall Apart , the story is given a new twist or interpretation at the end, this time not a white but an indigenous one, thus reappropriating what Things Fall Apart showed to be temporarily dominated by white knowledge-power. From the perspective of people who believe in Ulu, the white men turn out to be not only marginal but also tools and allies of Ulu, which gives their project a totally dierent meaning than they themselves think it has. This interpretation is juxtaposed with overviews of Winterbottoms and the catechists further development. The narrative voice remains neutral, showing some empathy for each of these perspectives. Implicitly, the narrative voice has its own strand that is not associated with any one of the characters. This appears to be the point of view of a Westernised or hybridised Igbo of the time when the book was written, possibly of Achebe himself. It is especially visible in the treatment of Animist religion. Though some magic is not explained and therefore remains an object of belief (470), it is always shown that masks and spirits are enacted by men, and it is implied that some people of Umuaro are becoming aware of this. This is a development from Things Fall Apart , where such a trend was only gently hinted at. The old religion is breaking up, and the narrative voice seems to be ahead of this development. This is especially clear in the treatment of Ezeulus reasons for withholding the harvest festival. The narrative voice alternates between showing them as Ezeulus own preparation (527) for revenge (507) or as visions and directions given by Ulu. Even the visions from Ulu are represented in such a way that they can be interpreted as Freudian dreams. They reflect Ezeulus own feeling that his fellow villagers are against him, and blend things that he has just heard or seen, such as dierent kinds of deance. In one of his dreams, the Animist elders call Ulu a dead god (483) as Christians do. A level reminding one of Freudian theory is present throughout the book. Ezeulus mother had a madness that echoes and influences his familys religious attachment to the moon (500, 548), and that he eventually reproduces in turn. One of Ezeulus sons speculates that his brother Oduche might be open to Christianity because he has not
143
received enough emotional support from his father. Ezeulu is described as Known and [. . . ] Unknowable (455) or as consisting of human and spirit, which can be interpreted along the lines of a conscious and an unconscious self. Like Heart of Darkness, this book is open to conflicting interpretations, and emphasises the subjectivity of individual perception. Achebe extends modernist methods by presenting several radically dierent perspectives, showing that elusive reality and unstable value judgements are not only a matter of personal perception but are also founded on sociopolitical developments. There is a synergy between Western modernist relativity and the Igbo cultural aim to never see one party as right and the other wrong (421). In this and other respects, observations that have been made about Conrad apply even more to Achebe. Marginality is another obvious point, and Achebe unlike Conrad uses a culturally hybrid narrative voice. The narrative voice goes beyond Marlows modernist atheism by responding not to one religion but to two religions and (implicitly) to its own agnosticism, each of which is depicted as somehow understandable or plausible, so that in the end there is not one true religion or irreligiousness. Even the title of the novel stems both from the Bible (Isaiah 49.2) and from something Ezeulu says (516), emphasising the relativity of beliefs. This dual title is programmatic for an important theme of the novel, that of coincidences, misunderstandings and accidental synergy between the Igbo, white and middlemen groups. For instance, Ezeulu thinks it convenient that he can stay on Government Hill and teach a lesson to his own people, but in the end his strategy opens the door for the catechist. Ironically, it turns out that this unfortunate cooperation has been made possible only by the inconsistent British strategy on native chiefs, which is abolished as soon as Ezeulu has left detainment, so that his nal crisis is a result of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, not a necessary part of something systematic. There are many other examples. The snake happens to have a meaning in Igbo and Old-Testament beliefs. This synergy of the two separate beliefs makes the sacred python a preferred target of converts, thus aggravating the enmity between Ezeulus family and his old antagonist Ezidemili whose priesthood coincidently includes the care of pythons. Even Obikas death is the result of an accidental conjunction of his fever and his fathers problematic standing in the village, which Obika feels would be worsened if he refused to run as a spirit. The insistence on synergy shows that nobody is in full control of the developments, in spite of the protagonists strong focus on power, politics and their desires to lead. As soon as each party has brought its ideas and aims onto the scene, they acquire their own momentum and develop into something that is described by the proverb that a thing greater than nte [has] been caught in nte s trap (545, italics in the original), or what has evolved is now too large to be controlled.
144
Synergy between Igbo internal conflicts and colonisation leads to cultural loss. The narrative emphasises that the white men could not have won alone. They attract and coax as much as they overpower; and they happen to be there at a moment when, for instance, local religion has become brittle. They are not the villains of the piece, but humans caught up in a dangerous idea and its concomitant system. It is the idea that is vicious, not the individuals. Winterbottom, though well-intentioned, believes in it (349). This reminds one both of Marlows insistence on ideas and of the impression that in Heart of Darkness, all characters are victimised in some way. Certainly, the idea suits Winterbottoms personality, including his intense work ethic that (unlike Marlows) keeps him from stopping to think and question his purpose. Achebe evokes such analysis of white personality structures and relates it to white literature by citations, but he leaves it at that level, making it clear that a critique of white emotions and discourse is the responsibility of white people. Igbo characters are the ones he studies in depth. This novel emphasises the dierent pieces of information or knowledge that dierent characters have about the same course of events. Each group of characters is deeply entrenched in its own views and problems. The white men live in a web of hierarchical thinking, rivalry and slightly absurd etiquette. The middlemen and converts are busy implementing their new knowledge and aims. Ezeulu feels that [h]is quarrel with the white man [is] insignicant beside the matter he must settle with his own people (484). Achebe answers the question asked in colonialist ction to what extent transcultural understanding can take place. He takes the problems of epistemology onto a dierent level: the question is not whether an understanding is possible in the sense of metaphysics or essentialism, but very pragmatically, why it has not taken place. Reasons include language problems and the sheer amount of eort that would be involved in acquiring a minimal competence in another culture. The overwhelming thing [. . . ] caught in nte s trap partly results from a powerful group interfering with another while possessing only little or half-understood knowledge. Clarke, the Assistant District Ocer, meditates on facts. His thoughts show that not all colonisers are interested in full understanding, but want to act rather than think. Ironically, Clarke feels that [p]erhaps facts put you at a great disadvantage and that the British colonial system is ham-strung by all the commissions of inquiry and other endeavours to nd out about facts (428), while the reader realises that facts are actually in short supply with the colonisers. Clarke also forgets to inquire about the road-builder Wrights treatment of his Igbo workers and would not know how to inquire anyway. Because Wright is not being monitored, he acquires the kind of unchecked power criticised in Kurtz.
145
No character fully understands the developments. For instance, Winterbottom ends the war but only knows a strongly distorted version of its cause. The whites commandeer unpaid road work because the budget is exhausted, but the Umuaro men think this is directed against them. The coastal catechist is proud to have attracted so many people to his church and school, when they are actually hoping to acquire literacy in order to counteract the Christians. This hope itself stems from a coincidence. Finally, the Umuaro people arrive at a very flawed explanation of why Ezeulu delays the harvest, thinking that it is because they have not tried to prevent his detention. Achebe shows how the acquisition of intercultural knowledge works and how many misunderstandings it entails, often of small details such as left-handed writing or the ways a persons age can be expressed. He demonstrates how misleading partial knowledge can be when rephrased in a dierent cultural frame, such as the meaning of Ezeulus title. Sometimes, religious belief determines understanding, such as the assumption that Ezeulu has caused Winterbottoms illness by way of retribution. A misunderstood English idiom contributes to this impression. In spite of these diculties, out of necessity the middlemen, far more than the colonisers, acquire some working knowledge. Among the concepts whose meaning varies between cultures is truth. Modernist Marlow speaks of a personal truth or life-sensation. For Ezeulu, a member of an oral society, truth is what he has heard from his father, even if all other Umuaro men claim to have heard something dierent from theirs in the land case. The narrative voice seems to be wary of oral culture, subtly showing how a tale from Things Fall Apart changes when told and retold (Things 30; Arrow 542). Winterbottom thinks he can judge what the truth is in the land dispute, and feels that Igbo witnesses usually lie. In fact, rather than a truth there seems to be a product of political circumstances, as the Okperi people only start the dispute after their city has acquired white residents and thus more power to promote their truth. What an absolute truth about that piece of land would be is not determined. The negotiations around this truth are at the root of Ezeulus ambivalent allegiance and unique position with respect to the colonisers. He desires the white mans friendship and his knowledge, but not his rule. Ezeulu recognises the agency of middlemen who show the white men the way literally and guratively (454-55, 459-60). Against Umuaros opinion of him, he does not want to facilitate the advent of white rule himself by becoming Winterbottoms chief. The complexity of Ezeulus position becomes clear when he calls the meeting to discuss whether he should follow Winterbottoms summons to Okperi. His role and that of the villagers are suddenly reversed. The other men have always reproached Ezeulu for being too close to the whites, but now they advise him to go because doing otherwise would be too dangerous, while he himself is considering a refusal.
146
Doring
Truth is, at least in part, negotiated through language. Interpreters are much in demand; they have the power to skip or change some of the content, and nothing remains secret because there is always an interpreter present (D oring 149-50). Increasingly, many Igbo consider English the language of power and social elevation. The messengers and middlemen use English in all-African groups to mark distance from the villagers, to exchange secrets in front of them, and as a lingua franca (475-78). While their speech is reproduced as a pidgin or initial contact language, the narrative voice uses hybrid language in more subtle and more recent ways. It slightly alienates British English, for instance by using themselves instead of each other (495), custom as an adverb (443), and call instead of address or pronounce (493). It also uses Christian or idiomatic English expressions for Igbo contexts, including head or tail (346), kith and kin (359), go in peace (373), sin (380, 392) and absolution (442). While both the characters and the tale itself are forced to use English in their contact with Europeans, Winterbottom studies some Igbo playfully and to impress his colleagues, but he is never seen forced to rely on it for communication, and it remains unclear how much he really knows. Moses Unachukwu, an Igbo Christian who acts as an interpreter, makes it especially clear that a new space between cultures is emerging, not only on a linguistic level. He takes over the white mens light/darkness rhetoric, but gives it a new meaning: When Suering knocks at your door and you say there is no seat left for him, he tells you not to worry because he has brought his own stool. The white man is like that [. . . ] As daylight chases away darkness so will the white man stamp out all our customs (405). Moses believes that there is a true God behind this, but it is not clear whether he likes this true God (or his followers) coming and doing so. Moses name is an ironical hybrid containing references to a Christian founder and to Chukwu, the supreme Igbo God, and he makes use of both Igbo and Christian myth. Moses hovers between acceptance and creative appropriation of the Bible. He alternates between a perspective from which this true Gods activities may be rather deplorable, and his new beliefs, which he still cites in extraneous-sounding formulas such as This is the God about Whom we preach (405). The character of Moses exemplies the turmoil of hybridisation felt even by someone who is open to it, and simultaneously shows that indigenous knowledge and culture remain strong even as they change. The result is a new and distinctly African viewpoint.
GI , A GRAIN OF WHEAT (1967) 3.13 NG U
147
3.13
Ng ug , A Grain of Wheat (1967)
Born in 1938 in the heavily colonised Gikuyu region of Kenya, Ng ug was in his earlyNgugi 1 teens when the Mau Mau struggle for Kenyan independence began. His older brother joined the Movement, and his village suered in a campaign. Ng ug was educated inNgugi Kenya, Uganda and Britain, where he became interested in Fanonist Marxism and socialist ideas of nation. During his early years, he was a devout Christian. Later, he rejected this faith, and in 1976 changed his name from the original James Ng ug toNgugi the Gikuyu name of Ng ug wa Thiongo. His life between two cultures is an importantNgugi topic especially in his early writing. Ng ug advocated the abolition of the British-centredNgugi canon in Kenya as early as 1968, while teaching (English) Literature at the University of Nairobi. In 1977-78 he spent a year in prison without trial, for a play in which he criticised the Kenyan government. Barred from returning to any teaching post, and seeing the imprisonment of many intellectuals in Kenya, he chose exile in Britain, later in the US. In spite of the great success of his novels, plays and essays in English, Ng ug Ngugi decided to write in Gikuyu. In his 1986 book Decolonising the Mind , he describes the use of English in Africa as part of a mental subjugation, in that a value system is conveyed through the language, and cultural content is restricted to an educated elite. Ng ug waNgugi Thiongo lives as a professor in the US, writes ction in Gikuyu and criticism in Gikuyu and English, and edits a journal in Gikuyu as a cultural platform. The frame story of A Grain of Wheat is set during four days in December 1963, the last of which brings Uhuru (independence). Flashbacks in this frame describe the lives of ve people from the Gikuyu village of Thabai, who have known each other since childhood. Kihika went to live in the forest in 1952, as one of the rst Mau Mau freedom ghters, who raided and killed settlers. He became famous for capturing the local police fort of Mahee, a symbol of white power, but was caught and publicly hanged. Karanja became a guard, a chief and later a library helper for the local British occupiers, arguing that he did not want to die in the ght but to preserve himself for the future and especially for the possibility of winning the love of Mumbi, the woman he admires. Gikonyo, the carpenter, is the man who actually won Mumbis heart and married her. He did not go to live in the forest, but helped the Movement and as a result spent six years in detention camps. Mugo, who lives alone and has no family or intense friendships, has also suered the hardships of detention. He is famous in the village for sheltering Kihika after Kihika killed a District Ocer, for saving a woman from the whip during a punishment inflicted
Biographical information stems from Liukkonen, entry Ng ug wa Thiongo; ASRC; CamineroSantangelo, ch. 2; Rao; Gandhi 146; Boehmer, Literature 193. On Ng ug s politics of language cf. also Ashcroft, Griths & Tin 131.ngugi
1
148
on the whole village for Kihikas victory, and for organising a world-famous hunger strike in one of the detention camps he was in. Mumbi, Kihikas sister and Gikonyos wife, is coveted by Karanja and Mugo. She has always wanted to be courageous and strong and play her part in the resistance, but has not been able to full these dreams and sees herself as a failure. During Gikonyos imprisonment, she has born a child to Karanja. The British in the nearby settlement and agricultural research station of Githima, for whom Karanja works, play a minor role. John Thompson, the Administrative Secretary at Githima, is admired by Karanja as the epitome of white power, on which Karanja relies for his own power and for a feeling of security. Thompsons career was thwarted when he was commandant of the camp in which the hunger strike developed around Mugo, during which eleven Kenyans were beaten to death. Thompson and his wife leave on the eve of Uhuru, afraid of anti-white developments but still planning to extend some influence over Africa from home. Their colleague Dr. Lynd decides to stay, unwilling to give up what she feels is her home and to leave her wealth to Kenyans. The frame story takes the form of a detective thriller. Two Mau Mau veterans, General R. and Lt Koina, together with Gikonyo and the elders Warui and Wambui suspect that Kihika was caught because someone betrayed him. Their main suspect is Karanja, the collaborator, who has betrayed his oath to the Movement and led other homeguards into the forest to hunt down the Freedom Fighters (147). They plan a trap for Karanja to come into eect during the Uhuru celebration. They want Mugo to give the main speech at the celebration, and also to stand as area chief. Step by step, the reader learns that Gikonyo has betrayed his oath by confessing it to Thompson, then commander of the detention camp that he was in. Gikonyos motivation was his longing for his wife, but the process of his release took four years altogether, and he came home to nd Mumbi mother of Karanjas child. He has not acted kindly towards her or slept with her since. He does not know that Mumbi was never friends with Karanja. A chief at the time, Karanja took advantage of her relief and shock on the day he told her that Gikonyo was on his way home from detention. Earlier than the detective elders, the reader learns that Mugo, not Karanja, has betrayed Kihika to Thompson, because all Mugo wanted was to be left alone and not be involved in political struggles, and Kihika made him fear for his life by trying to draw him into his resistance work. A nancial reward was a secondary motivation for Mugo. During the Uhuru celebrations, Mugo publicly confesses his betrayal. He is summoned for trial by the elders, and is executed. Gikonyo breaks his arm during a symbolic competition with Karanja over Mumbis love. Mumbi is worried about her husband, which eventually leads to their reconciliation. Prompted by Mugos honesty, Gikonyo and Mumbi decide to work through their past and then enter into their private future by planning to have children; this dual resolution is symbolic of public developments in the new, free Kenya.
149
The canon read during Ng ug s studies at African universities was very traditional,Ngugi and Conrad was among the most recent authors included. Ng ug chose him as his spe-Ngugi cial subject (Bardolph 32). The resulting intertextuality has been discussed extensively; however, most critics read A Grain of Wheat as a rewriting of Conrads novel Under Western Eyes .2 In addition to strong parallels in the betrayal plot, Ng ug s lonely, alien-Ngugi ated, hesitant and self-conscious African characters, who are torn between moral ideals and failure or disillusionment, have invited comparison. Ng ug s revolutionary heroes areNgugi not free from betrayal, egoism and self-doubt, and the morality of their actions is not left unquestioned. They bear far more resemblance to the protagonists of Conrads long novels, including Under Western Eyes and Victory , than to those of Heart of Darkness. However, the references to Heart of Darkness cannot be missed. The most obvious echo lies in the description of the white characters. As in Arrow of God , these are satirised and exaggerated, appearing as sorry mists whose lives are outside the African writers detailed interest. Ng ug splits Heart of Darkness into its two modes of representationNgugi and alters their association with characters. His whites reflect the shallower level consisting of satire, ridicule and stereotypes (which Marlow mostly associates with Africans and the pilgrims), while he describes Kenyans with empathy, complexity and thoughts that expand Conrads criticism of empire (which is expressed through Marlow and Kurtz). In true colonial spirit, Thompson has come to Africa with the great moral idea (54) of bringing British cultural standards to Africans as a gift. His ideals appear more progressive than those of Conrads colonisers, as they have been motivated by an encounter with African students in England, whom Thompson has, to his genuine surprise, found as intelligent as British students. This liberal, relative openness is insidious in that Thompson sees the students main qualication in their ability to receive the British colonial light [that] shone in the darkness (54). His colonialist vision consists of anachronistic ideas (inspired by his readings of Kipling) that Conrad already denounced in the form of Kurtzs philanthropic smokescreen. This means that Ng ug both parodies Conrad andNgugi cites him as an authority. Thompson intends to write a book on Africa that is to include sentences like These primordial trees have always awed [. . . ] the primitive man (55) and stereotype-ridden studies of the African (56), an echo of Kurtzs report and of the discourse it reflects. His highest priority however, not unlike that of Conrads pilgrims, is his own standing. While African characters intensely remember detention and punitive campaigns for the suering they have caused, Thompson only sees their eect on his career, weariness and exasperation. He develops a Kurtz-style hatred of Africans when they do not comply. When Mugo and his fellow prisoners are on hunger strike, Thompson repeatedly desires to eliminate the vermin (134). Another white character,
2
Cf. e.g. Bardolph; Caminero-Santangelo, ch. 2.
150
Ngugi
Ngugi
D.O. Robson, who indulges in random violence against African civilians, only speaks one intelligible word during his death by Kihikas gun: brutes (187). Albert Schweitzers idea of a contagious moral ruin (56) inherent in Africa, quoted by Thompson, completes the Kurtz picture. Some of the ironic distance with which Ng ug describes the colonisers rubs o on the Kenyans who collaborate with them (who are otherwise given a rather fair analysis). Where Marlow sees a dog in a parody of breeches (Heart 38), Karanja appears as the picture of a dog that has been unexpectedly snubbed by the master it trusts when he hears that Thompson is going to leave for England (161). Ng ug gives this comparison an extra edge by showing that several colonisers give more human feeling and more expensive fare to dogs than they give to Africans, even to those who, like Karanja, humiliate themselves to the point of resembling dogs. Ng ug s complex analysis of ideas and symbols of ideas intensely engages with Heart of Darkness. Marlow both accepts an idea or spark from the sacred re (Heart 8) as a genuine justication of (honest) colonial eorts, and derides certain religious, economic and political ideas that motivate his fellow whites. He does not make explicit what idea(s) he sees as redeem[ing] (10). In A Grain of Wheat , ideas motivate black and white people, freedom ghters and collaborators. These ideas are shown and evaluated. Their value is not measured against abstract or absolute criteria, but against the historical situation. In the given situation, several, but not all, ideas championed by Kenyans are more appropriate than the ideas of all British characters. The main criteria in this are the degree to which an idea belongs to the land and its history, both in an emotional and an economic way, and the degree to which it benets the Kenyan community. One and the same (abstract) idea can acquire a totally dierent meaning and legitimacy depending on the context. The British moral vision of colonising (49) and the new visions opened to Kenyans by the Movement (10) are linked through the ideas of self-sacrice and of an improvement of African living conditions. Representatives of each ideology struggle for land and power. Their denitions of improvement and the actual beneciaries of the struggle are not the same, which makes their motivations into antagonistic ideas. Sometimes the same wording carries opposite meanings, such as the idea that all men [are] created equal (54). This phrase leads Kihika, a man following an idea (97), to campaign for a nation of free and equal Kenyans, and also relates Kenyan independence to the earlier successful Declaration of Independence of the USA, while it makes Thompson wish that all persons in the Empire felt and behaved as British subjects. Such pairs of conflicting interpretations remind one of Conrads question whether words as such carry any denite meaning at all.
Ngugi
151
Ideas migrate and are appropriated, either with their original goals, such as Mahatma Gandhis idea of a peoples unity against the coloniser, or with new goals, such as Biblical ideas used by Gikuyu churches after their break with the missions (170) and by Kihika, who is something of a liberation theologian. Ng ug s Kenyan characters are willing toNgugi learn from all kinds of ideas and to mix them with their own, for instance Christianity with local religion, and school knowledge with traditional knowledge, rather than reject any possibilities on the grounds of some concept of purity. They also welcome world-wide support from such sources as Kenyattas Indian and European lawyers. Sometimes ideas are planted or used maliciously, such as the evangelical movement that forbids political work to Christians and that appears to have been started by a missionary in Rwanda (84-85). Christian religion is a prime example of a set of ideas that can be employed for almost any cause, depending on who controls it. Other ideas that appear pure or at least worthwhile to some characters are tainted in implementation, or their upholders are treated unjustly by others. For instance, instead of the simple socialism and justice that Lt Koina equates with Uhuru, neocolonialism is becoming rampant, and the people who prot from the new nation are not the ones who fought for it. Ng ug shows that ideas are never peoples only motivation, but are complementedNgugi by love, desire, fears, family ties and many other impulses. Each characters childhood is described and contributes motivations, as regularly as Freudian clockwork: Karanja lacks a father gure and therefore seeks the powerful white man as a substitute, Kihika enjoys courage and public admiration as much as he enjoys politics, General R. nds his mother a collaborator with his petty colonial tyrant (212) father, an assistant native chief, and grows up to kill collaborators, etc. Several characters act in states of shock or trance, often caused by fear or unexpected events, which remind one of Marlows darktunnel sensations. In such states of shock or numbness, Mugo betrays Kihika, Mumbi sleeps with Karanja, and so on. Mugo confesses because of his own emotional tension, exacerbated by Mumbis trust, and not because of a belief in abstract honesty. Dreams and waking or sleeping nightmares are further frequent motivations. Rather than being true motivations, abstract ideas are often used as explanations or justications for decisions already taken on other grounds. Mugo fantasises that he is like Moses whose life is spared for an important social goal (Moses life in the reeds in Exodus 2, Mugos by the betrayal). This is a doubtful application both of popular religious ideas and of the idea of living for the community. A symbol that is outrightly misleading, in that it serves as a justication for something the character will later regret, appears in Gikonyos dream of Mumbi, which is caused by his physical hardships in detention. The vision that leads him to betray his oath (gaining him little advantage and a strong feeling of guilt) resembles Kurtzs picture
152
Ngugi
of a woman with a torch. Mumbis torch dispel[s] the darkness in front of her. [She appears as] an incorruptible reality in a world of changing shadows (112). The image and emphatically Conradesque language show that Gikonyo learns what Marlow may have suspected: that ideas, and symbols of ideas even more so, however sublime and trustworthy they look, have no xed meaning in themselves and do not guarantee a desirable outcome. The character whose belief in ideas is strongest, Kihika, in a certain sense loses his life to his idea: he is so full of it that he does not hear Mugos weak protest and does not realise that Mugo does not share what Kihika is sure all sensible people must believe. He therefore makes Mugo feel cornered, and loses his life to Mugos fear. Ng ug s analysis shows that a belief in an idea is neither stable, pure nor a universal justication for actions as Marlow hints, but may not quite believe. The characters are left with a mixture of hope and despair, of trust and disappointment in ideas and revolutionary goals. In the rst ending of the book, Wambui sees her trial of Mugo as a terrible anti-climax (243). His pointless death calls into question the idea of justice itself. The second ending shows Gikonyo and Mumbi, named after the Gikuyu Adam and Eve (Bardolph 33), on the way to openness and reconstruction. This prominent position of the more hopeful ending tips the dialectic towards hope and a continuation of the struggles. The characters are modelled as representatives of groups of people who have built the nation, a typology of Kenyans with respect to the Mau Mau struggle, and also of the now-redundant colonisers. As with Heart of Darkness, it is obvious that this book is constructed, not an attempt at mimesis of someones actual experience. In contrast to Heart of Darkness, A Grain of Wheat is obviously constructed with a view to didactic eects. Its characters have been invented (and, in the case of Kihika, based on a historical model (Bardolph 35)) for the sake of making real history tangible and a good read, not for the sake of removing art from reality. The novel deals very explicitly with economic, social and political problems of the day and is interspersed with passages that could almost be from an actual history book, which position the story as ctional, but typical, in Kenyas history. It is a foundation story, the history of the new nation from the mythical times of matriarchy to Uhuru. Like Achebe, Ng ug emphasises continuous history and shows that the colonial situation intensies internal tensions in Gikuyu society, but does not cause them. Ng ug s relation to Achebe is part of the emergence of a tradition of African writing in English.
Ngugi
Ngugi
153
Simultaneously, Ng ug establishes an especially detailed dialogue with Conrad andNgugi modernism in style and content. A Grain of Wheat develops the modernist opposition to Western rationalism into an analysis of peoples actual motivations, which are seldom rational. Motivations are the meeting point of layers of meaning that are comparable to Conrads. These include (indigenous) myth as a source of role models, religion and psychology. Egoistic motivations lead to dubious power structures colonial structures at Conrads time, neocolonial ones during the coming of Uhuru. Ng ug describes these with irony, like Conrad, butNgugi also outlines eorts to overcome them. His symbolism supports these eorts. It includes the grain of the title, the imagery on the gift Gikonyo wants to carve for Mumbi, and the weather. The end of the book, on the threshold of important developments that will shape the new nation, is bathed in tropical mist like Marlows ship before his important discovery of Kurtz in person. The outcome is yet undetermined. Social eorts are up against political, but also emotional obstacles, described in Conradian imagery such as darkness, gloom, detached voices, or impenetrability. This includes phrases like the sun seemed to die prematurely (179) and Life itself seemed a meaningless wandering (175). Characters often struggle for words in key situations. Like Conrad, Ng ug underlinesNgugi this by graphical ellipses (three dots). For his characters, however, after delays and misunderstandings, communication always turns out to be possible. People in Thabai nd that words and voices are adequate to [recreate] history (218). This practical possibility coexists with the vagueness of ideas, just as unexplained Gikuyu words and proverbs coexist with Conradesque diction. The narrative technique shows how modernist methods dovetail with African styles. Ng ug appropriates several written and oral genres, and it turns out that love story,Ngugi politics, detective thriller, documentary and philosophical analysis go well together. The narrator directly addresses the readers, as if they were listeners. The nonlinear narrative structure, which reminds the reader that the tale is a tale and not reality, goes together well with the interweaving of many peoples stories. The eect resembles that of an oral narrative, which may be a dialogue between people or the tale of a narrator who remembers dierent incidents as the story progresses. Each characters story achieves closure, they all matter, none is marginal. This gives the tale multiple centres and breaks with the Western tradition of introspection into one self, in favour of community and multivocal representation. The omniscient narrative voice, which frames shorter narrations by characters, is not named and does not take part in the developments until it identies itself as the voice of a spectator at the Uhuru celebration. It increasingly refers to the experience and knowledge it shares with the implicit narratees, assumed to be from Thabai. On the threshold of his decision against English, Ng ug positions his audience as Gikuyu. Ngugi
154
3.14
Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North (1969)
Tayeb Salih was born in the Sudan in 1929, in a family of small farmers and religious teachers.1 He studied at Khartoum and London Universities, and worked for the BBCs Arabic Service, as Director-General of Information in Qatar, as well as with Unesco in Paris and Qatar. Having spent most of his life outside the Sudan, Salih is a bicultural personality. He writes mostly short stories. Season of Migration to the North is a story told to an unspecied audience of gentlemen (1) by an unnamed narrator. He returns to his Sudanese village on the Nile in the 1950s after taking a doctorate in poetry in Britain. In the village, he nds a new inhabitant, Mustafa Saeed, who was born in Khartoum and has married a woman from the village. They have two small sons. Mustafa leads a quiet, unremarkable life. The villagers respect him for his business experience, which he generously places at the disposal of their agricultural co-operative. They do not know that he has spent thirty years in London and Oxford and worked as an economics lecturer. Only to the narrator, sworn to secrecy, does Mustafa tell about his time in Britain. There, Mustafa probably caused the suicides of three of the many women he slept with. He also killed his British wife with her consent, and went to prison for it. From several persons, the narrator hears more and more details about Mustafa, who at some point dies during a Nile flooding. While people are not sure whether this is an accident or a suicide, Mustafa has left a letter in which he gives custody of his wife and sons, and of a secret room in his house, to the narrator. Soon after the narrator discovers his love for Mustafas widow, Hosna Bint Mahmoud, she is forced by her father to marry an old man, Wad Rayyes. The couple are found dead in their bed, having killed each other ghting with a knife while Wad Rayyes attempted to enforce consummation of their marriage. When the narrators best friend blames the widow, the narrator tries to choke him. Shocked about himself and feeling guilty for not having married the widow himself (polygamously) to save her from forced marriage, the narrator opens Mustafas secret room. He nds shelves and shelves of European books on a wide range of subjects, ction and non-ction, as well as British xtures and furniture, letters from Mustafas British women and their photos. To calm himself, the narrator goes for a swim in the Nile. Half way from the Southern to the Northern shore, he nds himself too tired to go on. After considering the option of drowning, he decides that he wants to live, and shouts for help.
Biographical information stems from Heinemann.
3.14 SALIH, SEASON OF MIGRATION TO THE NORTH (1969)
155
This satirical novel focuses on the various lusts (Heart 57), including sex, power and sometimes death, whose gratication Mustafa as much as Kurtz liberally seek as soon as they are among the Other people and free from the restraints of their own society. These lusts are intimately connected with the wish to invade or colonise the lives of others, in Mustafas case those of white women. This in turn can cause an irrational attraction of the (emotionally) colonised to the intruder. Mustafa repeats that the emotions of both sides are caused by the germ of a fatal disease that has stricken [them] a thousand years ago (34). This may stand for the point in time when the rst encounter infected Africans and Europeans with both attraction and aggression for each other. Mustafa takes over this image from a lawyer at his trial, and it is eventually adopted by the narrator. In this context, Mustafa repeats that his store of hackneyed phrases is inexhaustible (35, 39), aware that these basic, ubiquitous lusts have always played such a strong role in lives and literature that their telling verges on the banal. Mustafas British girlfriends strongly desire the exotic Other. Playing on this desire, he makes use of the stereotypes they harbour, and represents himself to them as a naked, primitive creature [from] the jungles whose face is Arab like the desert and whose head is African and teems with a mischievous childishness (38). The women laugh about stereotypes clad in such simple words, but they do fall for Mustafa because of his exotic flair, which he builds up with the help of incense and decorative items in his flat. He in turn is attracted by their strange, European smell (25) and white thighs (163). Mustafa identies people with cities or landscapes, and again and again pictures his British women and himself as the North and the South, or the ice and the heat, which yearn for each other. As with Kurtz, whose lover and adversary is the wilderness rather than any person, this makes the exoticist desire appear universal, almost impersonal. Just as Marlow identies Kurtzs female African friend or the gendered (dream-)geography of the long dark Congo-River passage with the continent, Salihs narrator equates the feminine with the invaded country. With satirical exaggeration, the novel shows how stereotypes complement each other, and each side projects the various lusts onto the other. While the villagers on the Nile regard Britain as the land of hanky-panky (80), Mustafas girlfriend Ann Hammond pictures herself as the reincarnation of a (lust) slave girl to her oriental ruler (142, 146). Another woman even wants to be burned in the wild and impassioned rites (106) of her black god Mustafa: as with Kurtz who gets himself adored (Heart 56) and feels that whites appear as supernatural beings (50), desire gives a quasi-religious dimension to skin colour. Stereotypical discourse is fuelled by representation in books and institutions of learning. Ann Hammond studies Oriental languages. The European books on Mustafas shelves are lined up like Kurtzs impaled African heads. In some sense, books are like
156
heads, because both contain thoughts. Like Kurtzs trophies, Mustafas books stand for the Other that has been seized and has changed the man who has seized it. Mustafa initially describes himself as a cold, unemotional intellectual, and is seen by others as heartless (28), perhaps hollow at the core (Heart 58) like the similarly multi-talented Kurtz. He originally only sets out to make sexual conquests, and to the extent that the sea is harmful when ships are wrecked against its rocks (41) accepts but does not encourage the despairing suicides of his three girlfriends, which are caused by the intensity of their emotions and by their discoveries of his indelity. Simultaneously, Mustafa publishes essays on economics, which advocate a fair, liberal interaction between Britain and the former colonies. Mustafas call for humanity in economics (35), like Kurtzs philanthropic words, contradicts his actual acts and feelings. While in Britain, he sees himself as a sexual conqueror (60), a coloniser of the private and the emotional. He pictures his sexual encounters as a war with bow and sword and spear and arrows (34). Mustafa gains access to his own emotional potential only when he meets Jean Morris, who engages him as an equal in his war. She plays with his feelings and destroys his belongings, and she is the rst person he falls in love with and marries. Going native begins with desires for sex and the exotic, and ends in a wish for death. Initially it appears that only Jean indulges in her desire for death (which can be interpreted as the Freudian death instinct). She kisses a dagger [. . . ] fervently and repeatedly looks at it with variations of astonishment, fear, and lust (164) and longing (158). Her death is described quite like a mutual orgasm, initiated by her. Jean wants Mustafa to die with her, and it is possible that she contaminates him with her desire for death (or awakens his death instinct). As in Heart of Darkness, it is not really clear who contaminates whom with what, and whether a man goes under to the self or the Other or to desires awoken by their interaction. Jean Morris wants Mustafa to kill her and then commit suicide. Mustafa nds that his life has reached completion (92) after killing Jean with his own hands. He presumably achieves his own death in the Nile flooding, after he lacked the courage to commit suicide immediately after killing her, and a British court, struggling with liberal and racist stereotypes, did not sentence him to death as he had hoped. Jean Morris, the only woman who is his equal in his sexual battles, is the only one whose picture he paints and keeps in his secret room in the Nile village, reminding one of Kurtzs picture. The men who gratify their primal lusts are regarded with a mixture of suspicion and restrained envious desire by Marlow and by Salihs narrator. Salihs narrator again and again stresses his rootedness in the village, his pure love for his grandfather and for his own lawfully wedded wife, and his supercial relationship with the British, whom he did
3.14 SALIH, SEASON OF MIGRATION TO THE NORTH (1969)
157
not nd exotic but just like us (3). He insists that their colonisation of the Sudan was not a tragedy as we imagine, nor yet a blessing as they imagine (60), but one act of dominance among others that will become history and be replaced by a feeling of normality. Just as Marlow nds his alter ego (or the id to his superego) in Kurtz, Salihs markedly self-controlled and non-exoticist narrator eventually [begins] from where Mustafa Saeed had left o (134) and identies with him. His face begins to remind people of Mustafas, and he may experience his own share of contagion by violence when he tries to choke his best friend in this village in which no one ever kills anyone (140). He comes to hate himself and to feel that [his] adversary is within (134), and he mistakes his own face in the mirror for Mustafas. Just as Marlow returns to society and gradually manages to reduce his emotional intensity, Salihs narrator chooses not to drown but to live on with his friends and family, whether or not life has meaning (168-69). Mustafas Sudanese widow Hosna Bint Mahmoud, a formerly quiet and well-adjusted native of the narrators village, falls under the spell of her husband like the Intended (and the Russian) fall under Kurtzs spell. It appears that someone like Kurtz or Mustafa, open to violence and to extreme experiences, sends out some strong signals that can make him attractive at home as much as abroad. Although Mustafa does not tell her about his past, Hosna becomes like a city woman (101). She tries to refuse marriage to Wad Rayyes, which the villagers consider a Westernised rejection of tradition. When this fails, she kills her new husband and accepts her own death as the consequence. She cannot stand having another sexual partner after Mustafa. It does not become clear whether she acts in pure self-defence or has taken over some of Mustafas destructive potential without knowing that he had it. Hosna takes on the role of the Intended in a long conversation with the narrator. After a sunset in which, as at the beginning of Heart of Darkness, the sun dies, this encounter is insistently enveloped in nights darkness, and [n]othing remained but [Hosnas] voice (89), which fades over into a memory of Mustafas voice, just like the Intendeds low voice seemed to have the accompaniment of [. . . ] the whisper of [Kurtzs] voice (Heart 74). Like the Intended, Hosna is the woman who does not know about her mans dark side, and who represents his tie to society. Her lamentation of a woman for a husband she did not know (92) resembles that of the Intended, and the narrator does not give her the knowledge she lacks. He later regrets this, feeling that he might have avoided her death if he had told her about Mustafas past and personality. He thus questions Marlows policy of leaving women out of it. Salihs narrator takes a few faltering steps in the direction of feminism, seeing both Mustafas reication of white women and Wad Rayyes reication of Hosna as evil (87).
158
While this novel also refers to many other Eastern and Western pre-texts, including Othello (38) and the Arabian Nights (34), the dialogue with Heart of Darkness is evident in the story line as well as in verbal echoes and citations. Although this book was originally written in Arabic, and one would expect that this would make it harder to insert direct verbal references, there are many. The references oscillate between a satirical and a serious mode. An example of this is the Nile, that snake god (39), which as part of the stereotype helps Mustafa to get women interested, but is also a river as symbolic as the snaking Congo was for Marlow. In this river, Salihs narrator nds himself exhausted half-way to the Northern shore. In the middle between South and North, the Sudan and Britain, the traveller is in danger of going under to the encounter. Like Marlow, Salihs narrator survives to tell the tale of the man who went before him. This and other key scenes are set in darkness (including Jeans death, Hosna as the Intended, and the narrator in the secret room). The narrator has a nightmarish feeling (14) on rst hearing about Mustafas secret, and a feeling of waking from the nightmare (168) when he shakes o his fascination in the nal river scene. On another river, the Thames, Mustafa recreates Marlows experience of travelling into the unknown. Looking to right and left, at the dark greenness, at the Saxon villages (27) with their veil of mist (28), he gives a description that hovers between Marlows homely, reassuring Thames valley with its human settlements and British mist, and his fear of the greenness and white fog that envelops him like a dark tunnel on the Congo. Appropriating Mr. Kurtz as an African, Salih pictures African agency that is more than resistance, and that comprises aggression and power. In Britain, Mustafa does not want to be patronisingly regarded as the black favourite of leftists and liberals, or condescendingly treated as a (pseudo) equal. He wants to be recognised in his profession, and to make sexual conquests that prove he is the stronger one. The mirroring of Heart of Darkness in Salihs plot and characters establishes a symmetry between the two books. Mustafa sees his desire for revenge as similar to the earlier colonial impetus, and as similarly strong. By this, he establishes a struggle between equals. However, Salih also points out that though a symmetry of aggression and revenge can be attractive and even pleasurable for a while, it is ultimately no solution. It destroys Mustafa just as power has earlier destroyed Kurtz. Marlow and Salihs narrator, who decide against violence and try to establish some normality, survive. It may not be a coincidence that it is an Arabic-speaking African author who sees himself positioned to construct this image of strong African agency. Rather than rst reconstructing their peoples past, Muslim postcolonial writers can work in the tradition of written documents of their history, which includes conquests and strong rulers, and which to some extent whites respected more than they did Central African cultures,
3.15 JOSHI, THE STRANGE CASE OF BILLY BISWAS (1971)
159
even in colonial times. In fact, the decorations and books Mustafa uses to give his flat in Britain an exotic appeal are Eastern more than Southern, in spite of his insistence on the mutual yearning of South and North. He has studied all the Orientalist stereotypes and uses them to his own sexual advantage. This corresponds to another stereotype, that of the sly, egotistic, Muslim male obsessed with sex, ever sure of himself and in control. This self-image disintegrates when Jean Morris establishes a symmetry of power with Mustafa, and both are destroyed by their desire of conquest. Salihs satire does not spare either side, and he criticises patriarchal Sudanese villagers and the corrupt new rulers of Africa (118) as much as neocolonial British intellectuals. To continue with rewritings by authors from colonies of occupation (Africa except South Africa), skip to page 221. To continue with Images of Africa, skip to page 172.
3.15
Arun Joshi, The Strange Case of Billy Biswas (1971)
Arun Joshi (1939-93) was born in India, and was educated in India and the US.1 He wrote ve novels and a collection of short stories, and worked as a management consultant in Delhi. The story begins in about 1947 and spans nearly two decades.2 The narrator, Romesh (Romi) Sahai, studies Literature in the US and takes a summer course on Henry James in New York, where he stays as the subtenant of Bimal (Billy) Biswas. Both are about 22 and come from Delhis smart society (3). However, Billy prefers to live in Harlem with poor African-Americans and share their ways of life, because he feels that [w]hite America [is] much too civilized for him (5). Though his father wants him to become an engineer, Billy studies Anthropology. One of his friends is a psychiatrist from Sweden, Tuula, who is interested in altered states of awareness such as hypnosis. Romi and Billy also become friends. At the end of the summer, Romis father dies, and his family forces him to give up his studies and return to Delhi to look after his mother and sister (23). Romi becomes a civil servant in the Indian Administrative Service. Billy completes his doctorate and then returns to his family as a lecturer in the Anthropology department at the University of Delhi. Reasons of work and family only permit Romi and Billy to meet a few times. One of their rare encounters takes place when Billy after much
Biographical information stems from Indiaclub; Damodaran; Ezekiel & Mukherjee 287. See also Sharrad et al. 2 Romi and Billy rst meet at about 22, and are about 39 at Nehrus death in 1964 (8, 106, 120).
1
160
hesitation marries Meena Chatterjee, a typical upper-class Delhi woman. Romi marries a Delhi woman called Situ, also from his own class. Meena tries to keep Billy from going on research excursions. During what she wants to be his last excursion to a primitive people (103) of rural India, Billy disappears without trace. After a fruitless search, the authorities declare that he has been eaten by a tiger. Romi becomes the Collector, a district administrator and magistrate, of a rural district in central India. Ten years after Billys disappearance, there is a terrible drought, and while touring the suering villages, Romi suddenly nds himself addressed by Billy, who is living among the villagers. Romi learns that Billy has left his own social environment because he could not stand life there any longer, being intensely drawn to the lives of the tribals (98). Billy is now living as one of them, with his local wife Bilasia and two sons. The two men meet a few times after that, and Billy explains his search for self. Although Romi is in despair about the drought and is doing what he can, a group of men eventually come to put pressure on him to alleviate the starvation and thirst in their villages. The conflict escalates into violence, and just when the police of the district are aiming their guns at the men, Billy steps forward from among them to negotiate a non-violent settlement. He has not come with them, but has met them on their way and has stepped in to preserve the peace. When Situ has an attack of recurrent migraine, the news about her illness spreads, and Billy comes at night to treat her with magic [and] forest drugs (196). Situ insists on nding out who has cured her, and Romi nally gives in to her pressure and tells her, but swears her to secrecy. However, she informs Billys father and his Delhi wife Meena, who immediately come to see Romi to make him retrieve Billy. When Romi refuses, Billys father contacts the Chief Secretary, Romis highest superior, who promptly orders the police forces of Romis district to nd Billy. At their rst attempt, Billy kills a police constable with a spear. After a search through rough terrain, a policeman shoots Billy dead but claims that he only wanted to hit him in the leg to stop him from running. At Bilasias request, Billys body is cremated. Romi takes some of his ashes to Billys father and to Meena, and practically lays his death at their door, although he himself also feels guilty, and he also believes that by rst contacting him, Billy had already exposed himself to a danger of that kind. Joshi precisely names the place of his story, the Maikala Hills in Madhya Pradesh, where Billy lives among the Adivasi people. These people are called tribals in Indian politics and primitives in anthropology, words which Billy and Romi take over unquestioningly. Their descriptions of the Adivasi way of life are short and quite supercial rather than anthropological, and are in accordance with accepted scholarly discourse.3
Cf. Britannica CD, entries India, untouchable, South Asian Arts: Dance and theatre: The performing arts in India, South Asian Arts: Dance and theatre: Indian dance: Folk dance, Asian Peoples and Cultures: South Asian cultures: Traditional culture patterns: Religion and art.
3
161
Interestingly, this novel is not about colonisation. Its beginning roughly coincides with Indian independence, though this is only alluded to in passing. It does not focus on an encounter between Europeans and non-Europeans, but still pictures a social contrast that is in many respects as intense as the one between Conrads Europeans and his Congolese. The educated, wealthy, Anglicised and largely English-speaking (because multilingual) society of Delhi, to which Billy and Romi belong, has little knowledge of Adivasi villages, where people make a living on subsistence farming. Generally, people live and work and marry only within their class, to the point of a (Social) Darwinist thousand years of selective breeding (59) which also means that most middle-class and upper-class Indians are of far lighter complexion than the Adivasi. At the beginning of the friendship between Billy and Romi, the reader is alerted overtly that this novel is a rewriting of Heart of Darkness. Billy talks of a play about a chap from New York, quite educated and all that, [who] goes down to the Congo and is so incensed by the heat and the light and the primitive music that he just goes out [. . . ] and starts killing everybody. Billy can quite imagine something like that happening to oneself (7), but in fact, something rather opposite or complementary is going to happen to him. His story responds to the various lusts of Kurtzs encounter with Africans, but without the lust for conquering, power or bloodshed. Simultaneously, this novel echoes and explores Marlows awareness of the deep human feelings of some dancers on the shore, which leads him to provoke his listeners with the question You wonder I didnt go ashore for a howl and a dance? (Heart 38). Billy searches for himself, he wants to get away from his oppressive family and society (or civilisation), and he wants erotic energies, music, drink and a certain atmosphere. He conflates all these personal desires with the Adivasi Others (especially the women), and with an intense perception of nature. Where this conflation is described, and only there, the style and wording become intensely Conradesque, with some satirical overtones. When Romi meets Billy among the villagers, he initially suspects that the jungle, a dark and mysterious shadow whose mystery very few Collectors had unravelled since the race of Collectors began (102) had done something [. . . ] unspeakable [. . . ] to this friend (103). Drums have an important symbolic function, expressing both Billys emotions when he plays them and the attraction he feels when villagers play. Darkness dominates the atmosphere of nearly all decisive scenes. In the forest, Billy feels like the rst man on earth facing the earths rst night (118), like Marlow travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world (Heart 35). Billy equates Bilasia with the essence of that primitive force (140), just as for Marlow Kurtzs woman friend is like the jungles own tenebrous and passionate soul (Heart 60). The repeated equation of the Adivasi woman with nature and the description of her natural beauty, pride and grief make her a close
162
relative of Kurtzs African woman. Her sexuality is even described as primeval a conflation of totally unrelated things (139). Like the exoticist Isabella in Salihs Season of Migration to the North , Billy feels that sexual closeness to the Other is like the presence of his god (140). Billy derives his view of the Adivasi as paradisiacal children of nature from a discourse he especially gets to know through his studies of anthropology. His feelings and desires can be read with empathy, or they can be read as the product of terrible stereotypes, or both. He denies that primitives have a civilisation and produce works of man (118). With them, he feels as though his life had been reduced to those elements with which we [. . . ] are born (139). Billy initially assumes a polarisation between primitive and civilised, like Marlows. He conflates primitive desire with primitive people, and then in turn identies the abstract concept of primitive people with certain groups of actual people. Billy identies it with the Congolese in the play, with African-Americans in Harlem and with the Adivasi. This means that he ignores the complexities of their lives and practically equates the three groups (which is even more astonishing for an anthropologist character who is supposed to study the complexities of peoples, than in Marlows case). The dierence from Heart of Darkness is that the conflation of primitive desire with primitive people is Billys original impulse, not the by-product of intrusion and greed. Billy feels that he has become morally corrupted in the city, experiencing the area of darkness that lies at the heart of each of us (188), and that he can nd his true and honest self only in the village. (This reminds one of Singhs argument that Kurtz does actually not go native enough to learn something, cf. p. 24.) Freed from the context of egotism and moral decay that it has in Heart of Darkness, Billys quest explores the possibilities and the limits of an encounter between the fantasies and discourse of city people and the actual lives of a society they label primitive. After some time with the Adivasi, Billy begins to doubt whether his binary assumption and his conflation make sense. At some point, he realises that [i]t is amazing how unhappy everyone really is, even here in the village (189), and that he is really seeking something else beyond his Adivasi experience (187, emphasis in the original), something very personal and possibly akin to religion. This may be the point where he makes his way back to Romi, who has been a real friend for him although he is a city person. Even the radical break Billy has made has not cut him loose from his past or changed his identity as completely as he had fantasised. His own doubts in his search take him back to a contact with the city and eventually to death. Romi feels early on that Billys relationship with Bilasia is destined, perhaps inevitably, to end in a tragedy (141) and that at some point Billy wait[s] for death (135). There is a possibility that Billy contacts Romi or kills the constable in order to end his village life.
163
When the city comes to reclaim Billy, the villagers do not want to let him go. As is common in fantasies about city men going primitive, he is charismatic and has some abilities they do not have, such as knowledge of waterholes during the drought (101), and they see in him a king, priest or magician. After his death Romi feels that the villagers range Billy among the numerous man-gods of the primitive pantheon (234), and they build him a shrine. His similarity with Kurtz ends there. Billy rather reminds one of Mahatma Gandhi, ascetic with respect to food and accommodation, naked except for a loincloth, and intervening to preserve the peace. He becomes violent only in selfdefence when confronted by the police constable, and there it is arguably his reawakened city identity that guides the spear (as the echo of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in the title of the novel suggests). The violent people in this novel, of course, are the city people. Billys father and Meena want to own him, not to understand him. Unlike Bilasia, city women are (kept) out of it. They are deemed to need a man to look after them (23), and even Romi has a reflex not to take women seriously. He answers the oer of a young adult woman to help search for Billy, with the words You are a funny girl, arent you? (89). If a city woman ceases to be out of it, then beware, as the characters of Meena and Situ show. Their egotism and limited thinking are attributed to class upbringing and convention, and they lead to Billys death. Romi, too, is part of the danger for Billy. Not only is he a professional representative of civilisation, but he also precipitates Billys end by mentioning him to Situ. Bilasia gives her own explanation of why Billy goes back to Romi: he wants to prevent bloodshed during the drought, and feels that Romi needs to be protected from himself. Romi assumes that city people have lost certain modes of expression or intuition, while the villagers use folklore to say what mans language [is] grossly inadequate to express (159). He feels that dreams and myth can convey meaning that is outside waking everyday language in the cities. Billy sometimes experiences his desires and their fullment as a dream (or hallucination) or, from a city perspective, as a nightmare. He may owe this perception to what he has learned from Tuula, the psychiatrist. Shortly before his marriage to Meena, Billy dreams of Tuula, in reality a lesbian and ascetic, going heterosexual and dressing like the worst floozy [. . . ] in Times Square (55). This dream is an image of someone going against her nature, just as Billy is temporarily going against his nature by remaining in the city. Billy understands the dream and Romi does not, which reinforces the idea that Billy is better able to understand intuitive knowledge than Romi.
164
A village headman, Dhunia, tells Romi a local myth about a king who gives up his kingly privileges and devotes his life to carving a very special temple statue. He succeeds and is oered a boon by the gods. The kings brothers hear of the oer and, jealous, poison him (155-56). Billy however tells the same myth with a dierent ending: the king begins a wonderful statue of a god, but is not able to carve its face, and dies without having succeeded (168-70). These two versions can be read as interpretations of Billys life. Dhunia, in a premonition or warning, talks of a king (Billy) who has achieved his lifes aim and whose brothers (city people) are jealous and destroy him. Billy talks of a king who has achieved a lot but not his actual goal, and whose temple is therefore dedicated to fate. Fate or chance in an incoherent and meaningless world (44) is one of a whole range of interpretations for Billys life. Others include Tuulas psychological explanations, and Billys own materialist-spiritual analysis of city society, which implies that people need to retrieve the dimensions of life lost by concentrating on money. Romi describes himself as professing the usual amalgam of western pragmatism [. . . ] and Hindu dharma (38, emphasis in the original; dharma might be explained as religious ethics). Though somewhat half-heartedly, he contributes a basic openness for the supernatural or religious possibility that circles within circles and worlds within worlds (190), a superhuman presence or a god apart from the gods of civilized India (225) influence Billys life and those of the Adivasi. Romis simultaneous scepticism and openness towards many perspectives show how dicult it is for Indians of his class and generation to nd their place in life and to relate to the groups of people with whom they come into contact. This is partly a question of postcolonial hybridity: Romi feels new to India (34) when he comes back from America. He explains that Billy studies Indian herbs (172), and the word Indian sounds as distant as if he were a foreigner. Romi, whose narrative purports to be written, not oral, sometimes writes as if his unspecied audience consisted of foreigners, when he explains a wedding rite (59) or states that some people behave as they always do in India (65). On the other hand, he uses several Hindi words without explaining them, even as a gloss or better wording for something he rst renders in English. Billys radical search for self is an extreme reaction to a general situation in which many people of his social group feel destabilised, aware of Indian and Western(ised) influences and of social dierences in India. Romi is fascinated by Billy because Billy intensely explores the space between Indian family values, which are a form of community orientation, and Western individualism with the kind of modernist self-condence that permits him to sacrice his family ties for his search for self. Simultaneously, Billy feels strongly about the hypocrisy, the social restrictions and the inauthenticity of the city
165
society in which he has grown up, and sees Westernisation as one of the causes. Billys father is a traditional Indian family man, and yet, paradoxically, he is proud of being Anglicised, having served in the British-Indian civil service. Billy is critical both of his Indian and British cultural heritage. Like Marlow, Romi is aected by the same basic situation as the exceptional man but is more moderate and normal, and is strongly interested in him, both to oset and to mirror himself. Like Marlow, Romi tries to explain the other mans life but also stresses how hard it is to understand. Romi is clearly a member of smart [city] society (3). In Harlem, he feels wary of [. . . ] negroes (5). In India, he wastes a lot of water for his own convenience during the drought apparently without seeing a contradiction to his pity for the villagers, and he goes around with an armed guard to protect himself from the poor. Distantly, he talks of the great incomprehensible tragedy that was rural India (66). The rich are so far removed from the poor, feeling both helpless and intent on preserving their own privileges, as if they came from another country. Romi does not claim that he understands more at the end of his experience, but he does begin to respect what is outside his own sphere. He may have learned this from Billy directly: Billy questions decisions that his father makes as a judge, and stresses that the motivations of the accused may have been outside the range of what is taken into account in such a court (47-51). Romis insight is foreshadowed when he, as a magistrate, sentences a tribal to prison and wonders whether his sense and system of justice is adequate or compatible in this case. His doubts increase. At the end of the novel Romis driver tells him that Dhunia has killed the policeman who has shot Billy, and Romi simply does not want to know (242). He no longer wants to interfere in the lives of people he may not understand. To continue with rewritings by authors from colonies of occupation (India), skip to page 242.
166
3.16
Patrick White, A Fringe of Leaves (1976)
A Fringe of Leaves is loosely inspired by the experiences of Eliza Fraser, wife of a Scottish sea captain whose brig stranded on a reef o Queensland in 1836. The heroine of the novel, Ellen Gluyas Roxburgh, has grown up as a poor farmers daughter in Cornwall, where she has acquired extensive experience of nature, poverty and the rougher side of life. After the death of her parents, she has accepted Austin Roxburghs proposal, and has been educated by him and by his mother in their elegant home in Cheltenham to be a lady. The couple, in spite of an age dierence of about twenty years, appear loving and well-balanced, with Austins Pygmalion ambitions complemented by Ellens mixture of dependence and pity for her husbands frail health. In 1835, they travel to Van Diemens Land (Tasmania) to visit Austins brother Garnet. Garnet has been sent to the antipodes by his family after he was accused of forging a signature. As opposed to his restrained, bookish brother, Garnet is a tough farmer. Ellen does not like him, but at some point she explores his sexual attractiveness and discovers a form of lust that she has not found with her rather inhibited husband, but which she does not enjoy. She is to suer from guilt for this unconfessed lapse for the rest of her life. As both Austin and Ellen do not feel drawn to what has become of Austins formerly beloved and admired brother, they look for a passage home. The cargo brig that takes them on board runs aground on a reef during a storm. The people on board leave in two boats. The second mate, who is in the better boat, refuses to take the weaker one in tow and cuts the rope between them. After days, or weeks, or months (226) of physical hardships in the weaker boat, during which Ellen is delivered of a stillborn child that may be Austins or Garnets, she arrives on an island with her husband and a few crew members. When an all-male group of Aborigines come to meet them, a crew member kills one of them with his gun. In retaliation, the Aborigines kill the captain and Austin Roxburgh. They lead o the remaining men of the crew, and apparently kill them too, as Ellen is later to come across the singed remains of one of them. A group of Aboriginal women come for Ellen. They remove her clothes and rub her skin with charcoal. Ellen adds a girdle of vines, the fringe of leaves. She is taken into the home of a polygamous family as a nanny and servant, but without any sexual tasks. She is treated as what she feels is a slave (251-80), having to work hard and being last in the strict order in which people receive food. Simultaneously, she feels that she is treated as a supernatural creature (243) or demi-goddess (267) in certain ritual contexts. At some point, Ellen happens upon a cannibalistic funeral, from which her hosts have tried to keep her away. Disgusted but driven by hunger, she eats a few shreds of flesh remaining on a human bone that falls out of a bag unnoticed on the mourners way home. Although she feels that she has partaken of a spiritual experience akin to a sacrament (272) and has thus
3.16 WHITE, A FRINGE OF LEAVES (1976)
167
gained access to some hitherto unknown part of herself, she adds this experience to her store of guilt she never talks about. When her adoptive tribe (275, 376) crosses over to the mainland for a corroboree, she meets an escaped convict, Jack Chance, who is living with another Aboriginal group. He agrees to take her to the nearest white settlement, the penal colony at Moreton Bay, from which he has fled. During their arduous journey, the two discover their love for each other, and Ellen also discovers a passion (311) that is neither restrained as with her husband nor unpleasantly lust-driven as with Garnet. Ellen wants Jack to come with her, and intends to obtain a pardon for his life sentence. However, on reaching the settlement, Jack returns to the forest for fear of renewing the traumatic prison experience. Ellen is found on the doorstep of a farm, naked and delirious with fever. After her recovery, she is sent to stay with the commander at Moreton Bay. To confront both her own guilt and Jacks past, Ellen goes out to encounter a chain-gang of male prisoners and a group of female prisoners. She keeps pointing out the chasm between the privileged settlers and the prisoners to her hosts, who ignore it or rationalise it as just punishment. Eventually, Ellen is invited to Sydney by the Governor, from where she is to go back to Britain. On board the ship, she meets a rich London widower, Mr. Jevons, who ts her pattern of men who both oer protection and invite her pity. Moreover, his original accent is as lower-class as hers. It remains open whether she will respond to his admiration. Ellen spends practically all of her life in dierent captivities. This provides an unexpected rereading of Heart of Darkness. Kurtz and Marlow are usually read as travellers on a search for self, which is an active pursuit directed only by their own unconscious. Ellen is again and again thrown into situations, by birth, chance or social convention, in which she does not have much choice and does not try to choose. Each captivity comprises some kind of initiation, and some trial or test of her strength. In this light, the quests in Heart of Darkness appear far more passive, and also less universal what travellers nd out about themselves is shaped by the situation in which they happen to be. This shows that universalism misrepresents not only the places of the journey, but also the quest itself. While on a modernist search for self, Marlow is simultaneously aware of fate and chance, which foreshadows the postmodern idea that each person is thrown into a historical situation they have not chosen or made. In A Fringe of Leaves , this idea is symbolised by the time spent drifting in the boat, and by Ellens identication with the prisoners. Ellens endurance and adaptability are linked to her gender. The lady quester, whom men would like to keep out of it (away from mens talk (188), a ships deck and the prisoners, for instance), is aware of the limited space granted her, just as Marlow
168
is sometimes aware of what is beyond [his] power of meddling (40). She nds herself in relation to these limitations. Ellen explores all her dierent captivities, and in the process of adjusting to them learns more and more about herself. She realises that a certain resignation is part of herself, and that she has taken over feminine roles, such as that of an enabler and a listener. Society maintains that a lady must pursue not a search for self, but conformism and self-correction (73) according to norms, up to a cultivated self-deceit (177), an internalised variant of Marlows lie to the Intended. Ellen becomes aware of these expectations but is not in a position to reject them in full. While White apparently found a female character more suited to exploring the passive aspects of a search for self, he uses the concept of class to show that the feminine approach is acquired, not innate. Ellen really has (at least) two selves, distinguished by her maiden name and married name. The poor Cornwall girl, marginalised in British society, has the strength and the survival skills that a lady is not supposed to possess, to such an extent that White can talk of the spirit of Ellen Gluyas coming to Mrs. Roxburghs rescue (263). Her face has a masculine rmness (27), and she secretly prefers the company of men. Ellens femininity is taken straight from literature. This novel is Victorian in pace and tone. The ironic social prologue and epilogue parody the trivial conversations ladies were expected to have. After in various ways transgressing the limits of self-experience conceded to women in that society, Ellen suspects that self-knowledge might remain a source of embarrassment, even danger (341). Sexual and spiritual self-knowledge contribute to her feelings of guilt. She rather admires men who feel no guilt, such as the second mate who has separated the two boats. Ellen feels that such men shape their own lives, but that this assertiveness is not for her. She even sometimes tries not to search for herself, because it would be too painful. This pain resembles Marlows insofar as both Marlow and Ellen have found something, but they cannot really name or explain it, and they do not stand much chance of changing the situation in which they have found it. Ellen is as acutely aware as Marlow that what she understood had little to do with words (364). How dicult it is to pinpoint what she has found in the search for self is emphasised by the many symbols (such as garnets and birds), which are often hard to interpret or can be invested with various meanings, reminding one of Conrads halo eect. Moreover, all protagonists provide dierent and changing evaluations of each other and of situations, and oscillate between ambivalent feelings. Ellens several selves, which she nds in dierent situations, are in conflict with each other. Having grown up poor and Othered as Cornish, colonised by Austin and his mother, she has never developed the imperialist attitude of superiority that most of the settlers take for granted. She can therefore identify with Jack Chance; but she also distances herself from Jack Chance the convict (321, 332) or brute (319). Later,
169
she is simultaneously sympathetic towards convicts in captivity and afraid of escaped convicts. If there is a self deeper than the others, it only surfaces during her fever: when found outside the farm, she introduces herself simply as Ellen (336), with neither of her last names, and correspondingly this is the only situation in which she is completely naked. Back in Moreton Bay, Ellen tries to conform to expectations. When she does not, and confronts authority gures such as a commander and a priest with her knowledge and her compassion about the prisoners lives, she is taken for a hysterical female (388), and is ignored. Realising that her identities of survivor and of fugitive from the Aborigines do not belong in this society, Ellen eventually chooses the most socially suitable self, that of a lady, and is on the point of completing it by flirting with Mr. Jevons. A lady friend sees this as a sign of an ordered universe (405), a stability that is desirable in spite of the limitations it brings. This strongly resembles Marlows paradoxical view of the advantages and disadvantages of what he calls civilised society. Just as Marlow lies to the Intended, Ellen represses certain knowledge or gives up on certain aspects of herself to realign herself with society. With this feminine character, whom elegant society has taught to live and survive in emotional captivity, the fear of going under to the Other is studied in the form of an actual enslavement. Marlow sees Kurtz as an emotional slave of darkness, with the distinct possibility that this darkness is brought to him by the Congolese. A Fringe of Leaves is a fantasy of an actual enslavement by Aborigines. This fantasy is sustained by an extremely negative image of Aborigines. Ellens time with them is a descent into just about all the horror (256) one can imagine: slavery and bodily abuse, extreme patriarchy, cannibalism, poverty, starvation and disgusting food that includes fleas and lice, repulsive illnesses treated only by ineectual magic, nakedness and a fetid lack of hygiene, murder of the ships crew, polygamy, and sex between a husband and his two wives in front of Ellens eyes. Apart from bark cloth, meals of opossum and a few tools, the novel describes remarkably few cultural forms specic to Australian Aborigines; most is just a general image of savagery. As in Heart of Darkness, the reader who chooses to see deeper can nd irony and statements about white peoples psyche in this image, but not all readers will feel invited to do so. The people on board enter the heart of a nightmare (183), another Conradesque dream journey, while stranded on the reef in darkness. Ellens journey parallels Western myths, including those of King Arthur (Tintagel: 77, 346) and of Ulysses (39), and thus enters the realm of ction. Most importantly, the Aborigines are marked as fantasies or as a Freudian projection by the device of parallelism. Austin dreams of eating a dead crew member in a situation of extreme starvation and associates this with
170
Christian communion; the Aborigines are cannibals both for dietary and for spiritual reasons. The settlers lawfully exploit their convicts like slaves; the Aborigines enslave Ellen. Since her Cornwall childhood she sees spirituality in nature rather than in formal religion, and she nds this aspect of her child of nature self mirrored in what she sees of Aboriginal religion. Austin sees Ellen as a divinity (40), a customary image of women, while exerting power over her with his wealth, education and sick mans whims; the Aborigines sometimes assign her the role of demi-goddess (267) while keeping her subjected. Austin feels that he can shape Ellen like a work of art (61) because [t]here is more of wax in a woman (121); the Aborigines cover Ellens head in wax and feathers and turn her into a work of art (251). He assigns Ellen the role of carer; the Aborigines do likewise. Garnet is secretly polygamous and the Aborigines are openly so. White British and Australian men uphold their patriarchal power under an elegant cover of social and religious institutions, of wealth and career opportunities; Aboriginal men parade their muscular bodies before their women who have grown bent with work and childcare. They take their choice of the food and throw the remains to the women, who have to pick them up from the dusty ground. The paired images mark these Aborigines as a literary construction, an extreme projection of repressed fantasies of white society. Moreover, much of the representation of Aborigines clashes with that in Voss , where, for instance, males are depicted as eeminate. The absence of a narrator makes it more dicult to identify the fantasy. The reader must gure out that the omniscient narrative voice is not objective and not Whites mouthpiece, but is a 19th-century voice that tells a ctional story only vaguely inspired by the Eliza Fraser material. More complex yet, the representation of convicts appears to correspond to a later (or more progressive) perspective than the fantasy about the Aborigines. Space is given to Jacks counterdiscourse but not to theirs. One can learn from the parallel images how the concept of savages has been constructed historically, as a projection of repressed emotions onto whatever Other people is available. White certainly satirises and criticises British-Australian society for its hypocrisy, where poor men are sentenced to chain gangs and rich wrongdoers like Garnet roam free, and prisoners are seated at the back of the church out of sight, out of mind for all free worshippers except Ellen. If one takes the image of Aborigines as the image British-Australians had around 1835, and not as Whites view, then it is part of this criticism, and the book hardly makes a statement about historical Aborigines at all. Yet, however satirical, the images remain on the readers mind. One knows that to throw food on the ground for others to eat is simply illogical, something a basic health instinct would prevent humans from doing, and that this must be another alert to the fantasy. Still, some doubt persists about what is true and what is a fantasy. The Aborigines way of life is represented as abysmal. Ellen is eager to get away from the
171
people who have killed her husband, and retains a fear of all Aborigines. She learns to feel sympathy with the convicts plight, and petitions again and again for Jack, but does not develop any similar feelings for the Aborigines, whose displacement and decimation at the hands of the settlers are not even hinted at. Jack himself describes to her what he has experienced before his stay with the Aborigines, but not how he has lived with them. Although this book is ostensibly about Ellens castaway experience, her life with the Aborigines is only accorded roughly one-eighth of the text, and they only amount to a part of the background for her personal development. They are described in all the usual derogatory terms of the time, uttering animal gibbering, or human chatter (235), seen as savages who are ominous and silently melted away among the shadows, or natural innocents with aesthetic [. . . ] muscular forms (236). They utter horrid shrieks and howls (239) and have a propensity for stamping, clapping (252) and crowd frenzy (283) during celebration and war, which are nearly indistinguishable. Ellen has some unconrmed ideas of the Aborigines religious beliefs (254, 259, 265). She depends on their skills for her survival and feels a common humanity (261) with them not unlike Marlow. Her vague recognition of their ordered social structures (282) and of traces of kindliness (363) is either just sucient to make the image plausible (which is even more insidious than an obviously stereotypical image), or it alerts the reader to the fantasy. The comparison of Jacks whip scars to Aboriginal decorative scars suers from the same fallacy as Conrads comparisons of the colonisers to the Congolese, the idea that white imperialists are as savage as actual savages (cf. p. 27). The absence of Aboriginal voices and the half-heartedness of all attempts to understand their lives mean that this satire of nineteenth-century representation remains another frontier novel, pointing out what is not appropriate, but not pointing to what is. The multiple pockets of darkness are distributed roughly as in Heart of Darkness in society and in the self; in violence and exploitation (of white prisoners, in this case), in repression and outbursts of desire, in skin colour and vegetation; but even more explicitly than in Heart of Darkness, indigenous lives provide a strong source of darkness and a mirror of whites psychological darkness. This book was published 77 years after Heart of Darkness, and its representation of Aborigines is based on the same patterns as Conrads representation of the Congolese. This shows how innovative and shocking Achebes attack was, which took place while White was writing A Fringe of Leaves . To continue with rewritings by authors from white settler colonies (Australia), skip to page 208.
172
3.17
J. M. Coetzee, In the Heart of the Country (1977)
J. M. Coetzee (1940-), a white South African, studied English and Mathematics in his native country.1 He worked as a computer programmer while writing a thesis on Ford Madox Ford, and began his university career in Literature in Britain and the US. Coetzee taught at universities in South Africa and the US before emigrating to Adelaide in 2002. He is widely renowned as the rst South African writer who abandoned the national tradition of realism. Notwithstanding his postmodernist allegorical and discourse-oriented mode, his writing is political. In the Heart of the Country is a diary or written stream of consciousness of a white South African woman of unspecied age, Magda. She lives on an isolated farm in the semi-desert with her father and three black servants, namely the aging couple Jakob and Anna and the younger Hendrik. The text contains no indication of time other than that it is set during Apartheid or the preceding form of racial segregation. It is not the record of a plausibly real life, but of fantasies. The reader cannot always distinguish between Magdas actual life (to the extent that the life of a literary character can be called an actual life) and the story she invents about herself in order to give her life a structure and a meaning, or as she calls it a beginning, a middle, and an end (42). In her rst, very short version of her life, her father, widowed when she was a baby, brings home a new wife. Magda does not make friends with her stepmother, who would like to initiate a sisterly friendship. Instead, Magda indulges in lonely and frustrated fantasies about the current sexual experiences of the couple and about her own conception and childhood. After some eavesdropping at the master-bedroom door, she kills her father and his wife with an axe, and plans or tries to drown herself. This fantasy ends with her scrubbing the bedroom floor to eace the traces, and pondering how to get rid of the corpses. She discards the story explicitly. In the second version, it is Hendrik instead who brings home a wife, Anna. Magda renames her Klein-Anna (little Anna) to keep names unique. Magdas father soon begins a sexual aair with Klein-Anna. Hendrik cannot protest because of his servant status, and pretends not to know about it. Jakob and the older Anna leave the farm. Magda eventually shoots her fathers gun from outside the house through the window at the bedroom ceiling to startle him and Klein-Anna, but without any intention of hurting them. Nevertheless, she nds her father wounded. She does not call a doctor although there is one available at about two days distance, and perfunctorily nurses her father until he dies. With Hendriks help, she buries the
1
Biographical information stems from Head and from Fr angsmyr.
3.17 COETZEE, IN THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY (1977)
173
corpse. Magda gets somewhat closer to Hendrik and (Klein-)Anna, having lived as on separate planets before (28). Not knowing how to withdraw money from the post oce, she then nds that she cannot pay them. In retaliation, Hendrik rapes her. Nevertheless, she invites them to live in the big house with her which is forbidden under Apartheid laws, but passes unnoticed because hardly anyone ever comes to visit. Hendrik exerts sexual dominance over her, spending the night with his wife but making short excursions into Magdas bed. He continues to address her as Miss in a stilted grammar expressing respect, but he does begin to reject her orders sometimes. The two experience a strange mixture of closeness in sex and in shared farm work, and distance in verbal communication. Magda wants the sexual experience but does not enjoy it, and she desires communication, cooperation and tender physical closeness with both Hendrik and Anna. Anna is obviously unhappy and refuses Magda the sisterly whispering and cuddling of which the white woman dreams. Hendrik, too, refuses to intensify communication or to cuddle her, and keeps the sexual act at basic penetration. When white neighbours do visit, they notice the absence of the baas and come back to search for him. Hendrik and Anna fear that they will be punished for living in the big house and accused of killing him, and that as black people they will have no chance in a trial. They flee, and Magda remains alone. There is a skip in time, and Magda is now a self-proclaimed mad old sad old woman (123). She begins to see aircraft that look like a cross between a pencil and a dragonfly, and that send voices (125) to her not audibly, but sinking from the sky like dew. The voices speak a language that she identies as Spanish but simultaneously as a universal language that does not belong to any specic place, and which she is able to reconstruct from her own unconscious without having access to a dictionary. She tries to attract the aircraft to herself rst by shouting, then by forming words and pictures with white stones, but to no avail. At the end of her story, she is still nursing her father, whose senses of perception have all ceased to work but who is still alive. She plans to crawl into a grave on the farm herself when her time comes, and leave the land to be taken over by nature. Conceivably, the dialogue with Heart of Darkness is announced in the title of the novel. This title is repeated with variations throughout the book.2 Like Kurtz, Magda is a white person living in relative isolation among some black people. Kurtzs reaction to this situation is colonial; it is rather tersely described. In In the Heart of the Country , the reaction is an explicit, self-reflective transition from an internalised Apartheid way of thinking to tentative postcolonialism.
2
In the Heart of the Country 4, 76, 110 (heart of nowhere), 23 (heart of nature), 23, 50 (heart of the country), 71 (heart of things).
174
In the two books, similar issues are important to a (white) person in isolation. The absence of (white) neighbours, limits and a limiting God is recognised as a major factor that facilitates both a violation of social norms and a descent into madness. Both Kurtz and Magda at some point feel boundless and want to be special, destined for great things. Kurtz becomes violent out of greed, Magda becomes violent (at least in fantasy) in order to make her life interesting and as a way of dealing with her loneliness and frustration. Kurtz is usually assumed by readers to indulge in sexual activity one takes the emotional and sensual intensity of the African woman and her shadowy embrace (Heart 61) of the steamer as evidence of a sexual relationship, and possibly the unspeakable rites (50) as a sign of more public erotic activities. Magda thinks about sex in two contexts, as a possibility for herself, but also in intensely Freudian terms of her fathers penis (which has helped bring her into existence but was responsible for her mothers death in childbirth), of her fathers eternal NO (16), the primal scene in the master bedroom and anal-faecal fantasies. Oedipal desires are evoked in several contexts. Magda has spurious memories of childhood rape and incest, which she recognises as fantasies. In her second version of her life, she kills her father and cuts him o symbolically by sawing his room o the house, in order to sleep not with a mother but with Hendrik, who is as taboo to her. Magdas diary is an attempt to invent herself. She knows that the predominant aspect of herself is discourse and story, not action. In fact, she is not strictly speaking forced to live as a castaway (123, 131, 132, 135), gripping her pen like a lifeline. She could try and marry some neighbours son, or leave the farm for existing settlements within her reach, which she calls civilization (132, 138) a word she associates with material comforts, ordered structures and larger aggregations of people, which she sometimes nds vaguely desirable but also fears may endanger her individuality. Just as Kurtz prefers to return home to his station while his clerk ships the ivory, Magdas mental connement turns out to be stronger than her geographical possibilities. She does not leave the farm throughout her life or anyway her fantasised life, although in a dierent mood she claims to have been to the seaside. Such uncertainties and repeated parallel or alternative scenes mark her self-invention through words. Reading is as central to Magdas life as writing. Her story includes references to Hegels theory of the master/slave relationship, in which the dependent slave identity is not in a position to authenticate the masters identity, so that both are harmed; numerous allusions to the Bible, to castaway stories, Kafkas human insect, linguistic theories of codes, signs, gaps and absences, the themes of Olive Schreiners The Story of an African Farm and the meditative mode of Becketts monologues, and many other pre-texts. The language Magda has thus acquired in loneliness includes unusual, literary
175
words and poetic collocations. She claims that as a child, she played with the servants children: I spoke like one of them before I learned to speak like this (6). Like this can refer both to literary/canonical and Apartheid/master language, which suggests a relationship between the two. The authors endeavour to situate his own books in the canon is attributed to his protagonist. Ironically, she seems to be none the happier for having read all these ideas, which are often inappropriate and confusing and keep her from adjusting. Her story is so much put together from pre-texts and literary language that it is a postmodern commentary on the act of writing as a mosaic self-denition. One could almost speak of a genre or meta-genre in the tradition of Heart of Darkness, a search for self combined with a vortex of current scholarly and political ideas. As much as such writing is a search for self, it is an attempt to construct oneself as someone else with the help of pre-existing ideas. Magda is explicitly writing for an audience. She wants to enter into a literary sphere of myth and hero, beyond [her]self (4), much like Kurtz wants to set himself up as a philanthropic celebrity in his writing. In this context, Magda briefly considers becoming a stereotypical colonial do-gooder, but unlike Kurtz, she is aware of how she hurts others, namely the younger Anna. Not only in the relationship between Magda, Anna and Hendrik, but also on the detailed meta-level of citations and reflections, the struggle between traditional and new ideas is very important. Moreover, Magda keeps on blending her story and the meta-story of writing it. She observes and reflects on herself all the time, and recursively reflects on her reflections. This is an extension of Conrads insistence on the importance of the act of telling and on layers of meaning. In Heart of Darkness, the stress is on layers of simultaneous cultural knowledge. Coetzee studies modes of thought fading over into each other over time. His text reflects the frontier novel aspect on a far more conscious level: his main character explicitly recognises, ponders and tackles the frontiers with varying success. During her attempt to reach out to Hendrik and Anna, Magda learns to distinguish between the lonely words with which she constructs her story, and dialogic words, whose use is restricted by Apartheid. This is an extension of Marlows scepticism about language: he doubts whether he can express his experiences; she feels that her monologue helps dene her relationship to the world, but that communication with others remains a problem because of limited levels of language known and permitted to master and servant respectively. Originally, Magda says, Hendrik has kept his station while I have kept my distance (24). Her renaming of Klein-Anna shows how much she takes another privilege of the dominant group for granted, the privilege to name. Magda has learned this role from her father. Like the men in Harriss Palace of the Peacock , the daughters of the colonies (3) were born as colonisers. This role is not their choice.
176
Magda feels that her father himself destroys the old language (43) of dominance when he talks intimately to Anna. She monitors her own reaction to this, and feels that she ambivalently both misses the old old code (25) and desires a change. She occasionally talks down to Hendrik and Anna, but she is aware of it. Sometimes she realises that she depends on Hendriks expertise around the farm, sometimes she nds herself reproducing stereotypes of lax (113), sly or simple-minded blacks, or a Darwinist hierarchy. On the other hand, she avoids a stereotypical usage of language by describing human skin as either white or brown but never as black, which leaves the words black and dark free to describe aggression or unhappiness without any puns on skin colour. Within a few sentences, Magda denies and rearms her ethnic aliation: I am not simply one of the whites, I am I ! [. . . ] Are you waiting for me to become your white slave? [. . . ] Must the white woman [. . . ] (118, emphasis in the original). She does not want the limitless power (74) of her traditional role, but fears the social consequences of change, thinking that she may become a servant when Anna becomes her fathers friend. Much of her musing is about her own confusing hybridity: her dream of a pristine age (7) is a black servants tale of empowered black nomads heard during her childhood, while her father was a representative of the tradition of Apartheid, and she only begins to get closer to Hendrik and Anna after she has killed him. Her father (as she knew him before he destroyed the old language) is like a superego, internalised as a censor (8). There are no easy solutions. Magdas new, insecure management of the farm cannot provide food or money to Hendrik and Anna. The long and painful attempt at transition between the two modes of thinking ends in renewed loneliness and in madness. A complex sexual politics develops between Hendrik, Magda and Anna, which is underpinned by traditional, symbolic gender roles. Trapped on the threshold between her master upbringing and a genuine desire for human closeness, Magda tries to force her desire on Hendrik and Anna. She is aware that Anna does not want their triangle, but she continues to deny this knowledge. This is an illuminating image of postcolonial relationships whites trying to make, or force, friendship with blacks from the stronger position they retain through resource ownership, education, communicative traditions and similar factors. Magdas stepmother has earlier tried to force her desire for friendship on Magda in a similar way, which means that Magda repeats the behaviour she has herself suered from the earlier generation of factual and emotional colonisers. Hendrik has been deprived of the true authority that is due to his abilities as a farm worker and head of his household. He asserts himself in aggressive sexuality and ostentatious manhood, a roughand-ready way of exerting some dominance without previous experience (cf. Hall 262-63). Outside the sexual relationship, Hendrik continues to act as a submissive and rebellious servant (rebellious especially when Magda cannot pay him) and not as a partner on
177
equal terms. Among people who have grown up in master-servant roles, sex becomes a medium of dominance and retaliation, a passion of rage (117). Hendrik repeats the No (112) to (sexualised) communication that Magda has earlier heard from her father, his master. Both Magda and Hendrik are extremely insecure in their attempts at a new distribution of roles, and Anna, who has neither white nor male power, is in some sense their victim and the weaker part in the redenition struggles. Confusion within a group becomes evident when Hendrik feels that Anna cannot defend herself against his betrayal because she has lower status than white people: What can she do? What can brown people do? (112). For Marlow, sexuality is something dark and private. The dicult social-sexual relationship fantasised by Magda (and still illegal in South Africa in 1977) is an allegory of sociopolitical developments Coetzee envisaged as possible, a painful experiment in a new interaction between black and white. Magdas eort to invent herself can be read as a parable for attempts to nd a new white South African identity. Coetzee anticipated and warned what might happen after Apartheid, and that not everything would be as paradisiacal as some people expected. In the context of the social-sexual image, traditional gender roles are used in quite shocking ways, for instance when Magda succumbs to stereotypical language and conflates a female-virgin-childless, anatomic hole (9, 41, 114) with emotional emptiness and hollowness, a gendered variant of Kurtz being hollow at the core (Heart 58). However, Magda is aware of this burden of the past. Moreover, her knowledge of a dominated role, the feminine one, enables her to rethink and redene the dominance between white and black. As a daughter and a woman, Magda is the dominated part, while at the same time she is aware of her complicity as a member of the dominant group. By claiming the Kurtz role for a woman and then showing how she tries to give up this role, Coetzee permits a fresh look at power struggles around race, gender and generation. Coetzee takes up the character of Magda in his 1999 novel Disgrace . To continue with the next geographical category in Path 2 (colonies of occupation), skip to page 115.
178
3.18
V. S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River (1979)
V. S. Naipaul was born on Trinidad in 1932 as a descendant of Brahmin immigrants from India.1 His grandfather came to the Caribbean as an indentured plantation labourer. Naipaul went to England as a student when he was 18 years old, and has lived there since, as a writer of ction and non-ction. He has spent a great deal of time travelling in Asia, America and Africa, including the Congo and Uganda in the 1960s. Scholars have extensively studied Naipauls response to Conrad.2 Naipaul is a highly controversial author. Many, including Achebe (Home and Exile , ch. 3), accuse him of identifying with the British and reproducing demeaning stereotypes about third world people. Others see his works as provocative analyses of the current state of aairs in young postcolonial nations. While this discussion is reminiscent of the racism controversy centred on Conrad, Naipaul has been able to react to an emerging public debate about racism, which was not available to Conrad. A Bend in the River is the story of Salim, a man whose Muslim Indian family has lived in East Africa for centuries as small traders. When the feeling grows among people of Salims group and generation that there is no secure future for them in East Africa, he acquires a small shop in Kisangani, Kurtzs Inner Station, which is by then a postcolonial city just recovering from the countrys struggle for independence. The city, the country or its dictator are never named, but can be inferred from many details. The book, which purports to be Salims written account of his experience, begins with his journey to Kisangani in 1963 when he is 23 years old, and covers about a decade. Salim deals in basic Western household goods. When the non-indigenes on the East Coast are in fact expelled, Salims family is scattered, and Ali, who is a few years younger than himself, decides to join him. Alis family have been slaves of Salims family for generations, a status which Salim interprets as a privileged kind of protected servanthood preferred by the slaves. Ali is renamed Metty, i.e. m etis or half-caste, by the locals, as some of his ancestors were from Salims family and some were slaves from Central Africa. After struggles between the army and civilian groups, the Big Man (Mobutu), president for life, who claims to bring peace and social justice and encourages nationalist feeling in his speeches, rules the country. The Big Man establishes the Domain, a model area with a polytechnic and other facilities that are intended to help create personalities for the new Africa (127). One of the young men who study there is Ferdinand, whose mother Zabeth is a magician and small trader from a remote river village and a regular customer
Information on biography and reception stems from Liukkonen, entry Sir V(idiadhar) S(urajprasad) Naipaul (1932-). 2 Cf. e.g. Prescott; Duyck; Berger; Nakai, English Book , ch. 7.
1
metis
3.18 NAIPAUL, A BEND IN THE RIVER (1979)
179
of Salims. Salim is able to observe Ferdinands intellectual and emotional development in the diligently postcolonial setting of the polytechnic. Salims friends are migrants whose situation resembles his own, especially some men of Indian descent. These include Mahesh, who has escaped with his wife Shoba from certain restrictive social conventions, and leads a rather withdrawn life; and Indar, who studies in Britain, becomes a teacher and importer of new ideas into the Domain and similar places, and despairs when he is later cut o by American sponsors of the project. Salim has an aair with the Belgian Yvette. Her husband is the historian Raymond, the Big Mans political adviser. Salim initially admires the Big Man and feels that policemen and guns contribute to his own security. However, the Big Mans means of acquiring or securing power become more and more threatening, and public violence begins again. Raymond is gradually being excluded by the Big Man. Salim leaves Yvette when both nd it hard to continue their aair in an atmosphere of fear and defeat. He travels to London to get away from Kisangani and to meet Nazruddin, the East African Indian who has sold him the shop, and who is now living in London. Salim sees how migrants from all over the world try to carve out a life in London, and form a new stratum of its population. When he returns to Kisangani in order to sell his shop and move to London, the Big Man has nationalised all companies that belonged to foreigners. Raymond and Yvette are gone. Salims shop has been assigned a semi-literate, alcoholic African trustee, or owner. This man makes Salim his manager and chaueur, and Metty a general servant. Metty feels let down by Salim who, partly due to a misunderstanding, cannot protect him from this humiliating fate. He betrays Salim to the police, as Salim is secretly dealing in gold and ivory at that point in order to earn some money for a new life in Britain. Salim is taken into prison by a policeman, who tries to extort money from him. Ferdinand, who has graduated from the polytechnic and has become the Commissioner of the area, saves him and advises him to flee the country immediately because of the growing violence between the dictators forces and the popular Liberation Army, which claims that it will return the country to a pre-colonial state. Ferdinand fears for his own life due to his position, but he and even Metty have no chance to leave. The book ends with Salims flight as a luxury-class passenger on the last steamer. Along the river, some people are trying to flee in panic. Others join the insurrection and attack the steamer, without success. Salim has long been engaged to Nazruddins daughter and has formalised the promise during his visit to London. As he has obtained a British passport in East Africa long ago, he can easily go there. Many visual details link A Bend in the River to Heart of Darkness, including tollhouses as forlorn sheds with flags, the use of means of transport to bring in soldiers, an arrival in a city whose inhabitants have fled and that is overgrown with grass and plants, neglected and rotting imported technical equipment, the direct connection between the
180
Thames and the Congo River evoked by Indar, and nature destroyed by builders. Like Marlows, Salims journey into the heart of the continent (51) is a journey into the self, into political struggle and into an infernal or purgatorial landscape. The immensity (60) of the rainforest (called the bush by Salim), a powerful and archetypal presence, permanently threatens to prevail. At the end of the book, during Salims second arrival in Kisangani, his arrival in prison and the attack on the steamer, darkness takes over. The concept of Africa as a symbolic space, an overwhelming metaphysical landscape through which moves the detached but troubled lone observer, reminds one of Conrad. Naipaul uses these intense similarities as a foil for his radical departure from Marlows static binary model of a dominated and a dominant group. He introduces a third perspective, that of a multiply displaced Easterner who situates himself between Africans and Westerners in hierarchies of achievement, of privilege and of oppression. Salim recognises that his perspective is close to that of the Arabs who were still powerful in the Congo at King Leopolds time (cf. p. 6). They do not appear in Heart of Darkness, which uniquely portrays a bipolar encounter between weak and strong. According to Salim, the Arabs were great explorers and warriors (20). He does not subscribe to the historical representation that shows them as evil, which served to justify King Leopolds conquests and which Salim considers English-school stu (186). Salim sees history as a sequence of struggles in which power really circulates, in which numerous civilisations rise and fall, and the Arabs lost against Europeans rather as European rule is now being replaced by the young nations of Africa. Another binary division, that between indigenes and intruders, is disappearing. Salim belongs and does not belong to Africa. Migrants from formerly colonised places in upheaval flee to London, a source of colonising activities. Fluidity and hybridity become world-wide phenomena. Conrads ction does not explicitly relate to his own status of exile from a country in political subjugation. Naipaul makes exile one of his main topics. The towns motto, a modied Virgil quotation, is actually the Old Motto of Trinidad, Naipauls birthplace.3 This import reinforces the similarities between Salims life and that of exiled Indians in Naipauls own group. As in Heart of Darkness, the place is recognisable, but, together with the international motto, an absence of names serves to universalise the story. In many respects, Naipaul uses Conrads novella as a mould to tell a very dierent tale. He insistently plays on the dierences and similarities between Salims experience and Marlows, and thus on what is common to all humans and what is specic, and possibly on what he appreciates in Conrads view and what he feels needs to be added to it.
3
Cf. Naipaul 68; cf. Aeneid, Book IV, line 112; cf. Government of Trinidad and Tobago.
181
Naipauls historical sequel, which takes the story of the Inner Station to the 1970s, has the same narrative structure as Heart of Darkness: a lone rst-person narrator learns more and more about a powerful person, whom he originally admires for his strength and his proclaimed ideals, and who turns out to be violent. The parallel is reinforced when Raymond remarks that the dictator is a truly remarkable man (140), the same words with which Kurtz is rst described to Marlow. The Domain resembles the empire that Kurtz sets up, in the same place. The dictator takes to dropping explosives at random in the bush (84), much like the French war ship and the pilgrims, representatives of the European powers about whom Marlow grows more and more wary. The end result is Salims stay in the hell of the prison (276), and the nightmare that Ferdinand sees as the countrys immediate future (282), two more echoes of Heart of Darkness. Similarly, the rhetorically perfect, demagogic words of the Big Man, which are painted on hoardings and prison walls and transmitted on the radio, remind one of Kurtz. Perhaps this shows that A Bend in the River is a rewriting of Heart of Darkness, but also that Kurtz is a prototypical dictator. As a gloss on the Big Mans rhetoric, there is an alert to the general untrustworthiness of language: several characters use words not to say what they mean, but to achieve something, and the reader often only nds out about this later. These include Raymond, who hides his insecurity and fear behind optimism, and Nazruddin, whose persistently exalted descriptions of his own life are recognised by others as a communicative strategy. Ideas and ideals are mere covers for power. The dictators Africa of words and ideas (131), situated in his expensive projects such as the Domain, remains detached from the actual lives of the people, who remain poor and whom he oppresses with increasingly despotic means. The dictator invites a neocolonial trac in ideas. These ideas are imported by white and other foreign teachers like Indar, who believes in his ideas but despairs when he realises that they are merely used as tools in a power struggle. Imported ideas help shape the identities of students of Ferdinands generation, in a way that prevents them from becoming true leaders. Ferdinand, as a Commissioner, feels that such education has damaged him: Everything that was given to me was given to me to destroy me (282). For Salim, the dictators maxims become the lies he started making us all live (12). To complete the lie, the Big Man pays publications in Europe to report favourably about his projects, much like King Leopold did. The other nationalist movement, the traditionalist Liberation Army, compete with his modernising approach but similarly publish a leaflet that includes imported ideas. It positions them as men of the people when in fact they are the Big Mans recently ousted small-scale elite.
182
Marlow talks of one (white) civilisation, threatened by the wildness of humans and of nature. For Salim, ideas help dene many civilisations, which are precarious in that they are subject to tide[s] of history (26). This is visible especially in the characters of exiles, who have no place to go back home to because their civilisations of origin, hybrid and unstable to start with, are being destroyed. Some exiles, such as Mahesh and Shoba and Salim himself, enjoy their freedom away from the restricting societies they have come from, but they all feel uprooted and vulnerable. Salim feels that rural Africans have preserved enough basic life skills to be self-sucient and survive when war cuts them o from the rest of the world, and that Westerners have the doers and makers who can create complicated, technologically advanced objects (59), while the men in the middle, the traders who belong to neither of these two civilisations, are neither selfsucient nor able to produce the commodities they have come to rely on, so that their dependence on society is the most intense. While civilisations are fragile, attempts to forcibly change peoples lives under the pretext of civilising bring out savagery. There are killings at the beginning and end of A Bend in the River . The savagery lies mostly, but not exclusively, on the side of the colonial or postcolonial powers who claim to be more civilised. It spreads to their employees: the chain gang overseer in Heart of Darkness, soldiers and jailers in A Bend in the River . Just as Marlow noted seventy years earlier, Mahesh sees that in such a situation, law loses its meaning: It isnt that theres no right and wrong here. Theres no right (99). Such pessimistic convictions about human nature and the inevitable abuse of power, and the emotional and moral tension experienced by all characters, agree with Conrads view. Salim, who like Marlow has rejected religion, feels that life is pointless. Where Marlow believes that [w]e live in the flicker (Heart 9) of a fragile civilising achievement, Salim goes further and thinks that there had been [colonial] order once, but that order had had its own dishonesties and cruelties that was why the town had been wrecked. We lived in that wreckage (63). Like Conrad, Naipaul establishes additional distance by adding some parodic or satirical overtones to the pessimistic mood. This includes the exaggeration in the presidents speech and the Liberation Army leaflet, the humorous description of taxis chased by avid disinfectors, and Indars account of the Indian embassy in London, where he realises that India cannot be an emotional home for him. The in-between state of the exile adds important aspects to the question of racism. Salim devalues Africans when he regards their present development as a fast-forward through the past of other peoples (specically, those of India), assumes that university courses have been simplied for Africans, and considers Africans malins , people who regard others as prey by a survival of the ttest law intrinsic to Africa like something
183
that came from Nature itself (85). He sometimes falls back on stock images of mask-like faces, childish or simple behaviour, and innate violence that leads to uprisings without idea or structure. Such obvious racism certainly helps Salim align himself with the West. However, it is also related to his embitterment. When he writes his story, he has recently been dispossessed by a new African nation, and his family by another one. Furthermore, Salims perspective is not the Western one that traditionally claims universality. He is an Other himself for the majority of his English-language readers. This specic rather than pseudo-universal perspective locates his racism, it shows how a persons racism can arise from the combination of readily available discourse and personal issues. For the reader interested in such questions, Naipaul oers Salim as an object of study. Universality is further disclaimed by the presence of other characters approaches to Africans, including the Belgian Father Huismans, who thinks of himself as a genuine admirer of African religious art, but also desecrates it by turning it into mere museum pieces; young Americans who romanticise Africa and want to dress and dance like Africans, and one of them steals most of Father Huismanss collection as a souvenir; and Metty, who is m etis and ends up living both with Salim and as the father of a youngmetis Congolese family. Salims view of Africans is not always negative. Sometimes he admires them for their neighbourhood-level democracy (53) and their subsistence skills. Salim meets some Africans, including Ferdinand and his mother Zabeth, as individuals and puts aside many of his stereotypes with them, going far beyond Marlows mixture of positive and negative stereotypes and rare personal contact. Zabeths life stands at the beginning of the book, and Salim describes her sorceress status respectfully as that of a person of power, a prophetess (16), nowhere near Kurtzs unspeakable rites. He sometimes nds it hard to compete with Ferdinands education and self-assurance. Similarly, Salims attitude towards Westerners is ambivalent. He admires their technological and political power, their wealth and knowledge, but he also denounces the eects of their colonial intrusion, which has inflicted much suering on people and has left them with a tendency towards egoism and violence, and towards lies black men assuming the lies of white men (22). Salim initially claims that his own social group has no sense of history, and that he has learned about its historical identity only from books written by whites. However, he later nds out that Raymond works only from (biased) newspapers and archives and does not interview people. This shakes his belief in the value of the discourses whites have to oer. The awakening distrust in white history writing also points to another problem in Salims outlook. About the colonial times, he knows that there was a miraculous peace when people could travel everywhere because tribal boundaries had been temporarily pacied (40), and he knows that the people of [the Kisangani] region had been much
184
abused (72), but given that his historical sources have been mostly (neo)colonial ones, he may not know much more than that. Their silencing and forced forgetting of colonial history may be partly responsible for Salims way of thinking. Salim is obviously a limited and fallible individual. He criticises things in others that he does himself. Though he decries the rampant corruption in the young state, he participates in the secret trade in gold and in illegal ivory himself when he feels that circumstances drive him to it. Salim also denounces postcolonial mimicry. He is aware that the dictator imitates the display of power of Western politicians while proclaiming nativist views in his speeches. The dictator with his personal riches and high-flown, self-celebratory words also models himself on the earlier Europeans [who] wanted gold and slaves, like everybody else; but at the same time they wanted statues put up to themselves as people who had done good things for the slaves. [. . . ] Being an intelligent and energetic people, [. . . ] they got both the slaves and the statues (23). In spite of this trenchant analysis, Salim tries to model himself on Western culture in many ways. Concerning slavery, as well, the reader gets to know more about the narrators psychological mechanisms than he can himself see from his limited perspective. Salims insistence that the slavery of the east coast was not like the slavery of the west coast and that the slaves [. . . ] wanted to remain as they were (19) is at least partly a facesaving reaction to the knowledge that his family dealt in slaves. Salim rationalises this trade as a way of assigning them safe homes (10) after others made them come from Central Africa, and with more success than Christian missionaries had with a similar project (185-87). Salim treats Metty as a servant and an inferior, but believes that their relationship is justied by Mettys being a member of [his] family (45) (which genetically he is), and by several situations he describes in which he feels that slaves have power over their masters. In other respects, however, several characters are becoming aware of their own attitudes. Salim realises that the mystery and the magic of nature are his own projections (103-04). Raymond accuses whites of reading mysteries into Africa (142). Salim is aware of prejudiced simplications (60), and he realises that his sympathy with the Congolese (later Zaireans) for their dicult task of recovering from defeats and humiliations (108) is not strong enough to last when he feels irritated by their ways of handling power. Salim and his friends soberly reflect on themselves and their own group, with fewer stereotypes than about others, but with as much criticism. In particular, they nd inertia, passivity and an unwillingness to look at larger events outside the small group, a narrow-sightedness which they feel is that of migrants who, trying to make their home in one place, exclude the larger, unsettling world from their perception. This self-assessment of a (partly) dominated group shows its agency, as people do not see themselves as victims.
3.19 SILVERBERG, LORD OF DARKNESS (1983)
185
Salims sexual life is his world view in a nutshell. For him, African women are suitable only as prostitutes. Yvettes whiteness and European atmosphere are sexy, providing the thrill of border-crossing up to the skies (191) into the admired group, so that in the centre of Africa he actually goes un-native, a valued but short-lived experience. Marriage takes him back to his own kind, to a woman he has known from childhood, complete with at least some geographical refuge, the remaining roots of the uprooted man. To continue with rewritings by Caribbean-born authors, skip to page 190.
3.19
Robert Silverberg, Lord of Darkness (1983)
Robert Silverberg was born in 1935 in New York City, and currently lives near San Francisco.1 He is a widely-known author of science ction. Apart from over a hundred novels in that genre, he has written non-ction including popular history, and a few novels outside the sci- genre. Lord of Darkness is set in a framework of actual historical fact. In 1589, the English sailor Andrew Battell joins a crew of privateers who attempt to take colonial riches from the Portuguese. When the crew flees from an attack by South American cannibals, Andrew and a few others are left on an island o Brazil. They are captured by the Portuguese, who feel they do not have enough men on the West African coast and intend to use English prisoners as forced labour in the area of Kongo and Angola. However, Andrew is soon the only Englishman in their West African territory. He makes some Portuguese friends and nds a lover, Dona Teresa, whose grandmother is an African while the rest of her family are Portuguese. As there are no Portuguese women in the colony, women of this description are frequently courted by Portuguese men. Dona Teresa is the lover of several powerful men, intending to acquire power herself. She is a Catholic, but adheres to some African Animist rites, which Andrew considers witchcraft. An Anglican Protestant himself, Andrew is wary of both Catholicism and Animism, although over time, he increasingly experiences momentary feelings of tolerance. The Portuguese force him to do some adventurous river and coastal shipping for them. They trade in slaves as well as in ivory and other goods. Andrew learns that there is a powerful tribe in the area, the Jaqqas, who travel from one African city to the next and loot and destroy, practising dietary cannibalism with relish. They appear sometimes as allies, sometimes as enemies of the Portuguese, confusing them considerably. During one of his adventures, thinking Dona Teresa has died as a result of a political intrigue, Andrew acquires an enslaved African convert to save her from shipment to the Americas. They become lovers. When
1
Biographical information stems from Strickland.
186
an opportunity arises, Andrew tries to flee to England with a Dutch merchant ship, but is betrayed by the jealous Dona Teresa and by a man whose brother he has killed more or less in self-defence. The Portuguese then force him to be a foot soldier in their wars against small African states. After a battle, he is lost in a desert with some fellow soldiers. A group of Jaqqas arrive and wordlessly take them to the nearest Portuguese settlement. During a reconnaissance, Andrew is left as a pawn to an African king by his Portuguese troop. When the troop does not come back, the king intends to kill him. Andrew escapes and places himself under the power of the Jaqqas, mostly out of fascination with their chief Calandola, and to get away from the treacherous Portuguese and the African king who had him imprisoned. He feels safe with the Jaqqas because his white skin and blond hair (dierent from that of the Portuguese) appear to them to have religious powers. Moreover, they treat him well because he can kill people for them with his musket. Andrew Battell is renamed Andubatil and is initiated into the Jaqqa community by secret rites involving cannibalism, violence and killing, marriage to a woman and blood brotherhood with a man, and nally a special initiation that binds him to the Jaqqa chief Calandola by a night full of drugs, drums, wine mixed with human blood, sex with a severed dead sheep and ritual homosexual activities between the two heterosexual men. He also learns the Jaqqas philosophy, which is to destroy all settled civilisations that till and otherwise desecrate the Earth Mothers crust. Finally, the Jaqqas decide to go to war against the Portuguese, who have become their main and most powerful enemy. During an initial reconnaissance, they capture a few Portuguese including Dona Teresa. Andrew saves her from being eaten at a cannibal feast, which she perceives as hell on earth. However, she remains a prisoner. She tries to warn the Portuguese of the impending Jaqqa attack and is sentenced to be eaten during the next feast. To save her, Andrew calls the Portuguese army with the help of his obedient Jaqqa wife. During the feast, the Jaqqa society falls apart due to internal leadership disputes. The Portuguese come too late to save Dona Teresa, but are able to defeat the Jaqqas. Calandola disappears without trace, so that Andrew comes to believe that he is really an incarnation of Satan. After some more time in Africa, during which he works hard to overcome his fascination with Calandola, Andrew returns to England in 1610 and adopts the daughter of the woman he originally intended to marry. They settle down to a quiet life, and he sets down the narrative as his memoirs. His adopted daughter marries Samuel Purchas, who includes an abridged version of Andrews memoirs in his book Purchas his Pilgrimes . Lord of Darkness is dierent from all other texts I discuss, in that it is usually bought for escapist leisure reading. The majority of its readers are probably male, and many of them teenagers. This hefty novel can stimulate sexual arousal, horried fascination with graphic violence and delectation in gore at the same time.
187
Although this text should probably be called a fantasy novel, it has elements of science ction. The Jaqqas closely resemble peoples who in science ction dwell on other planets. They have the kind of simple, outsider logic that disarms Earthling/European civilisation, which manifests itself in questions such as Why did we use gold for our money and not iron, when iron was the more sturdy and useful metal? And, Why did we build great stone houses in which to worship our god, when God is everywhere? (391). Such questions could come straight from Mr. Spock. The Jaqqas aim to destroy those who dele the Earth Mother through settled civilisations is the kind of plausible, but oversimplied aim that sci- novels associate with alien powers and explore in thought experiments. Similarly, Andrews liminal experiences are of the kind often found in sci-, a speculative research on the loss or total transformation of a human personality when faced with extreme situations. As long as Andrew only hears about the Jaqqas before meeting them at close quarters, the reader may suspect that they have indeed come from outer space. They are the only people mentioned in the novel whose name is spelled in an implausible way, and that cannot be found in history books. Their indiscriminate cruelty and cannibalism make them like wild forces of nature without souls or consciences (104), so that several characters suspect early on that they are not human. They do not seem to have children. All Jaqqas have very perfect, often frightening bodies. It would not come as a surprise if they had parked their spaceship in some quiet cactus grove. But this is not the case. The Jaqqas turn out to multiply by adoption, kidnapping teenagers from the cities they raid and raising them as their own. This implies that every Central African has the potential to be a Jaqqa. The ornamental scars, body painting and sparse dress of the Jaqqas closely resemble those of other African nations. They are not the only people in the world of this book who practise dietary cannibalism, as the Native Americans of Brazil are found to indulge in that too. Non-Jaqqa African nations sometimes display skulls or bones of vanquished enemies. Andrew is led through historically plausible transformations, such as increasingly violent ghting for the Portuguese, who are enemies of Britain, and use of their language and dress, directly to the fantasy transformation into a Jaqqa. He sleeps with darker and darker women: an English blonde at home is followed by the near-Portuguese, Christian-Animist Dona Teresa in the settlement, then a Christian African slave, then traditional African women given to him by their kings, then a Jaqqa, whose darkness is a symbolic one. He even reflects on how he had by gradual ways come to be enrolled in the very life of Africa by women who, stage by stage, were ever darker, ever more barbarous until he was ready to embrace without reluctance that woman of the cannibal race (402). The Jaqqas t in seamlessly with Africans, and only their leader is assumed at the end to be a real devil. Andrew introduces his tale as a journey into the heart of African deviltry (16), and ends it with a recovery from his experience of Africa and of the Jaqqa-devil as from one and the same thing.
188
Andrew appears as a reliable and friendly person, someone the reader can identify with. He states that women are repressed and undervalued in early modern European society; that Portuguese and Africans are people like you and me with certain cultural habits which he may not like, but which are acquired rather than innate; that homosexuality is not to be condemned even if it is not to his taste, and so on. Andrew values honesty and plain dealing, and buys a slaves freedom because of her Christian belief. He nds savagery in the Portuguese (though not the English) slave trade, and civilisation in the Kongo kingdom. Moreover, he reflects on his own personality, nds himself changed by his experiences and more open to Otherness over the years, and searches his soul for the reasons that have made him accessible to Calandola. He also appears to be rather educated, referring to the Bible and to Greek and Roman myth and authors, and interested in contemporary British poetry and theatre. This narrator gives the impression that he can be trusted, so that his descriptions of the Jaqqas are easily accepted by unsuspecting readers. Andrews acceptance of certain cultural forms and his simultaneous association of the devil with Africa reminds one of Singhs argument that in Heart of Darkness, Marlow shows sympathy for Africans but simultaneously associates Kurtzs depravity with their influence (cf. p. 24). For Conrads time, this can be seen, as Singh does, as an exposure of contradictions in contemporary thinking. In 1983, this is no longer so, and Silverbergs adherence to some politically correct standards must be read as an attempt to mask the fact that he situates the devil in Africa, and to make it more palatable to readers. Silverbergs afterword claims that he has only embroidered on the existing history of the seafarer-adventurer Andrew Battell in Purchas his Pilgrimes : My purpose was to show what it might have been like for an English seaman to have spent twenty years in the jungles of West Africa in the late sixteenth century (559, emphasis in the original). Not surprisingly, there are readers who believe that Andrews story has either happened or could easily have happened, as the readers reviews section for the book on Amazon.com shows. The question to ask about this novel is perhaps not so much to what extent it is a rewriting of Heart of Darkness, but how this science-ction/fantasy material, which would be gory but mostly inoensive if situated on some ctitious planet, came to be set in Africa. Has the discourse epitomised by Heart of Darkness invited this identication of a devils followers with early colonial Africans, and if so, how? Where are the limits of the responsibility one can assign to Conrad and similar authors? Is Lord of Darkness a version of Heart of Darkness with most of the ambivalence left out? Is this what results when the Inferno that Marlow locates in colonial violence, in the depths of a depressive self and in Africa, is solely ascribed to Africans?
189
First and foremost, of course, Conrad situates evil and corruption in the white dictator Kurtz, while Andrew Battell identies the devil with an African. Both Kurtz and Battell appear to be changed by Africa, but Battells Africa blends Africanist discourse with fantasy. The investigation into the ways moderate, average persons fall for a charismatic dictator is broached in Heart of Darkness with the feelings the Russian, the lake tribe and Marlow have for Kurtz. This investigation is followed up in more detail here, and with considerable honesty on Andrews part, but he is fascinated by a devilAfrican dictator who is nowhere to be found in Heart of Darkness. Both narrators evoke versions of the Faust story in the context of souls taken over by the devil, but only Andrew identies this devil with the leader of an African people. Nevertheless, Andrew Battells narrative takes up the atmosphere created by Marlow, and simplies and intensies it. Battell reflects Marlows idea of Animism as witchcraft that makes his reman pray to an assumed evil spirit inside the boiler (Heart 39). Both narrators compare Animist belief to Christianity but ultimately hold it against Africans. Both reflect on forms of the fascination of the abomination (Heart 10) in what Battell sees as lands of dark (36) and impenetrable (50) jungles (17), savages (41), mysteries and horror (36). Both men experience Africa as a space of dream or nightmare, and as prehistoric. The Jaqqa rites may be an extreme interpretation of Marlows unspeakable rites. Indeed, Marlow takes no precautions to prevent such an interpretation, and he believes in the existence of dietary cannibalism in Africa, wondering why his ship hands do not satisfy their hunger on the whites. Both narrators see a visual and auditory, synaesthetic perception of drums, scars and piercings, nearnakedness and gleaming eyes as a vision of hell, except that in Marlows case it is symbolic and in Andrews case it is not. The Jaqqas are described as devils out of the pit (50) to Andrew even at his rst sighting of one, but for a long time this is taken by Andrew and thus by the reader to be a manner of speaking, a conventional description of Central Africans as it is in Heart of Darkness, where Kurtz is said to experience a devilish initiation [and to take] a high seat amongst the devils of the land (49) on the banks of the infernal stream (75), but no actual devil is postulated. In some aspects, then, the dierence between the two texts is only gradual, and Andrew wholeheartedly embraces discourse to which Marlow alludes from a greater distance. If intellectual Africanist discourse invites readers to consider a devilish horde of African cannibals plausible, then it is not too surprising that a more sensationalist author hides a real devil in such a horde, to be revealed late in the plot. Ambivalence itself is borrowed to make Lord of Darkness more plausible. There is no simple ght of good against evil. The Jaqqas have a social structure and a code of honour. The Portuguese are persistently deceitful and have a tendency to throw Andrew into dark dungeons. Andrew himself is changed by both groups in very questionable ways.
190
Silverbergs Jaqqa-devil is really a kind of space alien and not a devil according to Christian doctrine. In coming up with the African setting and getting it past his publishers, an interpretation, albeit an oversimplifying and sometimes outrightly malicious interpretation, of several aspects of Heart of Darkness may well have helped him. Whether Silverberg misunderstands Conrads Africanist discourse intentionally or not, his novel shows that such misunderstanding is possible. To continue with rewritings by white Western authors, skip to page 214.
3.20
Caryl Phillips, Heartland (1989)
Caryl Phillips was born on St. Kitts in 1958.1 When he was a small child, his family moved to England, where he later read Literature. Phillips now divides his time between London and New York. A writer of ction, non-ction and drama, he has also taught at universities in Europe, Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and the United States. Much of his work explores dierent perspectives on the slave trade and its eects. Heartland is set in a slavers fort on the West African coast, near the end of the slave trade era. The narrator is an unnamed African who lives with the whites in the fort as their interpreter, despised by Africans for his role as a collaborator, and by whites for being African. He is in the fort because after his capture, he was able to learn the slavers language and avoid the slave ship by doing this work. Though he feels that he is only doing his job in order to survive, he is rather callous towards the slaves. His interpreting enables the Europeans to do some trade in goods, while slaves are captured rather than bought in those days. The second in command, Mr. Price, rides to an inland village in order to procure a young woman for his bed, taking the interpreter with him. In the fort, he inflicts small burn wounds on her skin, and forces her to have oral and anal intercourse with him. Others in the fort can hear her scream with pain, and her health deteriorates within two days. At that point, Mr. Price makes the interpreter return the unnamed young woman to her village. The interpreter is both sexually attracted to her and impressed by her strong personality. He feels that she helps him retrieve the lost connection with the way he lived before his capture. Soon he goes back to the village, secretly, to see her. The villagers ask him what becomes of the slaves overseas, but he only knows a vague answer. They order him to take the traumatised woman with him. He takes her back to the fort and hides her in his room. He nds out that the woman is the village headmans daughter and was considered unclean in the village after her experiences in the fort, so that she lived as an outcast and would probably have died
1
Biographical information stems from Procter, Caryl Phillips.
3.20 PHILLIPS, HEARTLAND (1989)
191
of want if he had not come for her. They become lovers by mutual consent. At that point, there are only six soldiers in the fort, because all other whites are away to capture new slaves. The interpreter is worried that he will no longer be able to hide the woman when they return. When a few soldiers return with the Governor because he is suering from a tropical disease, the woman suggests asking him for help. The interpreter visits him at his sickbed. The Governor asks the interpreter whether his introduction to white civilisation has made him happy. He feels that this ought to be the case, and deliberates about sending the interpreter to his own country as an example of an African whom colonialism has improved, a living case in point against the anti-slavery lobby. The interpreter thinks that those are stupid questions to ask somebody who is being held captive (51), but he feels that the Governor is well-meaning and might be useful to him. He resolves to tell him about the woman the next day and ask him to authorise her presence. When the interpreter gets back to his room, one of the white soldiers, Lewis, has found out about the woman and is raping her. The interpreter feels powerless to stop him. The next day he wants to see the Governor, but the Governor has died. Over the next weeks, Lewis rapes the woman on a regular basis. The interpreter nally summons enough courage and tells him to stop. Right then, the other soldiers return from their slave raid. The interpreter helps sort and chain the slaves. He is now planning to escape with the woman as soon as the slaves have sailed and vigilance in the fort has subsided. However, the vengeful Lewis tells Mr. Price that she is there. Mr. Price sends the interpreter and presumably the young woman into overseas slavery, separating them. The story ends at the ships destination with the auction at which the interpreter is sold. Most obviously, Heartland is a rewriting of Conrads short story An Outpost of Progress. In that story, an African bookkeeper, who is working with two white men, is named Mr. Price. He sells their African employees to itinerant African slave traders, and the two white men get so confused, lonely and insecure that they both die in different ways. Phillips takes up the question of complicity, and shifts the focus from the colonial drama of Conrads white men to the motives and the suering of an African middleman. While An Outpost of Progress may imply that the white mens ruin is caused or precipitated by their African bookkeeper Mr. Price, the black protagonists in Heartland are abused by the white men Mr. Price and Lewis. The title of the story refers to the relationship between the fort on the coast, which is a European-African marginal zone, and the village at a days horseback ride inland from which the young woman is seized. The interpreter notices that the villages from which Africans can be seized are far in the heartland at that point in time, because the ones closer to the coast have all been deserted; in Heart of Darkness Marlow observes
192
a similar development again later in history. The title can also refer to the land of ones heart, which the enslaved Africans lose; or to Heart of Darkness in the sense that white men (with more or less consenting African helpers) travel into the African interior and cause upheaval and pain there while professing ideas of a benecial civilising mission. As a rewriting of Heart of Darkness, this story resembles Leonard Woolfs Pearls and Swine (see Section 3.2) in that it shows that whites do not need to be as mystical or as special as Mr. Kurtz to go under in a colonial setting. In Heartland, the Kurtz character is split into three white men, the Governor, Mr. Price and Lewis. The Governors way of thinking is completely inappropriate to the situation. It consists of heartfelt concern for the human souls (51) of blacks and whites, backed by religious devotion, and the sense of a duty to bring civilisation and Christianity to Africans while enslaving them. The Governors inability to survive physically symbolises the inadequacy of his naively idealistic personality. He thus echoes the early philanthropic aspect of Kurtz that is manifest in Kurtzs report and that is later superseded both by the anguish in which he writes his postscript and by his death, which according to Marlow means that the African wilderness is stronger than his personality. The egotistical and outrightly evil Mr. Price ruthlessly avails himself of African persons and abuses his power in practically limitless ways. Mr. Price embodies Kurtz insofar as he is corrupted by the power a white man has in the colonial situation. He himself mentions the idea, present in both An Outpost of Progress and Heart of Darkness, that white men change in Africa, away from societal control (31). He feels that his own natural authority is stronger than the Governors authority, which is endorsed by a faraway kingdom but not based on personal strength, and proceeds to show it by ignoring the Governors commands and appropriating the woman. Lewis, the youngest and least intelligent of the three men echoing Mr. Kurtz is the one with the most complex function in the story. He rapes the woman and tells the interpreter: You cant satisfy a girl like this by yourself. You ought to be grateful that I found her (53). In thinking that the woman wants to be raped, he is a mirror image of the Governor, who believes that Africans are content about being colonised and that the interpreter ought to be genuinely happy about his situation. This mirror eect creates a direct connection between the masculine colonial project and the malechauvinist stance of an outstandingly insensitive man who thinks that if he has an orgasm, then whoever else is involved is satised too. Colonial idealism is equated with a self-centred justication of rape, far more explicitly than in Heart of Darkness where the gendered geography and penetration of Africa point to the same equation.
3.20 PHILLIPS, HEARTLAND (1989)
193
The dominant Europeans and dominated Africans of Heart of Darkness are seen here from a third, additional perspective: that of the black collaborator, the interpreter. The story analyses his personality. He is not as perfect as some people would like to think colonised Africans were; he is a flawed and contradictory human being with elements both of weakness and of egoism. The whites exploit his personality structure to make him an important tool in their colonial project, which would not survive without African collaborators. He is a collaborator because he need[s] to feel safe (22), but this role appears to him as a fall (19) because Africans despise him and because he has forgotten African ways. He feels that he has lost his own identity in the fort. When he ends up in chains on the slave ship, he does not feel like a traitor, [but] like a fool (58). This suggests that he has, paradoxically, become a culprit as a victim of circumstance, somewhat like Marlow, whom the necessity to earn a living turns into a coloniser. The interpreter is safe only as long as he complies with the role others have devised for him. Just as in Heart of Darkness, all sides are criticised in this story. However, the interpreter is far better placed to do this than Marlow, as he sees both parties from the inside. He has thoroughly analysed white behaviour and thought, including the way whites consider him akin to an animal; and he thinks about exploiting this knowledge by playing a role that ts the Governors ideas. He also sees that the village headman has been a collaborator of a dierent kind, having sold slaves to the whites. Unlike the interpreter, the headman has made a prot from this. The headmans collaboration shows that not only Europeans can be corrupted by their own power. The Governor even thinks that Africans have proved by their collaboration that they are brutes who will sell their neighbours for alcohol, so that it is their fault if whites no longer deem [them] worthy trading partners, [but] just pillage (51). The interpreter himself is not free from abuses of his own power: though he is sometimes rather fussy about sexual ethics and considers masturbation a form of self-abasement, he does not see a problem with raping freshly captured slaves, or sleeping with the female protagonist before the two have established communicative intimacy. While the male African character has an ambivalently active role, the African woman of this story is a victim. Kurtzs African friend is represented as a seducer and part of the vortex that draws him into the heart of darkness. The female protagonist in Heartland is raped, injured and sold by white men. The traditional image of the woman who seduces and thus brings about her own downfall and that of a man, is rejected in favour of a bleaker truth. To continue with Images of Africa, skip to page 202.
194
3.21
David Dabydeen, The Intended (1991)
David Dabydeen (1955-), son of Guyanese peasants of Indian descent, came to England when he was 13 years old.1 His father had emigrated there rst, and sent for his children one by one. Dabydeen read English and Art History at Cambridge, and continued his studies in Britain and the US. His publications include poetry, novels, criticism and non-ction. Dabydeen is currently Professor of Caribbean Studies and Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Warwick. He lives and works in Britain and Guyana. The unnamed narrator of The Intended describes his teenage years in London and, in flashbacks, his childhood in British Guiana. A fth-generation descendant of indentured labourers from India, he identies himself both as a West Indian and as an Asian. He arrives in London in the late sixties when he is about 11 years old. Soon, his father, who has an alcohol problem like many men of his family, hand[s the son] over to the Welfare people (237). The child is sent to live in a boys home. There, he makes friends with Joseph, a black Briton who cannot read or write because the home does not make sure that he goes to school. Joseph keeps away from the gangs and violence that dominate the atmosphere of the home. He develops an interest in peace and in nothingness, colourlessness, the sightlessness of air (133). At school, the narrator makes some other friends, namely Nasim from Pakistan, the Indian Patel, whose family used to live in Africa, and the Pakistani-Briton Shaz. Nasim is assaulted by a gang of unknown white youths because his skin is brown. His experience leaves its marks on his friends. Shaz nds a summer job for the narrator and himself at Battersea Fun Fair, manning a ride that involves going down a long tunnel in small boats, with images from countries all over the world painted on the walls of the tunnel. Shaz also helps the narrator rent a room in the house of a couple from India, Mr. and Mrs. Ali. Patel passes an examination only with the help of a memorised cheat text he loosely links to Blakes tiger, and soon drops out of school. The narrator is very good at school. He helps Shaz prepare for his A-level exams, and the two boys discuss their syllabus readings, which include Heart of Darkness. Together with Joseph, they increasingly bring their own experiences to the reading of the novella. Joseph thus becomes interested in Africa as his ancestral but unknown place, and wants to turn Heart of Darkness into a movie. He tries to lm trees and grass in shabby London parks as the African jungle (109), and changes the African scenes in the tunnel, painting in a Mr. Kurtz, who is sucking on a bone and ring a gun pointlessly in the air (112), and two white men who have killed an elephant. The narrator, for his part, tries to write poetry according to formal rules. Mr. Ali asks him to write his sisters epitaph. Shaz is the rst of the boys to gain experience with sex.
1
Biographical information stems from Shepler.
3.21 DABYDEEN, THE INTENDED (1991)
195
Soon seeing its commercial possibilities as well, he quits school and becomes the pimp of a similarly underage girl of Italian descent, Monica. Her neighbour Janet is from a relatively rich white British family and is going through a far more protected youth. She nds a way of meeting the narrator on a regular basis. The narrator fantasises about her, but does not feel old enough or brave enough for anything beyond that. The boys meet Patel again, who is by then working in his fathers video shop with a large under-thecounter stock of sex lms and, later, cocaine. Patel and his father are planning to lm pornography themselves to further increase their relative wealth. Joseph, on the other hand, straps himself to the higher branches of a tree to lm the wind blowing through leaves. Passers-by assume he wants to commit suicide and alert the police. As the police rightly suspect his camera to be stolen, they take him to prison for questioning, from where he escapes. He mostly grieves over the lost camera. Shaz persuades Patel to oer him a job as the cameraman of his pornographic movies, hoping that the money and the use of another camera will cheer him up. While the narrator is taking his rst steps towards sexual initiation, always scurrying back from Shazs pornographic magazines and prostitutes to the safety of his school books, Joseph soon becomes disgusted with pornography, and produces artistic footage of light from a window and of painted lettering while he is supposed to be lming an orgy. This leads Patel to sack him. Shortly after expressing his sense of his incomplete, harassed life in a rst experiment with literacy, Joseph pours oil on himself and sets himself alight. The narrators achievement at the A-levels wins him a scholarship to Oxford, where he plans to read Literature. He tries to sleep with Janet but does not nd himself able to penetrate her. As a farewell present, Shaz gives him a sexual encounter with Monica, which is successful. Janet is to spend the next three years in Australia. At the moment of separation, the narrator has the courage to tell her that she is everything [he] intended (243), and they promise to wait for each other. The way this novel engages with Heart of Darkness on several levels of meaning is itself an interesting expansion of Conrads method. Marlow evokes a host of ideas, theories and knowledge in order to explain and to obscure his experiences in the Congo. Dabydeens narrator similarly searches for pre-texts that can help him nd, explain and construct himself and his life. His approach is to look for explanations in his studies of English literature, and he hopes that the years at Oxford [will provide means of nding out] who they are, who I am (217). This means that he embraces other peoples ideas and the canon of the motherland in order to understand himself. This mental migration from the margin to the centre is painful to observe. The narrator devalues himself and his origins in his admiration for the achievements and texts of the centre; he feels that [p]erhaps [he is] not English enough (216-17) to understand
196
himself and that all his life before reaching Oxford belongs in the bins (210). He is an unreliable narrator or in any case easy to see through in this sense; he is not presented as a role model but as someone who undergoes a painful process that in many respects derails him. Some of his friends see this problem and discuss it, especially Patel, who feels that he is a rich Paki, a happy Paki himself, while accusing the narrator of wanting to imitate the white people, because you are ashamed [. . . ] that people will call you a Paki (200). Indeed, the narrators striving towards the centre is connected with a pervasive sense of shame and embarrassment for being a foreigner. He feels that whites perceive non-white immigration mostly by its poor and vulgar representatives. Often trying to see himself through white eyes, he tries to distance himself from other immigrants by education and hard work, and sometimes by skin colour or appearance: No wonder [young Afro-Caribbean immigrants are] treated like animals [. . . ]. Not one O level between a bus-load of them [. . . ] but Im dierent, and I hope the whites can see that (177). Youre just like that Marlow, Shaz says to him, all work and no play (118). While Marlow uses his work ethics to stabilise himself emotionally, Dabydeens narrator tries to get away from poverty and obscurity by studying and writing. Writing, for him, is not mostly a means of self-expression, but a chance to be somebody (113), a public persona, and to obtain attention and acceptance in the culture of the centre. When Mr. Ali commissions him to write the epitaph, he thinks more about his own chance to be immortalised in words on stone than about the deceased. His value system is mirrored in his attempts to write the epitaph, as he feels that the life of an illiterate peasant woman [from India is] next to nothing (141) and petty, and needs universalising (155) for a text good enough for a tombstone. He wants to spice up the epitaph with Blakes tiger and wishes to rival Conrad and the other white writers when it came to jungle scenes (144) although the womans life has not been about tigers or jungles, and he can in fact describe it rather well as long as he does not try to turn it into an imitation of British canonical poetry. Shaz questions the narrators approach when he claims that the literary conventions of white-people expression are inappropriate for a black persons tombstone, while Joseph feels that there can be music and pure soul in poems of any origin (146-47). On a meta-level, the existence and importance of Dabydeens novel shows that (post)colonial and migrant lives are no longer considered petty, and that the narrators self-image is part of a way of thinking that is on the wane. The Intended itself is, ironically, part of a new canon, whose pre-texts include The Empire Writes Back , and whose content includes reflections on migrancy and hybridity, initiation and male psychology, sex, lies and videotape, the inner city and violence.
197
The ways in which Conrad and Dabydeen each integrate their texts into an emerging canon and help build this canon invite more personal questions about the two authors, two migrants who have become famous in their new home. Dabydeens narrator is the ctional author of the novel; it is implied that this novel is what he writes after his years at Oxford. A comparison between Dabydeen himself and this ctional author adds another level to the feeling of pain attached to canonicity in this novel. Dabydeen has rather obviously used his own experiences as material but has strongly shaped and reconstructed them; in spite of all its directness, slang and inner-city setting, this is a highly formalised book. Dabydeen came to England with his siblings, but makes his narrator a lone Marlow-like traveller. To make the rewriting structurally perfect, the narrator travels into a symbolic landscape, the darkest heart of Balham, nds a Kurtz there in Joseph who goes under to the influences of the white natives (pornography, police and prejudice), an Intended and even a version of the Congo River. The layers of meaning and the rather prototypical characters are too polished, t together too well and are described with too much emotional detachment to be a personal account of someones life. The reader is left with the disturbing feeling that writers who want to be read must rewrite their experiences to t into acquired forms and canonical themes now as much as at Conrads time. This recursion implies that Dabydeen grapples with his own life as a British professor, working at a Centre(!) of Caribbean Studies that helps soak up a margin into the new canons of the old centre, even while trying to change the centre from within. Although he distances himself from his unreliable narrators attraction to the centre by ironic and parodic exaggeration, and is almost certainly less in danger of becoming English than his narrator, Dabydeen does write about himself here. Conrads literarising of his material mostly misrepresents and obscures the lives of the Congolese; with Dabydeen, the reader wonders how much an author has to bend and twist his own life in order to t in with what the market demands, to be somebody as his narrator calls it. Joseph comments on this when he says that rules for the form and content of literature are like putting iron-bar one by one in a spacious room so the bird flying round and round and breaking beak and wing (95). The dierent levels of meaning of this novel comment on each other, more markedly than in Heart of Darkness. The problematic literarising of experience is addressed in a very literary book. Joseph actually comments on the book in which he is a character, like an Escher drawing that seems to reach out and draw itself. This recursion, a sequence of meta-levels that appears to tend towards innity, is one of the techniques of a new, postmodern canon. The reflection on the process and function of writing reminds one of Marlows reflection on his own narrative act. The characters of The Intended explicitly name and discuss many of its pre-texts. This makes the book more accessible than many others. It also elevates the readers experience as a t subject for literature, championing the equal importance of rereading and rewriting.
198
The young migrants experience is moreover marked as a t subject for literature by stylistic and verbal echoes of Heart of Darkness, some of them humorous. The rst venture into an x-rated lm is as much a meeting with an unknown darkness (8) as Marlows grander initiation. Several passages set in Guyana are worded in a rather high or poetic style, such the rage (18) of a speeding bus, or the narrators grandfather walking in the mist [. . . ] shrouded in the half-light [and emerging from a] wall of undergrowth [. . . ] magically [. . . ] like a spirit from the bush (31-32). Conrads atmospheric adjectives are appropriated, sometimes ironically, including unspeakable (7), unknown (8) and unearthly (60). Mysterious, which Europeans often use to describe (post)colonials and specically Asians, is used here by Asians about London life (3, 4). Playful echoes of the content complete the picture and allow the reader a certain pleasure of discovery and of associative images. These include Nasims mother knitting black wool at the door of the narrators Oxford experience, initiation to (a lambs) death with blood spilling onto the narrators feet, the impaled cow skull that serves as a scarecrow in his grandmothers garden, and the comment that we must live as we die, alone (140) not because of the limited expressiveness of words, which Marlow feels when he states that [w]e live, as we dream alone (Heart 30), but simply because strangers cannot talk to each other freely in public locations in Britain. Scepticism about big, hollow words is in order because even children learn them at school, as Patels essay on Blake shows. At the end, the narrator travels to Oxford in a taxi that looks like a black [. . . ] beetle (246) to him, Marlows image for his steamer (Heart 37). This acknowledgement that books are about books is closely related to the question of images and representation, which Conrad anticipated by ltering Marlows perception of the Congo through images from Greek myth and other school knowledge. Where Marlow sees his surroundings in terms of texts and images he has read, much of the postmodern metropolitan experience of Dabydeens characters stems from images in the rst place. Instead of Marlows Congo River, they get an articial, toy river at Battersea Fun Fair, painted with exoticist stereotypes of the world from A to Z in a total disregard of geography. Marlow perceives his river as a psychological tunnel, this river is a tunnel full of images, which look dierent again with special lights turned on. What people see has been predetermined by other people far more directly than for Marlow, though the basic idea is the same. Information and representation are crucial to the young migrants sense of identity and self. The narrator has memories of his childhood in Guyana, but his Indian roots are available to him mostly from over-sweet, operetta-like Indian lms. When Joseph becomes interested in Africa, all that is available to him are the passages from Heart of Darkness that his friends read aloud, and the images in the fun-fair tunnel. He asks
199
what every modern-day reader of Heart of Darkness asks: But is true or a lie? That we walk about naked with other peoples bones through our noses? That we eat each other? None of us had any answers to these questions (108). The school syllabus does not contain anything on Africa. Available images also influence the way migrants see each other and at times seem to construct hierarchies of race among themselves. The narrator sometimes perceives Joseph as a gollywog (170) or a primitive caveman and cannibal (193), and repeatedly uses racialist expressions when he is simply annoyed with someone and race-free insults would be just as appropriate. Shaz quotes a passage from Heart of Darkness that attributes incomprehension of white mans technology to Africans to insult Joseph (Dabydeen 106). A more recent representation than Heart of Darkness and the primitive or erotic naked Africans in the tunnel are the images on television, mostly waterless children, flies, deserts (108). These pictures are part of a new, help variant of racism, a grandchild of Kurtzs hypocritical philanthropy. Help racism implies that parts of the world are intrinsically poor and cannot make it without generous help from whites. This representation influences the narrator as strongly as the earlier ones. When Nasim is in hospital, the narrator thinks that he looks like pictures of hungry Third-World children we saw on television. I hated him [. . . ] because he reminded us of our own weakness, our own fear (14). The narrator has childhood memories of a child close to malnutrition [. . . ] covered in sores which attracted flies (125) and of white people handing out food at his school. His mother knew that these experiences were closely related to politics, to impoverishing independence struggles and whites lobbying for power. However, she preferred white rule and did not help him develop a political consciousness. He himself was too young at the time to understand that poverty is not intrinsic or his own fault. He sees himself as weak and decient rather than as someone who has been treated unjustly by history. Only once does he vaguely feel that Janets parents in their wealthy and ordered Kent village are responsible for [his] own disordered existence (168). As the title of the novel underlines, the narrators rst experiences with women are of central importance. However, for him, sex is predetermined and devalued by pre-texts as much as dark skin. The narrator learns about sex mostly from Shazs coarse pornographic magazines and Patels further commodication and from adults who earlier told him o for childhood curiosity without telling him why, a theme which has become practically canonical to recent novels on masculine coming of age. His idea of what it means to be a man is further influenced by the experience of several rather irresponsible men in his childhood, who link sexuality with violence and alcohol. Accordingly, the narrators idea of himself is split into a public side, which is dened by ambition, attempts at literature
200
and conformity, and gentlemanliness; and a secret side he identies with sex, deviance and transgression. Marlow identies the public side with light, civilisation, Europe and the Intended, and the secret side with darkness, the unconscious, Africa and Kurtzs African woman friend. Dabydeens narrator sometimes appears influenced by this scheme, but it is far too simple for his complex migrant experience. A sexualised attraction to what appears pure, clean and rich, like a white doll or Janet, links the two parts. Based on his ideas about masculinity, the narrator does not want to soil Janet with his desire and thus, to some degree, with himself. He has somewhat similar feelings about Rashida, Nasims sister, who as an Asian appears to him even more in need of protection. The theme of a dark secret that is somehow related to maleness and from which women are to be protected, by lies if necessary, can be traced back to Marlows withholding of information from the Intended. This strange inhibition and idea of a womans fragile integrity mostly leads to communication problems between the sexes. Sexual initiation is a rather lonely experience for Dabydeens male characters, who see women in the old categories of either virgin or whore, and restrict their teenage experiences to pornography, prostitutes and secrecy. The female characters, on the other hand, are not as schematic or as much out of it as the male ones see them. Janet is not as pure as the narrator would like her to be. While he tries to structure the expression of [his] desire for her so as to make it impersonal, philosophic, universal (243) like his attempts at literary writing, she tries to seduce him and later comes to a very clear analysis of his behaviour, stating that some men go with whores. [. . . ] They cant do it with clean women (242). She does not need as much protection as he thinks, which means that (like Marlow) he is perhaps protecting himself rather than her. As for Monica, she has chosen to work as a prostitute because she is questing for her own identity away from the social space of her parents; she is wary of her fathers complacency and hypocrisy that she attributes to his university learning and privileges. Though the narrator tries to win Janet over with words and stories, and discusses several other school-syllabus texts with her, he feels he has to protect her even from Heart of Darkness because of the sex there, and the description of blacks in the bush, two themes that are too shameful for [him] to contemplate in her company (122), both probably because she might associate them with him. The male friends, however, intensely discuss Heart of Darkness among themselves. The narrator accepts the literary, ahistorical reading oered at his school, a rather schematic aair of big words. His reading of animal, bird and sh images is Dabydeens parody of literature classes. While the narrator obediently interprets the grove of death as part of the theme of suering and redemption which lies at the core of the novels concern (98), Joseph homes in on the theme of colours. Finding that the white light in Heart of Darkness is trying to blot out black skin and green forest, he gives a reading
201
of the colonial theme. However, he moves on to reclaim the multiple meanings of colours in a way that is far more complex than the identication of the colour black with skin alone, and far beyond a black/white dichotomy. Blackness, for Joseph, can also mean blankness a black face is invisible in the dark, and Kurtz becomes a black man (101) in the sense that he is not really seen. He and his unspeakable rites are only the subject of numerous rumours, of which the Russians many-coloured dress is a symbol. Moreover, Joseph nds blackness in industrial processes, in oil stain or diesel fume or char (147), another blackness caused by Europeans in Heart of Darkness. The narrator suspects that when Joseph sets himself alight, he fuses his meditations on colours and symbolically puts them into practice: he reduces himself to pure blankness or to what is common to all humans, and fans out the blackness of his skin into the colours that constitute it, including a yellow and orange flame he has earlier talked about (100). The similarity of his name Joseph Countryman to Joseph Conrad explicitly invites comparison. However, like his reading of Heart of Darkness, Josephs name is not easy to interpret. Both men are foreigners: although Joseph was born in Britain, he does not have the stability of identifying himself as any one kind of countryman. Like Joseph Conrad, this Joseph would like to invent a universal language [of] symbols (160), in his case conveyed in a lm, and overlooks how much it is still based on the specic situation. Unlike Conrad, he is a rebel who does not want to be an insider, and he is broken by his experience. He has a fresh look at life and society and is not able to integrate this freshness into his surroundings, to measure it out like Conrad (and like Dabydeen). The narrator is sometimes envious of Joseph, who cannot read and often comes up with innovative and spontaneous images, presumably because his pre-texts are visual and oral, not essays to compose in the normal way, proper books to read (160). In a romantic vein, one can envy him his dierence and original genius that is free from the (over-)civilised limiting experience of education; realistically one cannot. In this multivocal novel, Joseph counterbalances the narrators perspective. At some point, the narrator calls Joseph his own dark self (196), meaning the migrant self that has no access to the exclusivity of Oxford. Where the narrator assimilates, Joseph appropriates. His stealing the camera is symbolic of a world view in which found intellectual material is there for us to take (108) and to express new meaning. Like the sheep that are stolen back and forth in the village of the narrators childhood, Blakes tiger theme, rst stolen from India, is now teaching material for migrant children. It is stolen back by Patel in order to pass his examination. On a meta-level, it is stolen back by the whole book, which uses British language and material to express a migrant life. Dabydeen does not seek assimilation like his narrator, but suggests stealing thoughts and ideas from each others cultures.
202
3.22
Marlene NourbeSe Philip, Looking for Livingstone: An Odyssey of Silence (1991)
Marlene NourbeSe Philip (1947-) grew up on Tobago.1 After getting a degree in Economics, she moved to Canada to study Political Science and Law and has lived there since. She practised law for seven years, and is now a writer of prose, poetry and plays, as well as political essays and literary criticism. NourbeSe Philip is well known for her public speaking and political activism on issues relating to culture and to racism. She identies herself as a Caribbean as well as a black Canadian writer. Looking for Livingstone is a highly symbolic mixture of prose and poems. A black woman, who introduces herself as The Traveller, travels through Africa for eighteen billion years the age of the universe (61) to nd Dr. Livingstone. On her journey, she encounters several peoples, all of whose names are anagrams of the word SILENCE (or SILENCES). Each time, she stays for a while and lives with the women, sometimes in a lesbian context. The women of each people teach her something about silence. In one case she has to remain in a sweat-lodge (41) to sweat out all words except for three of her own choice, and in another she is made to weave and quilt colourful cloths in isolation, to learn a very personal silence that does not mean an absence of words. The Traveller eventually meets the man whom she calls Livingstone-I-presume (62 ; cf. p. 5), and questions whether he is really a discoverer. She points out that help from Africans has enabled him to become famous, and discusses how his role in history has been constructed. Not conned to any one genre, Looking for Livingstone is a narrative and theoretical text in the traditions of feminist and postcolonial inquiry into silence. Silence is invested with numerous meanings. The Traveller describes the silencing of women and of the colonised as a [legal] sentence [. . . ] As in [. . . ] I silence you (70, emphasis in the original). This silencing itself has been researched in many ways. The Traveller does not explicitly mention all of these, but they are obviously pertinent. There is the silence that male colonial writers ascribed to women and Africans; the silence to which African languages are conned when Europeans discover and name things that already had African names; the silence of African artefacts in museums, bereft of their context; the loss of ancestral languages and cultures in Caribbean slavery; the deliberate obliteration of knowledge about slavery and African origins in the Caribbean under later British colonialism (Ashcroft, Griths & Tin 147); the omission of black and female subjects from ocial history and silencing
1
Biographical information stems from Emrit and from NourbeSe Philips web site.
3.22 NOURBESE PHILIP, LOOKING FOR LIVINGSTONE (1991)
203
of subaltern groups who do not have material access to the means of communication; silencing by actual killing; and other kinds of assumed or imposed silence. On the other hand, The Traveller appropriates silence. This appropriation is an ironic and simple inversion in that she conrms the once devalued silence to be an aspect of Africa and of femininity but reassesses it as positive; and it is not at all ironic or simple in the ways she learns to see silence as enriching and very personal. Silence allows communication with oneself, and a possibility to shed or appropriate the whore words (52, 53), which others have used before so that they impose pre-xed categories on speakers. Silence is also an attribute of communication beyond words, in body language, physical contact or intuitive understanding, and it allows a person to listen and learn. The Traveller oers this important gift to the white man Livingstone. She does not want to silence him, but to give him access to deep forms of meaning obliterated by his obsession with words. This re-evaluation of silence is reflected in a simultaneous acknowledgement and undermining of binary categories. Such categories include words/silence, male/female, European/African, discoverer/discovered, heterosexual/lesbian, where in each case the rst of the pair is traditionally marked as dominant and more highly valued. The Traveller has a new way of dealing with such pairs. She does not try to do away with them, but sees the two concepts in each pair as complements and supplements to each other, each as important as the other (54). She herself embodies at least one such pair. She sometimes appears to be an African-Canadian (African-American, etc.), when she looks at African landscape through a tourists eyes (36), wonders whether she wants to give him a rst rate black hand shake and say, Yo there, Livi baby, my man, my main man! (60) or alludes to many elds of Western knowledge and pre-text; and she sometimes identies with Africa, whose silence Livingstone nds (61-62). The ctional frame author, whose existence is revealed only at the end of the text, claims that The Travellers original handwritten journal (on which the novel purports to be based) is kept in the university library at Oxford, which rather aligns The Traveller with European explorers. She is thus a global traveller, who is initiated into Africa both as an outsider and as a woman of Africa(n descent). The Traveller gets to know herself in silence and communicates in words, and she tells Livingstone that Word and Silence have sent out the mating call (73) to each other. She writes her travel journal both in words and in silence, expressing silence either through blank space on the page or through the marker (silence) (60, 61, 74) alternating with words. This helps address the paradox that a tale about silence needs to be told in words, and in the case of the Caribbean-Canadian author even in the originally colonial English language. With the help of poetic and graphical alterations, NourbeSe Philip uses and transcends this language.
204
When The Traveller weaves the multicoloured (multivocal) tapestry in the land of the NEECLIS, she implies a connection between self-expression and a craft that is usually practised in silent self-reflection, and that is traditionally and in her story attributed to women. The tapestry itself is meaningful in an extralinguistic, symbolic way and is shown for all to see. While she weaves in seclusion, she learns to distinguish between word and silence. Only after that, she can connect them and is able to nd and hear [her] own Silence (54) in words she says to herself. Her symbolic quilt consists predominantly of silence, but is held together by the most invisible of stitches the invisible but necessary word (55). No people in her story has only silence or only words. The Traveller nds complementarity in discoverer/discovered in that Europe and Africa really discover each other: while you thought you were discovering Africa, it was Africa that was discovering you (62); and in heterosexual/lesbian when she nds herself and her own with women, while also dreaming about sex with Livingstone, which stands for the interpenetration of Europe and Africa, or of word and silence. Bisexuality, then, stands for an ability to embrace Sameness and Otherness: to nd one important experience in separatism and another one in contact. In addition to being complements, the concepts in each pair blur into each other, such as when the warring silence-believers and word-believers, both of them African peoples, have to embrace each others beliefs for some time (12); or when The Traveller herself thinks in Livingstones category of discovery for a while (15). One among the many levels of this highly allusive text invites the reader to reread colonial travel stories with a view to silence. A prominent example of such stories, of course, is Heart of Darkness, which is on one level inspired by Stanleys search for Livingstone, and on another one by his diction of darkness and impenetrable jungles (cf. p. 6), which The Traveller sometimes parodies (16, 21, 24, 29). Achebe points out in his critique of Heart of Darkness that Conrads famed evocation of the African atmosphere [. . . ] amounts to no more than a steady, ponderous [. . . ] repetition of two antithetical sentences, one about silence and the other about frenzy (Image 252). Marlow nds silence in African nature, in the high stillness of primeval forest (Heart 29). He repeatedly perceives this silence as mysterious, brooding, implacable and as concealing an intention. Marlow equates the silence of African nature and that of Africans when he either nds that Africans are literally silent [which makes him] uneasy (56), or when he claims that there is no meaning in their babble of uncouth sounds (22). This silence is broken when it turns out that Africans can speak, in their own language, which Marlow despises as short grunting phrases (42), and in unquestionably complex English (or rather, French) during the attack and after Kurtzs death. Conrads novella, like many other colonial texts, thus leaves an opening for the possibility that Africans can represent themselves, even while strenuously denying this possibility.
205
Similarly, Marlows scepticism about language and his use of the ellipsis (written as three dots or dashes) leave a small opening for the idea that words and the struggle over possession of words are not everything. Marlow appears to nd enriching silence in imprecision, reduced explicitness and information he leaves out. Such silence creates space for the reader to participate in the story, a space beyond the control of words. Although Marlow thus recognises the importance of certain pockets of silence for human emotions, he still devalues the larger and dangerous primal silence that he locates in Africa. Marlow implies an intimate relationship between silence and the unconscious, both for his small narrative silences and the perceived large African silence of the land [which] went home to ones very heart (28). His feelings foreshadow the intense research into silence that had its (rst) peak in the 1970s. This is one of several issues reflected in Heart of Darkness about which many people felt strongly but vaguely until explicit research was devoted to each (others being imperialism, racism, the psychology of masculinity, etc.). Heart of Darkness establishes a strong connection between the silence of Africans and that of women. The Intended is silenced by Marlows lie in the sense that one who does not get information, cannot answer it. In her presence, Marlow keeps silent about (or silences) the horrors of his colonial experience. As for Kurtz, he discoursed. A voice! a voice! (67). In conveying his colonial ideas about Africa, Kurtz is a bringer of words as much as NourbeSe Philips Livingstone, both to Africa and to Europe. His report is an example of the Africanist knowledge he helps construct. The Intended, full of passive and misled admiration, insists that his words must remain as (her) guidance (75). Kurtzs words leave only silence for her and for Africans. The person who is both woman and African, Kurtzs friend, is fully silent with strong body language, and she is very tangibly handed over to silence not only left behind but possibly shot, which is hinted at but is not discernible because of the shapeless smoke and meaningless noise with which the pilgrims answer her meaningful silence. This is one of the strongly symbolic passages in which Marlow states that there may be something important in Africa but he cannot see (or hear) it because the actions of Europeans obscure it. He is reluctant to participate in this particular project of silencing, but he neither has the power to stop the men from shooting nor to leave them. Heart of Darkness thus shows that European men are consistent in silencing the female Other as well as the African Other: they transfer the role they have learned at home, to the colonies. Nobody is the happier for this. Not only are the silenced parties victimised, but the silencing white men end up lonely and largely without deep communication. The more sensitive ones, like Marlow, have a vague sense of loss.
206
The Traveller takes up Conrads gendered and sexed geography. She feels that the word of Livingstone, the discoverer, [. . . ] thrusts its way through the wet and moist climate of Silence (61) or of rainforest or woman. She cites a (ctional) letter from Livingstones wife Mary, who is jealous of his penetrating Africa while leaving her behind. Mary, too, refers to Africa as female. The Traveller as a doubly feminine person (woman and of African descent) refuses to be doubly weak, and goes on a search for self whose outcome is not depressive. Like Marlow, she starts out with simple, incomplete maps of Africa and travels into the interior of the continent, opening a path to [her own] interior (61), mapping her own Silence to the last millimetre, and it exists (70) as powerfully as Marlows modernist, masculine self exists. Actual maps can show silence. Blank space was common on maps a long time before it was experimentally introduced into texts. As a child, Marlow sees the African silence in fascinating blanks on maps. When he undertakes his journey, the maps have been lled in, by Livingstone and others, with rivers and lakes and names and with colonial darkness, as Marlow recognises (Heart 12). However, he recreates the past blank on the map, and the assumption that Africa means silence, by leaving out place names and peoples names from his tale. This absence is ironically exaggerated by The Travellers discovery that Africa is inhabited by peoples whose names all spell SILENCE. This poetic and surprising image of white colonial thinking makes its fallacies tangible. The Traveller reminds Livingstone that he has not really lled in a blank, but captured and seized the Silence [he] found [. . . ] and replaced it with [. . . ] the silence of [his] word (69-70). On her own maps, which others have given her, she repeatedly dreams that she sees both silence/blankness and incomprehensible words, both of which challenge her to nd out for herself. On maps, silence and the limited expressiveness of words are an especially strong symbol of the insight that every person has to go on his or her own quest. Maps on which previous seekers have traced the outlines of their own ndings are of limited help. Maps are of strong, archetypal symbolic importance. Marlow maps out several hearts of darkness in Africa, including the one in his own emotions. An old woman points to The Travellers heart and to a map, inviting her to search for her heart there. Marlow also sees the Christian creation myth on the map of Africa, with the Congo River as the snake that has brought about the Fall. The Traveller hears and writes several creation myths, all of them concerned with words and silence: after the Fall from purity of either word or silence, people live with the harmony or the antagonism of the two. The interest in creation and in the Fall is related to initiation. The Traveller presents Africa and African rituals as a site of personal initiation. Her appropriation of this motif
207
from colonial travellers like Marlow is both ironic and serious, nding as she does peoples who are not at all a backdrop but actively and lovingly help her nd herself. Her initiation is made up of tests, rites and tales of which she often says that she does not understand them, while she still learns a lot learns from not understanding. Her approach oers an alternative to the kind of rationalism that makes Marlow feel uneasy and threatened when confronted with the incomprehensible. The binary opposites of rationalism and ritualism merge when women enclose The Traveller in a circle they discuss both in terms of r2 and of magic. The multilayered symbolism and poetic language of such images are hard to understand for the reader, in much the same way as The Traveller nds her own journey hard to understand. On some level, the reader learns what The Traveller learns, by the same method, which teaches and requires patience and self-reflection. The Travellers initiation is situated in a specic initial moment of colonial silence, Livingstones acting as the thin edge of the wedge. Her explanation that since this moment, Europeans have carried their own dark continents within them (66) into Africa was foreshadowed by Heart of Darkness. In spite of the historical specicity, The Traveller comes both from the past and from the future. She gives the date of their meeting as June 31, 1987, but actually Livingstone died in 1872. This capacity of nonlinear time empowers her in that she knows what happened after Livingstones death, and can evaluate his actions with historical hindsight. Her search encompasses the idea of prehistoric Africa, as she searches for Livingstone from the beginnings of time. This is an ironic appropriation of the idea that Africa has been waiting to be discovered, civilised and elevated from prehistory into written history when The Traveller nally meets Livingstone, she does not yield to him, but lectures him about the real meaning of his discoveries and about the knowledge-power nexus in his ability to create historical facts (67). Rather than nding herself penetrated in fact or symbol, The Traveller terries the strictly Calvinist man by daring him to give her a kiss, and taunts him by mentioning her sexual dreams about him not a victim attitude, but an invitation to measure their strength. While Marlow feels that the silence of the Congolese forest threatens the colonial project and the sanity of white men, The Traveller challenges rather than threatens Livingstones word with her silence, inviting not sheer antagonism but dialogue and fruitful struggle. She is not the passive background to a Stanleys search for Livingstone, but searches for him herself, discovers him and explores him. She thus shows that if Africa has been waiting for anything, it is for an encounter between equals. To continue with Images of Africa, skip to page 214. End of Path 2: rewritings by geographic origins of authors.
208
3.23
David Malouf, Remembering Babylon (1993)
David Malouf (1934-) was born in Brisbane.1 His fathers Lebanese-Christian family had immigrated into Australia in the 1880s and his mothers English-Jewish family just before the First World War. After graduating from the University of Queensland, he continued his teaching and university career in English Literature in Australia and Britain. Malouf now writes full-time and lives mostly in Italy. His work includes poetry, ction and drama. In 1978, Malouf wrote an opera libretto for Patrick Whites Voss . Remembering Babylon begins2 in about 1860 with the arrival of a stranger in a small, isolated settlement of rst-generation Scottish immigrants in Queensland. Although he is British, he has forgotten most of the English language. Nevertheless, the minister questions him and has the school teacher write down his story. The man, Gemmy, was cast overboard from a British ship when he was about 13 years old, and was rescued by Aborigines, with whom he stayed for 16 years. Ellen and Jock McIvor, whose children are the rst people he has contacted in the settlement, give him a place to sleep next to their own hut, and he shares their daily work. Gemmy teaches the children some Aboriginal crafts and skills, and gives the minister information about plants, their Aboriginal names and their uses as food or medicine. He does not, however, initiate people into anything that Aboriginal taboos would prevent them from approaching. The new knowledge leads the minister to envisage a larger use of native plants rather than imported species, and a general process of learning from the land and its people. He submits a report on this to the Governor at Brisbane, who ignores it. Gemmy plays an important role in the development of the McIvor children, Janet and Meg and their cousin Lachlan. His presence also causes many adults to wonder about their own position, both as settlers on the edge of what they call no-mans-land (3) and the dangers that may come from there, and as white people who wonder what the quality of whiteness is, and whether it can be lost or diminished. When Gemmy has been there for nearly a year, two Aborigines visit him to renew his memories of his life with them and of his religious connection to the land, to give him strength, because they notice that he is not feeling too well among the settlers. A young farm worker observes the visit, and spreads the word that Gemmy is in contact with Aborigines and will help them attack the settlement. This fear divides the community into those who think that Gemmy is harmless, and those who think he is not. Increasingly greater acts of sabotage are done to the farm where he lives, by neighbours who want to implicate the Aborigines
Biographical information stems from Procter, David Malouf. Cf. Malouf 42. The killings at Comet River, which were never proved to be the doing of Aborigines, took place in 1861, cf. Showroom Web Services.
2 1
3.23 MALOUF, REMEMBERING BABYLON (1993)
209
or to frighten the McIvors. After a few unrecognised white men overwhelm Gemmy, pull a sack over his head and duck him in a lake, Ellen McIvor and her female friends decide that he had better stay with Mrs. Hutchence, an elderly lady who lives at some distance with her younger companion Leona and hives of bees. Mrs. Hutchence initiates Janet into bee-keeping as a form of communion with nature. The teacher and one of the young men from the settlement are initiated into flirting by Leona. Mrs. Hutchences elaborate imported furniture and accessories make the teacher, the only villager who is in Australia only temporarily, even more homesick for Britain. Gemmys reaction is wholly dierent: the smell of a pine chest in his room helps him remember his childhood, most of which he had forgotten while nearly drowning and while forgetting the English language. Having been a child without parents during the later stage of the industrial revolution, he had to crawl under sawing machines and sweep up the sawdust until he was ve or six years old, in a close community of similar children. Later, he was boy to a London rat-catcher named Willett, from whom he desired attention and shelter as much as children do from their parents. Willett provided this stability for him, but also made him handle the dangerous rats, and sometimes beat him. When he was eleven or twelve, after a beating and some consumption of alcohol, Gemmy set Willetts place on re. He fled and accidentally ended up on a ship, which was already at sea before either he or the crew became aware of his being there. After a few years as a ships boy, he fell ill and was put overboard. Having retrieved all these memories, Gemmy wants to get away from the settlement. He feels that his life is tied to the pages of paper on which the minister and the teacher have initially described it, and wants to have them. As he has never learned to read, he accepts the random written pages given to him by the teacher, who does not have access to the real account. On Gemmys way back to the Aborigines, rain washes away the ink on the pages, and he feels cleansed. The story skips to the First World War. Janet is now a nun and a bee researcher, and Lachlan a politician. They meet and talk about their memories. Lachlan has earlier worked as a road surveyor, and Aborigines have shown him a burial site that they think includes Gemmys body. The burial site results from a dispersal, [. . . ] too slight an aair to be called a massacre (196), in which settlers killed Aborigines some three years after Gemmy had rejoined them. The book ends with Janets prayer for the people and animals she has known, and for remembrance of all creation. Like Whites Voss , this poetic and symbolic novel examines several discourses that enter into emerging Australian identities. The impersonal narrative voice mostly describes the feelings of the settlers or their children, but frequently takes on Gemmys perspective, and sometimes that of Aborigines. The settlers feel that beyond their last fence, there is a world over there, [. . . ] savage and fearsome, [. . . ] of nightmare rumours, superstitions
210
and all that belonged to Absolute Dark (2-3). Living on the edge of the immensities of the land (110), they feel both fear and a determination to make a dent in the Australian darkness to build themselves a home. The emerging discourse of a darkness immanent in colonised countries, which was later condensed by writers including Stanley and Conrad, is being applied to Australia as much as to Africa. The narrative voice distances itself from this discourse by pointing out that it is the standpoint [of] the little crowd of settlers (10), i.e. that darkness is in the eye of the beholder. In the settlers, Aborigines reawaken fears of the Bogey, the Coal Man, Absolute Night, a night stronger than the lighter side of things, which consists in British civilisation and feelings of homeliness (42). They suspect the Aborigines of cannibalism or abominations , and of drawing whites back to their prehistoric state (39, emphasis in the original). Some of the settlers would like to set up an extermination party against them (63). The indigenes are described as an incarnation of white fears, similarly to the Africans on the shore in Heart of Darkness. Out of this perceived darkness, Gemmy is launched at the settlers as if the landscape itself had hurled [him] into their midst (194), just like the forest pours out Africans in Heart of Darkness (Heart 59). Marlow intensely, but rather unspecically describes his feelings of primal fear. Malouf oers a detailed analysis of the fears, distortions and projections inspired by the half-Other, the black white man (10). The settlers have an old fear of raids by Aborigines, which is increased by the idea that Gemmy may be two-faced. This fear shows an inconsistency in their feelings: they believe that they have taken unsettled (75) land and now own it, but they also know that this land is part of traditional hunting ground (100). They have a reason to fear raids, as settlers elsewhere have harmed and killed many Aborigines. Unlike Patrick White, Malouf acknowledges colonial violence. He demonstrates how it aects both the settlers personalities and the Aborigines, who live miserably now (195). Gemmys hybridity also makes the settlers fear that they may lose their identity to the influences of the place, a loss which they feel Gemmy, now a savage (7, 13), has already undergone. This fear of a places influence resembles Marlows idea that the wilderness itself has changed Kurtz and may change himself. It is related to a fear that their civilisation may be fragile after all, and might not be enough against [. . . ] the world that could only be measured [. . . ] by the dread it evoked in them (105). Here, the settlers fear the unknown because it is unknown, not because of specic factors in it. Malouf subtly reinterprets several of Marlows feelings as disavowed fears. Marlow believes that the Congolese language is only made up of grunts and animal sounds; for Maloufs settlers the mere existence of a language they did not know was [. . . ] a way of making them helpless (65) because they have no power over it. Marlow derides his
211
reman as a dog in a parody of breeches; the settlers feel that Gemmy is a parody of a white man. [. . . ] He was imitation gone wrong, and the mere sight of it put you wrong too (39): the distorted reflection of themselves in the Other who has a certain amount of similarity to them makes them insecure about their own ways. Malouf also points out that this works both ways Gemmy sees himself reflected in a particularly aggressive settler as in a rippled water surface, seeing an image of himself that was all unfocused pieces that would not t (119). The settlers complex fears change both individuals and the structure of the community. People take sides, see new aspects in their friends, and wonder if they are changed themselves or have always been very dierent from their friends without knowing it. The character of Gemmy, the semi-Aborigine, invites one to reread Kurtz as a border crosser, a hybrid. When a border crosser is present, the self and the Other are no longer clearly separated, and people with a monocultural identity feel threatened. Marlow fears that Kurtzs involvement in Other, unspeakable rites (Heart 50) is a sign of a dark core or hollowness in the white psyche in general. Although the sensitive border crosser is his choice of nightmares (62), Marlow brings him back when he tries to return to the Africans on the shore. This scene shows Marlows fear of what will happen if Kurtz crosses the border again and for good. Marlow is not only anxious about a possible attack but also about Kurtzs (and possibly his own) identity, which he thinks will be utterly lost (65). Gemmy, of course, does cross the border back to the Aborigines. Marlow suspects that Kurtz wants to go back to the Africans for reasons of debauchery or various lusts (57). Gemmy has learned that life with the Aborigines is livable and sustains him spiritually; there is explicitly no debauchery with the Aborigines, who have barely enough food, and who exclude Gemmy from sexual activity on account of his marginal status. Marlow believes that a white man can only nd darkness in the colonised population (although Conrad leaves open the possibility that he may be wrong); Malouf shows that new insights and a life worth living can be learned there. Some of his settlers accept the man who has crossed the boundaries of his given nature (132), and Janet summarises at the end that he was someone we loved (194). These people learn a lot from him, and in the end begin to give up a whole binary world view. Eventually, they will no longer distinguish between an event in the lands history [or] part of yours (9). Gemmy himself has never tried to make a choice between his Aboriginal and European self, but has no notion of abandoning the tribe, even less of breaking from one world to another. It [is] a question of covering the space between them, of recovering the connection (32-33). His quest is for both sides of himself. The minister comes somewhat close to this idea in his report, which still talks of colonising as a means of improving the continent by introducing Christianity, but advocates respect and learning. As in Voss , native plants
212
symbolise an Otherness that can be embraced, or destroyed and superseded by imports. The minister wants both to respect and to appropriate the Australian environment, just as Mrs. Hutchence studies and domesticates native bees alongside her imported ones. The decline of a binary world view is reflected in language. The immigrants are intruders who name places and landmarks, but at the same time they are learners who pick up indigenous names, mostly for plants. By writing down Gemmys history, the men both document his Otherness and absorb it into their own approach to life, the literate one, in order to have some control over the unfamiliar. While Marlow suspects Kurtz may have given him the wrong papers, Gemmy denitely gets the wrong papers. In Heart of Darkness, this is a part of the general scepticism about language, implying that not even the right words are transmitted or saved, or that Marlow cannot know what Kurtz really meant to say. In Remembering Babylon , the wrong papers imply that written language is not as strong a magic as it may appear to the illiterate (and even to the literate) it has no intrinsic power but works because people believe in it. Several settlers have epiphanic or mystic experiences with nature that they feel cannot be described in words, like Janets being covered in bees or Jock McIvors discovery of beauty in water like silver and insects like jewels. They learn to accept what is inexpressible in language or at least in English. Such initiations also counter the possible romantic and essentialist prejudice that only Aborigines can closely commune with nature. Some characters are explicitly aware of learning processes. Jock McIvor literally learns to embrace the Other, when he overcomes his physical disgust of Gemmy and huddles together with him to comfort him after he has been thrown into the lake. Lachlan and the teacher explicitly reflect that to relinquish absolutes and to be less proud or dominant is a necessary phase in growing up. Symbolically, this can mean the necessary growing up of each person or of the Australian settler community. The ability to give up absolutes is taken up in the epigraph Whether this is Babylon or Jerusalem we know not. Marlow clearly indicates that the Congo is the Inferno, even if he is ambivalent about who causes this Inferno, the Congolese or the colonisers. Maloufs epigraph leaves it open whether Australia is the Whore of Babylon of Revelation 17-18, or the New Jerusalem of Revelation 3 and 21. The biblical Babylon stands for a city of abominations and decadence, but also a place of exile. Ellen McIvor thinks that the dark world [Gemmy] had lived in (79), the Babylon that torments him in his dreams, is Aboriginal society, when it is really industrialised London, an exile of the emotions from which Australia has rescued him. Gemmys arrival gives some settlers the idea that there might be doors here, hidden as yet, into some lighter world (11). Jock McIvor nds darkness (105) in his friends when they begin to turn against Gemmy. As in Heart of Darkness, it turns out that darkness can be everywhere but in contrast to Marlow, some of Maloufs characters nd out that light can be everywhere, too.
213
Marlows idea of an Inferno and of the end of the world when the sun dies is reinterpreted by an appropriation of the Aboriginal concept of cyclical time.3 When it appears that the sun at last had burnt itself out (176) in this novel, it is actually a bushre, which means a new season and new plant life. This idea is supported by an extensive re-and-water symbolism (Willetts house, the ocean, the lake, the bushre, the rain that Gemmy appears to start by naming it and that cleanses his written biography, Janets nal prayer). It reminds one of Wilson Harriss concept that from destruction springs new life. This dialectic is especially important in the literature of settler societies, both for the destruction they initially inflict and for their own initial destabilisation. Maloufs settlers also appropriate several other Aboriginal religious ideas, quietly, perhaps by osmosis from the land. This includes Janets dreamlike initiation to the bees, which to her are (Christian) angels or (Aboriginal) spirits, the evocation of the Dreaming as the lands other life (200) in her prayer, and Jocks realisation that words may cause things to happen autonomously, which Gemmy later conrms is a religious idea. The balancing act between an awareness of the unknown and an initiation into the new is reflected in Maloufs representation of Aborigines. He does not claim to speak for them, but attempts a fair description based on limited knowledge, which remains somewhat schematic but is respectful. Sometimes representation verges on the romantic, such as the idea that in a few words, Aborigines can evoke enough religious potency to heal Gemmy. Sometimes their limitations are pointed out, such as the relative poverty of a hunting and gathering life, or their refusal on religious grounds to fully integrate Gemmy as one of them, which makes him uneasy and pushes him to the white settlement. Altogether, their world [. . . ] proved no dierent in essence from [Gemmys] previous one (26). The idea of an us and them nally collapses when Gemmy, the white man, dies in violence against a group of Aborigines, and enters into the land by dying in it. On the one hand, this novel reads like a dream, or a mystic or religious parable. Gemmys picaresque adventures, especially his accidental jump onto a ship and his survival in the sea, are more fairytale-like than plausible. On the other hand, Malouf describes two actual founding Queensland politicians, the rst governor George Ferguson Bowen and his premier Robert George Herbert. The author remarks in an afterword that this account is based on historical material. The description of the two men is quite cynical. Unlike Gemmys settler friends, they do not seem to be open for learning. The governor desperately wants to be part of the countrys founding myth, and obsessively compares himself to founders and creators from Greek and Roman tales, up to the point where he sees himself as a kind of imperial demiurge, championing a great design, possibly a Conradesque idea (168). In reality, like Conrads colonisers, he is
3
For this concept, cf. Tripcony.
214
less concerned about the country than about his career. He hardly listens to information about the place, and he feels that his work in Australia is degrading, a position which he has not wanted and which proves to him that his career opportunities are smaller than he would like them to be. Mr. Herbert, a great cultivator of imported plants, appears similarly removed from reality. The two politicians make a totally inappropriate suggestion for Gemmys future occupation, and they give the impression that they are busy with inghting and with their hobbies rather than with their assigned task of building up the colony. The governor has little respect for the place, for the Aborigines only recently redeemed from nakedness, whose minds are still sunk in unfathomable night, as he believes. He appropriates the Aboriginal creation myth, the Dreaming, with biting disdain when he feels that only with the arrival of the colonisers, meaningful forms [. . . ] emerge out of the dark, the dreamlike (169). Much like Marlow, the minister, who meets the two politicians, learns how many inappropriate ideas and ambitions are brought to a colony, and feels quite discouraged by this. To continue with rewritings by authors from white settler colonies (South Africa), skip to page 172.
3.24
Mineke Schipper, Conrads Rivier (1994)
Mineke Schipper (1938-) has taught Intercultural Literary Studies, Literary Theory and Comparative Literature at several universities in her native Netherlands and in Africa.1 From 1964 to 1972, she worked at the Universit e Nationale du Congo. She has published literary criticism, non-ction and novels as well as journalistic contributions for radio and newspapers. Conrads Rivier (Conrads River) has been published only in Dutch. The story is presented by a frame narrator, the Amsterdam lm maker Hedda, who receives the diary of her deceased friend Ellen by mail and eventually bases a lm on it. This diary makes up most of the text. It spans the time from September 7, 1964 to December 31, 1965 (the years are never mentioned). Between Lumumbas death in 1961 and the coup d etat that made General Mobutu president on November 24, 1965, a struggle for power between Prime Minister Tshomb e and President Kasavubu caused a state of civil war, backed by powers outside the Congo. Mercenaries from South Africa and elsewhere were employed. UN troops were present from 1960 to 1964, initially called for by Lumumba. These historical facts provide the background for the novel.
1
Biographical information stems from Leiden University.
3.24 SCHIPPER, CONRADS RIVIER (1994)
215
Shortly after completing her studies in Amsterdam with a thesis on Heart of Darkness, Ellen marries Gerard, a businessman who has just been transferred to Kinshasa (Conrads Central Station) as an executive for an American textiles company. Gerard is interested in his career, in the growth of the company and later in his bosss flashy wife. Ellen takes up a teaching job at the University of Stanleyville, which has been temporarily moved to Kinshasa because there is civil war in Stanleyville. She soon makes friends with her students, especially Mofolo, a highly intelligent political refugee from South Africa. Her students and international colleagues awaken her interest in political and social questions. She becomes aware that outside powers use Central Africa as a battleground. Her insights become more complex when white refugees from the civil war stay in student accommodation for a while. Ellen attempts to dissuade Gerard from an alliance with a cotton company as she has heard that it exploits its workers, even killing them. Gerard angrily tells her that she is too gullible and should not believe her students political propaganda. At a party, Ellen meets a white South African mercenary, Willems, who molests her and whom Mofolo later recognises as the torturer and killer of many of his friends. Willems repeats that elke zwarte minder is er een (every black killed is one less; 104, 105), which sounds very much like exterminate all the brutes. For an exam, Mofolo gives a reading of Heart of Darkness which closely resembles Achebes 1975 critique. In the ensuing discussion, Ellen reproduces a fair amount of well-known criticism (cf. ch. 1), and basically concludes that Conrad was not a racist because his views were not those of his limited narrator. However, her trust in her own earlier, pre-Achebe type reading of Heart of Darkness is shaken. When she praises Mofolos essay and advises him to do more work on the topic, he replies that he feels he is neglecting far more important matters while he is idly discussing whether a writer from the previous century was racist or not. Soon afterwards, Mofolo kills Willems in a jazz bar using poison, and takes refuge with Ellen, whose husband is away on a business trip. The two feel very close but do not enter into physical relations. Gerard comes back earlier than planned and accuses Ellen of having gone native sexually with Mofolo. An hour after Gerard has thrown him out, Mofolo is arrested and imprisoned, possibly betrayed by Gerards Congolese driver for the reward. He is tortured and killed. With the help of a white, psychic monk, Ellen nds his body in the Congo River. To get away from Gerard and from her memories, she goes to Stanleyville, Conrads Inner Station, which she soon begins to call Kisangani, to teach at the re-opened main site of the university. She decides to retrieve her belongings from Kinshasa and break up denitively with Gerard during the holidays. After renewed ghting in Kisangani, she travels down Conrads rivier (152) by ship because all plane service has been suspended. On board, she rereads Heart of Darkness, and her last diary entry ends with a part of the last sentence from the novella. The reader then learns
216
from the frame narrative that the ship has been attacked and that Ellen has drowned in the river when the rail she was leaning on was destroyed by a grenade. The memory of Ellen and of her unusual approach to Africans lives on in Heddas lm, shot on location. Ellens view of herself and of her surroundings changes signicantly over time. She is initially naively Eurocentric, though very open to new experiences. Hedda, her more selfwilled friend, comments on this before Ellen leaves. She feels that students of Literature are apolitical, malleable and out of touch.2 Ellen herself says that her studies, including those of Heart of Darkness, hardly included anything about Africa, so that she is literally going on a journey into the unknown. Her family and friends are shown briefly to have the usual rmly entrenched stereotypes about black people, without any consciously bad intentions. Her father says that he is not a racist but he would consider it strange if she brought home a black boyfriend. Her old aunt, who used to work in Indonesia in colonial times, takes it for granted that the only possible role of whites in non-Western countries is to help, and that their help is always needed and welcome there. Ellens development departs from this point. It is wholly dierent from her husbands point of view. Unchangingly, Gerard continues to see Africa only as a site of economic opportunity. He prefers the government troops to remain in control because the civil war disrupts his export business. Gerard treats his African domestic employees as nothing but servants. He and his male friends believe that African men try to make European women go native with them, and that too much contact with African culture exacerbates this threat, such as Ellens wearing of African dresses. As opposed to their ideas, from the start Ellen treats every person simply as a person. When her husband and his driver come to pick her up at the airport, she shakes both mens hands. Being very sensitive and perceptive, she instantly catches her husbands negative reaction and wonders whether she has done anything wrong (31). Ellen continues to seek contact with Africans, regardless of their social status. She is more and more often invited into African families or gatherings. The frequent motif of shaking hands shows her feelings: some Africans are proud to shake hands with the white woman, and Ellen is equally proud and happy when someone extends a hand to her. When some Africans bring up the old colonial idea that whites are special, and for instance ought to give a speech at a church service rather than simply participate in it (79-80), Gerard takes this role for granted while Ellen does not feel that she is special in this sense. She feels increasingly alienated from Gerards set, and generally becomes aware of most whites behaviour, such as that of an American journalist to whom she introduces some university colleagues but who continues to talk only to Ellen, the white face in the group.
2
Cf. Schipper 17 (Apolitiek en van een niet te beschrijven braafheid, wereldvreemd).
217
Ellen embodies a European paradigm shift in the encounter with Africans. She approaches her new place as a learner, and she is insecure about whether she and the language that she teaches are welcome there (43). Seeing how other whites behave, including some who were there before independence and are nostalgic for the old colonial hierarchies, Ellen fears that Africans might reject her on the grounds of skin colour, and is surprised when they do not. She is increasingly able to relinquish her feeling of guilt for being comparatively rich and (geographically speaking) an intruder. Guilt, of course, is a self-centred feeling, which inscribes the other as a victim and causes a person to think that she has to be in control and solve all the guilt-inducing issues herself. Ellens feeling of guilt is alleviated when Africans oer her their friendship or accept her as an ally, and when they see themselves as agents rather than victims. They thus help her, not the other way round. Ellen does not succumb to a romantic view of Africans. She is able to see both beautiful places and neglected streets. In her diary, some of her students come across as flatly male chauvinist. She attributes [d]e horror, de horror (53) to the feared rebels as much as to the mercenaries. There is a distinct possibility that it is easier for Ellen to take on the learners point of view because she is a woman. Gerard keeps telling her that there are things wrong with her, that she ought to change and to accommodate. Similarly, she has memories of her mother discouraging her from self-willed behaviour. As a woman, Ellen is thus not as inclined to see herself as the centre of her world, or as the measure of all things, as are Gerard and the other male characters, who think that mannen [. . . ] waren nu eenmaal zo (197) men are what they are. For her personally, of course, this is a demeaning experience, but this is a case in which new possibilities spring from painful experiences (as e.g. Wilson Harris describes for whole societies). Having been somewhat destabilised because she is a woman, she is more perceptive and more adaptable. The connection between domination and gender is emphasised when she learns from Mofolo about political power structures and subsequently applies a similar analysis to Gerards means of exerting power in their marriage (189). Unlike the male white characters, Ellen is able to see herself from the outside, and to see that she herself is the Other in a situation where Africans are in the majority and on African soil. Seeing herself as Other to the given situation, as a possible mist, and as the person who is soliciting acceptance, is a painful but very enriching experience. Her journey into Africa is a journey into the self, but in the form of a dialogue with Africans, not as a lone observer like Marlow.
218
Ellen does not omit or embellish any of her experiences in her diary. She is not always successful in adapting to situations, and sometimes she is even clumsy, for instance when she speaks too loudly in the presence of secret police spying on a fellow teachers family (137). On some occasions, she reproduces stereotypes rather unthinkingly. Some ideas that appear quite normal in Europe sound half-baked and out of place in the Congo, such as her argument that poor people should not have many children because poor children are bound to be less happy than richer ones. This thought does not appear at all natural to her students, who feel that every child means new possibilities and a new lease on the future. Perhaps more importantly, Ellens argument appears naive in context with her privileged situation as a European. Nobody points out to her that Europeans rst contributed signicantly to the poverty of others and then acquired an unquestioned habit of telling them to spare potential ospring a life in poverty, or that the population density of the Netherlands is about 24 times that of the Congo.3 In encounters that implicitly contain such clashes in basic assumptions, Ellen feels uneasy, but she is not usually able to come to an analysis or conclusion. Instead, she writes in the form of open questions, both about her experiences and herself. She often wonders who she is and what she wants. The abundance of questions left open can be compared to Marlows way of describing his experience. On the one hand, Marlow, too, leaves open questions and paradoxes. On the other hand, he tries to make his experience manageable or explicable by superimposing pre-texts and canonical knowledge on it. Marlow evokes so many dierent explanations that it becomes clear that he does not really have an explanation and feels helpless, but still his eorts obscure his direct experience, expressing it in Western codes. Ellen tries to describe her experience as directly as possible. The novel is very intense because Ellens diary foregoes the literary distance oered by explanations and interpretations. (This abstention itself is of course a literary method). In her attempt at neutrality, she may overlook acquired thoughts and discourse through which she lters her experience without knowing it. This danger is inevitable, but is pointed out to the reader in that Ellen knowingly writes about many facts and opinions she hears from other people or from the media, and Gerard keeps telling her that she is too easily influenced. Schipper thus stresses that the influence of discourse cannot be avoided, only handled with care. Sometimes it is quite clear that Ellen refuses to form an opinion on something, such as what she hears about magic, including the psychic abilities of the white monk. Not having enough knowledge, she feels it is better to take things as they are and not to judge. She recognises her limits. About Congolese river villagers she says that she knows nearly as little about them as Conrad, who called them savages, and that their lives are ordered according to rules and based on a history she does not know (213).
Population per square kilometre: D. R. Congo: 19 persons, Netherlands: 453 persons. Websters New Encyclopedic Dictionary 1996, 1527-28.
3
219
At some point she feels that she knows less and less about what life means.4 This can be interpreted as a healthy postcolonial learning stage, the unlearning of acquired discourse, which leaves space for new experiences and favours a more self-conscious approach. An important pre-discourse of this novel, of course, is that of Heart of Darkness. Early on, there are several playful echoes. Visits to Brussels, an old aunt who invests all her work ethic in endless needlework like the knitters at the door to Marlows darkness, the perusal of a map before the journey, nautical images and Ellens childhood wish to become a sailor are some examples. Gerards eventual acquisition of a small castle (kasteeltje, 223-24) in Belgium is an allusion to King Leopold. Playful echoes add some detective reading pleasure to a novel and invite the reader to investigate the deeper connections. At the beginning of the novel, Hedda says that Heart of Darkness is not about Africa but about Europeans (22). This is one of Achebes arguments. It foreshadows the discussion that is later sparked by Mofolos exam essay. The surprising projection back in time of Achebes contribution and of subsequent criticism in context with Mofolos reading of Heart of Darkness appears as an interesting means of making them accessible to a wider public. The novel might also suggest that Achebe may not have been the rst to come up with such criticism, but only the rst who was suciently well-known and well-placed to be heard. This interpretation is however called into question by the closeness with which Mofolo follows Achebes arguments. Quotations from Heart of Darkness come to Ellens mind quite frequently. It is especially interesting to see what she chooses to quote, and what Mofolo chooses. Until the very end, Ellen quotes passages about the river and nature, about the act of telling, or about solitary moods. She sometimes cites them out of context in order to make them match her own moods. Seeing the river often makes her think of Heart of Darkness. Apparently, this is the way she has studied the novella in Amsterdam. Mofolo on the other hand chooses quotations where Marlow represents Africans, and interprets those in their discussion. This discussion is also the rst time Ellen pays attention to the Intended, who is excluded from important spheres much like herself. Mofolo identies with Africans, Ellen with a white woman, so each of them chooses the image of their own marginality in Conrads novella. (Black women, just as in Heart of Darkness, only put in a fleeting appearance in Conrads Rivier , in this case as prostitutes in hotels or as family members of university employees; Ellen has no female students or black female colleagues, and has little chance to get into contact with people who neither have the privilege of whiteness nor that of maleness.)
4
Cf. Schipper 113 (wat leven heet en waar ik steeds minder van begrijp).
220
There is a reprise of Achebes critique in the very last sentences of Ellens diary. Again, these sentences show the paradigm shift in which Ellen relinquishes a Eurocentric view. At rst, for her, was het ontdekken van Afrika een kader waarin Europa begon zichzelf te ontdekken (the discovery of Africa was a frame in which Europe began to discover itself). This is one of the ideas Achebe criticises: Africa as a backcloth for Europes search for self. Ellen then thinks of Mofolo and arrives at a view with two equal centres: Wie heeft eigenlijk wie ontdekkt? zou Mofolo vragen. We hebben elkaar aangeraakt en er is geen weg terug (who has actually discovered whom? Mofolo would ask. We have made contact with each other, and there is no way back; 214). Europe and Africa are presented as equal centres in many respects. Ellen is not the only person who searches for herself: her students discuss the N egritude movement of the 1930s-50s, which asserted the value of African emotional and rhythm-guided personalities without rejecting those stereotypes as such, and debate whether it was a stage in a development towards new African identities. While Ellen mentions several European pre-texts, colleagues introduce her to Fanons work. She reads Achebes Things Fall Apart and asks people to translate current Congolese songs for her. A recurring motif of myth shows that the two continents oer pre-texts of equal complexity and not, as Marlow suggests, a rich tradition on the European side and a few grunted phrases on the African. The novel focuses on myths about water beings. Andersens Little Mermaid, who gives up her identity for a man, is contrasted with Mami Wata, a powerful female, sh-tailed African water deity who is especially concerned with peoples aims in life and brings them success or failure. In a picture of Mami Wata that greatly impresses Ellen, the artist has incorporated imported objects (such as a telephone) to create a hybrid image that is nevertheless fully African. Mermaid-like beings as border crossers between water and land are implicitly likened to Ellen, who attempts to zigzag on the borders between white and black cultures far more intensely than the other Europeans. Water itself stands for life and death. Several people in the novel drown, nearly drown, or are nearly drowned by torturers. The Congo River is an actual and a symbolic waterway. Several characters say that the river never returns to its source, the past is gone forever, be it the pre-colonial, colonial or personal past. To Ellen, the Congo River remains Conrads rivier until the end, even while she learns from those for whom it is not. Schipper shows how a European can learn from another culture without renouncing her own. She shares a certain didactic tone with writers like Achebe and Ng ug , which is an indicator of eorts to make a new paradigm accessible to a reading public. It points to the social responsibility of writers and teachers on which the two African writers insisted earlier. To continue with rewritings by white Western authors, skip to page 227.
Negritude
Ngugi
3.25 GURNAH, PARADISE (1994)
221
3.25
Abdulrazak Gurnah, Paradise (1994)
Abdulrazak Gurnah (1948-) was born on the island of Zanzibar, now part of Tanzania.1 He moved to Britain in 1968 as a student. After a brief spell in Nigeria, Gurnah took up teaching English Literature at the University of Kent, where he still works. His writings include novels and criticism. Paradise is set in East Africa at the time of European encroachment. The novel covers some six years directly before the First World War. Yusuf, son of an impoverished businessman, is pawned by his father to a rich coastal merchant he has so far known and admired as Uncle Aziz. Twelve years old, Yusuf tries to nd a new home in Azizs shop. He is tutored by an older boy, Khalil, who has similarly been pawned for debts. The two boys work and sleep in the shop. Yusuf is attracted to the lavish garden that belongs to the main house, and helps the old gardener or spends time there alone. He learns that Azizs wife, the Mistress, lives secluded in the house and is said to be mad, but he never sees her. When Yusuf is sixteen, Aziz takes him along on a trade expedition for the rst time, but leaves him with a small trader near the beginning of the route. This man, Hamid, is from the Kenyan coast. He has Yusuf take Koran classes, and his Sikh friend teaches the boy the English alphabet and some car maintenance. In the slow and tentative way of a shy young teenager, Yusuf begins to discover the attractiveness of a girl, herself still almost a child. Hamid and his friends, none of whom was born in that place, talk about their lives, religion, slavery and the coming of the white men. A year later, Aziz comes back with another expedition, and Yusuf travels with it all the way into the interior. The caravan journeys through what is now the mainland part of Tanzania, and was then part of German East Africa. It crosses Lake Tanganyika into the Manyema area of the Belgian Congo, the site of King Leopolds earlier arrangement with the Afro-Arabs under Tippu Tip (cf. p. 7), of whom the men still talk. The people of the villages, cities and small kingdoms in the interior, called savages by the travellers, claim tribute for letting the caravan pass. Although some trading takes place with them, the main destination of Azizs caravan is a city whose savage sultan (132) is called Chatu. When the men arrive there, Chatu has them captured and wants to keep their merchandise in exchange for their freedom. He gives them two reasons for this, namely that he is afraid they may be slavers, and that another similar trading caravan has earlier cheated him and he feels entitled to exploit this one in return. During his few days in Chatus town, Yusuf flirts with a young woman from Chatus court. A German ocial arrives and makes it clear that he has the right to administer justice there now. He makes Chatu give back Azizs belongings. The men in Azizs caravan and people in
1
Biographical information stems from British Council.
222
some villages say that this trade expedition will be their last one due to the changes brought by the Europeans, and that Europeans believe all Afro-Arab caravans trade in slaves. Aziz has never traded in slaves, but mostly in ivory, gold and rubber, which are now being monopolised by the Europeans, most drastically by the Belgians. Back on the coast, it turns out that the expedition has been a nancial loss. Aziz and some of his men travel again to exploit other sources of money that might alleviate the situation. Yusuf returns to the garden. He nds out that the Mistress is hiding from the world because she has a disguring skin disease, and that she believes Yusuf has a divine gift and can heal her. Yusuf is attracted to Khalils adopted sister Amina, who is living in the house as a secondary wife to Aziz and a companion to the Mistress. To see her more often, he accepts to go into the house in the evenings and pray for the healing of the Mistresss disease. He also nds out that the old gardener was originally a slave given to the Mistress by her father as a gift, and was oered his freedom long ago, but preferred to refuse it rather than nd himself a new home. Khalil, too, is nominally free now that Aziz has satised his formal claim by marrying Amina, but he is staying to comfort his sister. Yusuf talks with Amina, and it becomes clear to him that although she sees her life with Aziz as hell, his own wish to win her over is hopeless. The Mistress increasingly claims his attention, possibly with sexual intentions, up to the point that he flees from her. She then states that he has assaulted her. Yusuf realises that people will believe her and that he, and also Khalil and Amina, would have nowhere to go if they tried to flee. At that point, Aziz returns, bringing the news that Yusufs father has died and his mother has gone. Aziz reproaches Yusuf for having been in the main house so often, which gives rise to gossip. Yusuf feels intimidated by Aziz and does not have the courage to tell him what he has been intending to, that it is wrong [to] own people the way you own us (241, italics in the original). Aziz has heard about impending war between the Germans and the English on the northern border, and warns the young men that the Germans might try to kidnap people as porters for their army. When a troop of African soldiers led by a German ocer passes through the village and makes a brief halt outside Azizs shop, the members of the household hide in the buildings. Yusuf can see the soldiers outside, resting and taking captives. When they have just left again, he goes out of the house and sees dogs eating human excrement, which he interprets as an image of his own cowardice. When he hears a noise like the bolting of doors behind him in the garden (247), he runs after the soldiers. Paradise oers a piece of counter-history, about a culture whose voice is scarcely heard in Europe. The perspective is that of the Arabs and Afro-Arabs whom Conrad does not mention. While the route of Azizs caravan is described with so many place names and historical references that one feels invited to read the novel with the help of
223
an atlas and a history book, the Europeans are nameless and marginal to the story in spite of the threat they pose. In the highly mixed coastal society, people have to deal with dierence and Otherness. The main groups are (descendants of) Arabs, who speak Arabic and have brown skin, and Afro-Arabs, who speak the contact language Swahili and are of African or more or less visibly mixed Arab-African descent. The Swahili speakers are, at that point, a culture of their own. They are Muslims but cannot understand the Koran, which they must read in Arabic because to strict Muslims translations of the holy book are blasphemy. Although the status of Afro-Arabs is thus generally lower than that of Arabs, and many Arabs like Aziz are richer and more rened, the dierence is seen as gradual rather than abstract or essentialist. In addition to these two groups, there are some people from India, a few Greeks and other immigrants. The characters of this novel are from these dierent groups. They are not at all intellectuals. Many of them are a rough sort of men who have to work for Aziz as porters and guards because they have been unable to secure better occupations. These men come to terms with dierence by bantering about it, in discussions whose sentiments range from joking taunts to sincere views laced with amicable aggression. Khalil (who like Aziz is bilingual) addresses Yusuf alternately as my Mswahili brother (53) and you stupid Mswahili (32, 44). The character who is most serious about dierence is perhaps Kalasinga, Hamids Sikh friend, who wants to translate the Koran into Swahili to enable Muslims to see what a bullying god they worship. His friends recognise that there is an element of earnestness in this, but they call it his madness. To the men, adjusting to a mixed society does not mean hushing up dierences, but addressing them. Dierence helps dene the shape of friendships, but it does not diminish them. This approach only works for persons of roughly equal status, for whom dierence does not mean power dierence; Aziz for instance does not take part in it. The traditional Africans in the interior are called savages by the Arabs and AfroArabs, who call themselves civilised. The members of the expedition perceive the savages as very dierent, and do not take them seriously especially because of their Animist religion and their low achievement or ambition in the areas of technology and travel. The dierence of their appearance from the clothes of coastal people, and the warlike disposition of some Masai are further major issues for the travellers. Some of this discourse on Central Africa is surprisingly similar to Marlows, but not as mystifying. People are aware that ancestors of Afro-Arabs were traditional Africans. They often mention the mixed origin of their culture, as when Yusufs mother says about his father that anyone with eyes could see that his mother must have been a savage (14). As a child, Yusuf plays with the children of migrants from the interior who work for the Germans, although his father forbids it on the grounds of their savagery. On the expedition, savages act
224
as trading partners, and some of them know Swahili or some Swahili speaker knows their language, so that communication is always possible. The power of their rulers is not to be trifled with. All this gives the Otherness of traditional Africans a wholly dierent flavour than it has for Marlow. Savagery is a way of life (60), not a Darwinist or essentialist trait. When Yusuf flirts with a woman in Chatus court, he sees her simply as an attractive woman, not as the kind of ensnaring and destructive Otherness that Marlow sees in Kurtzs friend. To add to the complexity, dierent characters display dierent degrees of racism. This novel is very dialogue-oriented and multivocal. The leader of the expedition feels that savages cut o body parts of slain enemies out of instinct like a shark or a snake (60) (where Marlow chooses the comparison to a hyena (Heart 43)), whereas a guard explains that it has to do with their religion (60). Another man argues that all people are from the blood of the same Adam (127). Hamids friend Hussein feels that they should not be called savages at all (85). Aziz provokes people with the idea that African religious rites may be as good as any other medicine (123). His wife has been treated both by learned hakim (Arab doctors/scholars) and by mganga from over the hills (traditional African healers) (38). Just as the idea of savagery is far more complex than for Marlow, the concepts of slavery and freedom in this society are more complex than most Westerners know. Aziz and his men insist that they do not trade in slaves and do not approve of this trade, although Aziz has a system of claiming children as pawns. Pawned servants and slaves can nd a home and inner (emotional or religious) freedom with their masters, as the old gardener explains to Yusuf. Rich women are out of it and locked away in the house/harem, but can still have a position of power, whims and demands, and the possibility to shape their own lives to some extent. The Mistress manages to arrange a substantial proportion of the households life around her predicament, even while she is locked up in a very patriarchal structure and withdraws further to hide her disease. The women who come to visit her have an autonomous social life quite separate from that of the men. Women of lower ranks have more freedom to go out, joke around and say what they think, as the behaviour of female customers in the shop shows. It turns out that freedom is not a simple concept. Nevertheless, the diculty of nding a home and personal freedom as Azizs pawned servant turns Yusuf into a restless searcher. His search begins when he rst has to go with Aziz. They travel by train into a fear-inspiring darkness that Yusuf perceives as a measureless void (19). Later, the march through the rainforest appears as a nightmare (172, 179) to him for the strain, diseases and ghts it brings.
225
Initially, Yusuf searches for a paradise. Marlow situates paradise in Africa in two ways: to him, the Congo River is the beckoning snake, while Africa as such stands very denitely for a state after the Fall. The Biblical image of paradise and that in the Koran are quite similar: a magnicent garden with four rivers, guarded by re, etc. However, for Yusuf, paradise is rather like what heaven is to Christians: a promised land, the place where life will hopefully lead. This idea turns out to be common to several religions. Muslim paradise/heaven is a beautiful garden with sexual possibilities, and Kalasinga, the Sikh, talks of a very similar heaven for himself. The question where paradise/heaven is and who will be in it is part of the more or less playful intercultural banter between him and his Swahili friends. The men also try to situate paradise on earth. This attempt corresponds to the search for the good place or for a home, a central motif of migrant lives. Kalasinga argues that paradise is really a garden in India, built by Mogul barbarians (80). Yusuf rst tries to situate it in Azizs garden, which he feels is the rst good place available to him after his displacement. He later realises that this garden is not a real paradise, because it is tied to a state of captivity for him, for Amina and Khalil and even for the Mistress, its owner. He briefly thinks of building a garden of their own more complete than that (234) with Amina, but realises that he is not in a position to do so. Yusuf also nds that the red clis on Lake Tanganyika resemble the walls of flame that guard Muslim paradise. This prompts Khalil to ask whether savages live in that paradise (181). Though this refers to Chatus violence, Khalils question implies that paradise is where each person nds it. Each time Yusuf comes close to nding a good place, which usually includes a desired woman, he nds that it eludes him. Instead of nding a paradise, he learns about power structures. Marlow experiences something like that when he recognises what is beyond [his] power of meddling (Heart 40). Yusuf learns on his journey how Azizs trading empire works and where he stands in it. Marlow and Yusuf are initiated into closely related political developments from opposite sides. They mirror each other even geographically, in that Marlow approaches the Congo from the West and Yusuf from the East. Each is a vulnerable young man in a mens world. Their private, apolitical needs and emotions are influenced by history and vice versa. It becomes clear to the Arabs and Afro-Arabs that their search for good places, if only good places to trade, is going to be severely curtailed by the white occupation. The men try to form an impression of the occupiers. Like savages, whites are found at the edge of the world (42) in Arab and Afro-Arab myths, together with Gog and Magog or with semi-humans like jinns. They are thus ranged with the mysterious and the dangerous much as Marlow classies the Congolese margin of his European world.
226
Just as in Heart of Darkness, the levels of myth and reality coexist: Azizs men also have some actual information about Germans, including their resoluteness and desire to punish. They hear about the experiences of an African in Russia. Such knowledge conrms their idea that strange and surprising events, with both savage and civilised traits, happen in faraway places. The mens talk about the whites also shows how prone discourse about a little-known people is to errors. Yusuf and his fellow travellers consistently hear that whites can put their hands into res and eat metal. While it remains unclear what technologies have created these ideas, they show how close truth and ction are in hearsay about another people. This invites white readers, an important target audience of this book, to be critical of white discourse about other peoples. This selection of material makes it clear that the impersonal narrative voice, which appears to be following Yusufs perspective without commenting, is really a mediator aware of European and (Afro-)Arab cultures and unobtrusively creates a space between them. In addition to paradise/heaven at the centre of the metaphysical landscape and mythical beings at its edges, another symbol is important for Yusufs growing sense of identity: the dogs that are the subject of his frequent nightmares. To the other characters, Yusufs nightmares and fears mean that he is a sensitive, gifted young man, possibly even with a kind of religious vocation. His dreams mirror important developments. While Marlow interprets his oppressive journey into the Congo as a nightmare, for Yusuf fears and his sense of powerlessness and displacement turn into nightmares about dogs. He is scared of dogs, which appear as dangerous and aggressive animals more like wolves. In his dreams, they stand for the powers that have made him into a pawn and threaten him. Later the leader of the expedition exclaims that there will be no more journeys now the European dogs are everywhere (186). In the last scene, the meaning of a dog is dierent. The dogs there are abject beings whose obliviously degraded hunger makes them eat excrement. Yusuf suddenly identies with them, feeling that he is a coward and a shit-eater (247) himself because he has not done anything to improve his own situation. This insight and his compassion for what he has learned about Aminas and Khalils position lead him to aliate himself with the even more powerful and more dangerous Germans. Rather than be on the side of the weak street dogs, he prefers to be on the side of the strong (if despised) European dogs and runs to join them. Yusufs emotional development demonstrates how a person can become open for turning into a collaborator. From his disillusioned admiration of Uncle Aziz he moves on to a new paternal authority gure, the intruding power. Like Nwoye in Achebes Things Fall Apart , Yusuf becomes open to a new culture because he feels outcast and destabilised in
3.26 WIDMER, IM KONGO (1996)
227
the prevalent one. Yusuf is ashamed of his weak position although someone else forced him into it. He wants to be an agent rather than a victim, and it becomes quite clear to him that he cannot achieve this in his own culture. Kurtz, too, feels drawn to the Other when he is lonely and disoriented. What makes their experiences complementary is the historical situation and power imbalance between the groups. To continue with rewritings by authors from colonies of occupation (India), skip to page 159.
3.26
Urs Widmer, Im Kongo (1996)
Urs Widmer (1938-) is a Swiss writer renowned for farcical, even absurd ction that touches on sensitive issues.1 After studying History as well as German and Romance Literature in Switzerland and France, he worked for publishing houses and as a literary critic, and taught at university level in Germany and Switzerland. Widmers rst works Alois (1968) and Die Forschungsreise (1974) refer to Stanley and Livingstone, and he published new German translations of Conrads Congo Diary and Heart of Darkness with a detailed afterword in 1992. His works include prose and poems, essays, drama and radio plays. Widmer now lives in Switzerland. Im Kongo (In the Congo) has been published only in German.2 Set in 1994, it is the story of Kuno, a 56-year-old bachelor who works in a retirement home. Kuno is in love with the head nurse, Anne. He has once asked her whether she would marry him, and her answer was Da k onnen Sie warten, bis Sie schwarz sind (18) you can wait for that until you are black, an idiom that is not usually associated with skin colour, but with indenite time (wait until blue in the face). Kuno feels that his life is boring and that everyone except himself and his father has an interesting fate. Kunos father, who is still living in his own house alone, accidentally discharges an old war pistol in the general direction of his postman and is forcibly assigned to Kunos ward. Kuno now learns that his parents and the next-room neighbour in the home, Herr Berger, did have an interesting fate. Quite by coincidence, they took up working together against Hitler in the Swiss Intelligence during the war. Berger, who produced optical lenses and sold them to the Germans for military purposes, was invited by an unsuspecting Hitler at some point and given his secret phone number. When German soldiers accused him of spying, he phoned this number and was rescued by Hitler in person. The Swiss state has never ocially
Biographical information stems from Stuttgarter Zeitung and from Lyrikwelt. Excerpts were published in English translation in DIMENSION 2 Vol. 4, No. 1., Nacogdoches: The Second Dimension Press, 1997. See (July 1, 2005) members.aol.com/germanlit/dimension2.html.
2 1
228
Nestle
thanked Berger and Kunos father for their services, but they are not sure whether they would deserve that, because of internal conflict and economic motivations in the Intelligence. Moreover, Berger became rich by selling his lenses to the Germans, subsidised with a credit from the Swiss Chamber of Industry and Commerce. After the war, the two men refused to arrange asylum in Switzerland for their German informant, so that they do not feel that they are without reproach. Kunos mother and her gardener, really a security ocer, were shot from the house next door early in the war, by a guest of the rich brewer Anselm Schmirhahn, its owner. Schmirhahn was an adherent of Nazi ideology. One of his breweries is in Kisangani, founded by his grandfather during King Leopolds time. When, 37 years ago, its director was found dead, impaled and minus his penis, Schmirhahn appointed Kunos friend Willy as the successor. Willy took Sophie with him to Kisangani, whom Kuno had considered his own girlfriend. Schmirhahn suddenly turns up in the retirement home and pays Kuno to go and look for Willy, because there has not been any news or money from Willy for a year. Kuno instantly flies to Kinshasa, a city ravaged by a civil war of which he has never heard before, and takes a steamer, crowded with Congolese merchants. On the steamer, he meets Marlows reman, who works down in the hull and wears a bit of white woollen thread for a fetish. The reman goes overboard one night. Kuno arrives in Kisangani, where a black couple with an adult daughter claim that they are Willy and Sophie. They run the brewery. Kuno is scared of them. Obediently, he accompanies the black Willy to a yearly meeting of all tribal kings of the Congo, dressed in demonic masks and indulging in all kinds of excesses. One of these excesses is provided by Willy in the shape of strong beer, another is a tent full of white prostitutes from Brussels. Kuno frees Marlows reman, whom he nds tied up at the site of the meeting, and accidentally retains his thread fetish. During the meeting, the kings negotiate their relative power by a battle of their fetishes, a contest of purely mental strength. These kings include traditional rulers, but also new ones like Willy and the directors of Toyota and Nestl e Zaire. Kuno does not know that he has to prostrate himself before the most powerful king. The king takes this for courage, and gives him his business card. He intends to reclaim the site of the brewery, and does not want to harm Kuno. A troop of his soldiers soon attack the brewery in traditional gear but with modern weaponry. Kuno tells the brewery employees that the thread fetish will save them. He phones the number he nds on the business card of the king, Mobutu. Kuno is rescued by Mobutu just like Berger was by Hitler. When he realises that he is black, Kuno nally believes that Willy and Sophie (and their albino dog) have turned black too. He returns to the retirement home in Z urich. His father has found out who killed his mother and the gardener, but dies of old age before he can tell Kuno. Nurse Anne falls in love with the black Kuno. Schmirhahn is tricked in a letter from Willy into bequeathing his breweries to Willy, and the directors position in Kisangani to Kuno.
229
He dies of shock when he realises this. Willy and Sophie return to Switzerland. Kuno and Anne go to Kisangani, run the brewery and live happily ever after, both black now. When Anne and Willys daughter Saba buy a laptop for their accounting work, Kuno borrows it and sits on a tree for a week writing down this story. This is clearly a dream story, a fairy tale for adults. The repetition of Bergers rescue in Kunos tale shows that he (unconsciously) reacts to what he has heard shortly before, just as in a real dream. Several of Kunos dreams are wishful ones. He yearns for Nurse Anne, who turns out to have a sexual xation on black men. He also yearns for an interesting fate, something he feels is in short supply in his postwar generation. Consequently, he turns black, is rescued by Mobutu and conquers Anne in a spontaneous wild orgy, a fate which is as interesting as any. Kunos Zaire is a site of dream and fantasy, where beer is consumed on credit and in staggering amounts, and a man can prove himself in battle. He quietly assumes that colonialism has done some good even in this imagined wild site, as the kings meetings and many practices are less violent and thus more civilised now than in the precolonial past: in spite of the civil war (on which he hardly reflects), Kuno feels that much of the colonial dream has come true (149). A white(-born) man, of course, becomes a king in Africa, like Kurtz. The huge Swiss forest of Kunos childhood, a beautiful and inspiring forest with a personality of its own, has been partly chopped down and is full of logging equipment when Kuno is 56. Kuno recovers this lost dream in the jungle of the Congo. His daydreams in the forest of his childhood, of gnomes and spectres whose king he is, fade into a Conradian dream of snakes and of forest demons that impale people on stakes (64). Writing, he returns to the primal state in which humans still lived on trees, and chooses the highest tree to be the person at the top, and the one who sees it all. If there is no more adventure to be found in Switzerland, the Congo, where the blacks are blackest (26), still has lots of it to oer. The Congo and black skin are also described as a site of sexual fullment, not only for the exoticist Anne. Kuno has a voyeuristic fascination with black penises, and his own penis becomes interesting (and employed) only after it has turned black. In some respects, the Congo of this novel is a bad dream that turns into a good one. It is initially seen as a dangerous or nightmarish site: Schmirhahn originally sends Willy to Kisangani in the hope that the Congolese climate or people will kill him (because Schmirhahn hates Willys father and possibly Willy for having an aair with his wife). Later, Willy stops communicating with Schmirhahn because he hopes this will induce him to come to the Congo where he can succumb to the climate. However, instead of thus acting as a nemesis on demand, the former heart of darkness becomes a site of happiness for Kuno and Anne. The gap between black and white is bridged by their transformation, a dream come true of successful cultural integration.
230
Nestle
On another level, this tale is part of the eort to come to terms with the Nazi-era past of Switzerland, which as it turns out was a neutral country only in theory. Kunos Congo dream can be seen as an attempt to relate to what he learns about his father, and to his own fear that he may have assisted his mothers murderer by making her photo available to Schmirhahn. Widmer links the Swiss experience of the Second World War to Mobutus Congo. Hitlers war has seamlessly faded into the Cold War, whose victims are the Zaireans as the West supports the cruel and exploitative Mobutu because of his anti-communism. Widmers Mobutu talks like Hitler (164-65, esp. heim in mein Reich). The propaganda methods of Nazi Germany and other war-time European countries have been transferred to the Congo: everyone in Kinshasa and Kisangani has a TV set, and there is only one TV station. This station distorts actual Congolese traditions into soap operas, so much that people no longer recognise their own roots. The war proteers, collaborators, resistance members and especially the undecided, ambivalent people who existed in World War II now exist in the Congo. Their ospring actually become Congolese. Kunos father and Berger feel that their part in the resistance was only half-hearted. Their wartime life, especially Bergers, resembles both Marlows ambivalent anti-imperialist feelings and his vague involvement in the imperialist project. In the next generation, Berger and Kunos father are mirrored in Willy and Kuno. They are normal average people, ambivalent in their aliations and with no great striving for clarity. Willy and Kuno make money with Kisangani beer almost casually, and send it to the rich man in Switzerland for whom such exploitation is not casual at all. Emphasising the connections between the generations, the protagonists have the same rst names as their fathers. Globalisation, in this case the neocolonial economic exploitation of the Congolese by Schmirhahn and by actual Swiss companies like Nestl e, brings the question of Swiss responsibility right up to date. Schmirhahns grandfather made business deals with King Leopold. Today, Schmirhahns beer serves as opium for the people in the Congo, making them indierent to their problems. They spend their scarce money on beer as an all-round tranquilliser, so that Schmirhahn actually prots from their poverty and suering. The blackening of Swiss complexions brings the struggles in Zaire closer to home. It supports the idea that what happened here in World War II, is happening there now. The European war has only been moved further away from home geographically, in many respects a proxy war. In Widmers allegory it is suddenly very close. The question of how the Swiss treat members of other nations is brought close to home again when the Tamil cook of the retirement home commits suicide because he is to be expelled from the country the next day. Hitlers war, Mobutus Congo and the fate of this asylum seeker are overlaid in an eerie way that gives this book a complex political dimension of current interest.
231
Nazi ideology mirrors colonial racism. The Swiss Nazis of Kunos childhood feel that their German counterparts see them as grunting yokels and as genetically inferior, much like Marlow describes the Congolese (83). Todays racism, in turn, mirrors Nazi Europe. The self becomes Other when the black Kuno returns to Switzerland. Kuno gains an insight into what it means to be a black man in Switzerland, and it is not surprising that he prefers to go back to Kisangani. Schmirhahn tells the black Kuno that his, Schmirhahns, house used to be racially pure, no oence intended, but those were the good old times (178). After his rst lovemaking with Anne, Kuno exploits the stereotype. He scares away the residents of the home by approaching them as what they call a naked negro (184). As this means not only an unclothed African to them, but a dangerous and wholly uncivilised primitive, they hurry back to their rooms and he obtains the desired privacy. Several characters and other elements from Heart of Darkness appear in Im Kongo . The anachronistic steamer, fuelled with wood and sporting a steam whistle, is home to Marlows helmsman and reman. This reman is either thrown overboard by passengers due to conflict between ethnic groups or, Ulysses-like, is attracted to singing people on the riverbanks, who already made Marlow yearn to go ashore for a howl and a dance (Heart 38). His fetish is that of the man dying in the grove in Heart of Darkness. Indeed when Kuno meets this reman again, it turns out that the dying man was his grandfather, whom the whites forced to work and abandoned to starve when he was exhausted (163). People keep telling Kuno that woollen threads are the best kind of fetishes. After Kuno has freed the reman from his bondage in the camp of the mighty, the fetish, now a token of their cooperation, becomes powerful indeed. It helps Saba defend the brewery in the attack, if not by magical means then by boosting her selfcondence. Saba herself plays the role of Marlows accountant. When Kuno rst meets her, she is stepping out from her oce for a breath of fresh air, and insists that elegant clothes help preserve morale (132). As she is not destructive like Marlows accountant, this echo is a playful one, along with Bergers wife who walks by dressed in the Russians colourful rags at the end of the novel. All Europe contributed to the making of not a Kurtz (Heart 50), but of the movie Rocky III , one of the lms in which an image of the West and of power is conveyed to Africans in Kisangani cinemas (209). The description of the desirable Swiss forest is modelled on Conrads Congo rainforest from the start. The unspeakable rites are the struggle of the fetishes at the kings convention, a struggle between Congolese potentates and neocolonial players. Unspeakable rites are thus sheer power. Africa is hell and paradise, where Kuno creates himself through writing in seven days, although he is as irreligious as Marlow (213).
232
As with Heart of Darkness, one can argue that with a dream story that is not about Africa, it is hard to discuss its representation of Africa. However, the site of the dream is clearly identied as Zaire, and some descriptions including that of Kinshasa and of life on the steamer are quite journalistic. Widmer does not oer a distinction between plausible and implausible descriptions, but provokes the reader to work it out alone. From the beginning of the book to the rst arrival in Kinshasa, there are long intermezzi set in italics, which initially seem unrelated to Kunos Swiss tale. The rst one begins with the idea that the Congolese jungle dwellers, animal-like, feel less pain than whites (21), which sounds like an old-fashioned statement about Africans but also mirrors Bergers observation that war reduces sensitivity (72). The intermezzi describe the Congo as a timeless site of magic, spirits, human sacrice, territorial drumming and killing. They introduce the demonic god-kings of the jungle, horrid ends who sometimes exterminate whole peoples. The kings attract their victims by the fascination of their abomination, while their queens go out to kill men by sexual means. The description of life in the big cities, where no such kings rule, is more realistic, but people there appear excessively gullible and ignorant, confused by television, beer and the arbitrary goods and rumours brought by international aid. An important part of Western imports seems to consist in impoverishing urbanisation, in pornography, gambling and McDonalds. The intermezzi thus appear to cover every existing stereotype about the Congo, several of which intersect Heart of Darkness, but they also include some currently accepted ideas about life and Western influence in the Congo. They address the reader (assumed to be male), as if he were about to move to the Congo and experience all this or perhaps they address Kuno. Dream and reality meet when Kuno experiences what earlier appeared in the intermezzi: the descriptions of both jungle and city are continued in his experience as Willys grand-vizier (a rather inappropriate term from the Muslim world), and later as a king himself. Widmer suggests that Europeans still project the heart of Otherness onto the Congo. The word Congo denotes an actual country, but also a symbol. Even more than Marlow, Kuno constructs the Congo from his own thoughts rather than experiencing it. Widmer makes it easier to spot non-realistic discourse than Conrad, both through exaggeration and because much of the time, he confronts todays readers with yesterdays stereotypes. Moreover, for instance, the meetings of the kings are clearly ctional. They are described as an age-old tradition, but the Congo in its colonial borders is not age-old, and travel in a region of rainforest and other obstacles has always been limited. These meetings are a satirical image of international political power processes. Simultaneously, they are a dream of personal achievement and struggles for status. Like Conrad, Widmer overlays concrete political statements with the Europeans Congo of the soul or inner Congo. However, Widmer satirises the Congo of the soul
3.27 OHANLON, NO MERCY (1996)
233
and exposes it as a clich e. He warns of available representation of Africa. Some criticscliche feel that this is foreshadowed in Heart of Darkness, in that Conrad makes the initial perception of a discourse as Africanist possible (Miller 170; cf. p. 27). Widmers complex mixture of dream and Africanist knowledge is a parody of Conrads similar mixture. Simultaneously, the layers of meaning in this novel may purport to be what an average European associates with the Congo today. In this sense, it is another frontier novel, an overstatement of the inextricable hodgepodge of television knowledge and projections about Africa (including but not limited to Heart of Darkness) that Widmer nds in contemporary European thought. Kuno must have seen some general journalistic coverage of the Congo on TV, which he incorporates into his dream, but either the reporting was not specic or he did not watch it closely, because he does not know that there has been a war. Television and beer (or the immaterial, social drugs symbolised by beer) confuse actual Europeans as much as they do the imaginary Congolese townspeople. This image of Europeans accuses the (Western) reader, and it raises the question who is behind such confusion, or who prots from it.
3.27
Redmond OHanlon, No Mercy: A Journey into the Heart of the Congo (1996)
Redmond OHanlon (1947-) was born in England, where he still lives.1 He graduated in Nineteenth-Century English Studies, and has written a scholarly book entitled Joseph Conrad and Charles Darwin: The Influence of Scientic Thought on Conrads Fiction (1984). He has also published travel books about Borneo and the Amazon rainforest, and feels inspired by nineteenth-century explorers. For fteen years, OHanlon was the natural history editor of The Times Literary Supplement. No Mercy is a non-ctional report about a journey to the Peoples Republic of the Congo, the former French Congo, in 1989. Redmond OHanlons companions are the American professor of psychology and specialist in animal behaviour Lary Shaer and the leading Congolese biologist and head of a ministry Marcellin Agnagna. The two white friends are in search of adventure and zoological exploration, and they are interested in a big animal, Mok el e-Mbemb e, in the remote Lake T el e, which Marcellin claimsMokele to have seen some time ago and which appears to be a surviving dinosaur, but theyMbembe Tele simultaneously dissociate themselves from this aim because they feel that it is unscientic. Marcellin undertakes the journey to earn money from Redmond and Lary, and
Biographical information stems from Penguin. I use OHanlon to denote the author and Redmond for the character he is in his own book, as people address him by his rst name.
1
234
feticheuse
Nze
Samale
Tele
to communicate a new law to chiefs in the interior. Starting in the capital, Brazzaville, the journey begins with the two white mens visit to a f eticheuse who analyses their personalities and their futures and warns them against the dangers of their endeavour. This is followed by an arduous quest for the right visa documents, and a journey up the Congo and Oubangui rivers on a diesel steamer to which so many barges and boats are attached that it resembles a floating city (75) and market. The men recruit two relatives of Marcellins, Manou and Nz e, as personnel for their journey. From the city of Impfondo, the ve men travel by car, motorized dugout and nally on foot into the rainforest between the Oubangui and Congo rivers. They stay in small cities and villages. People are usually hospitable, but a lot of bribing is required. The administration of each place is split between a hereditary chief and an ocial of the socialist state. How seriously people take the state ocials and militia varies from place to place. In one village, the Commandant tries to take over the travellers equipment and provisions. Wherever they arrive, people come to them with diseases that could be cured if the proper medicines were available, and they soon realise that their huge store of antibiotics and similar remedies is woefully inadequate. Redmond and Lary learn that the Bantu, who inhabit the cities and villages, own the rainforest-dwelling Pygmies2 as slaves. Whenever the travellers walk through the forest, they employ Pygmies as guides and porters. A group of Pygmies permits them to watch a religious dance and a hunt, and answers questions on plants and religion. Back in the villages, the otherwise lively and condent Pygmies suddenly appear subdued, and their Bantu owners take their complete pay. In one village, the travellers meet Marcellins uncle, an elephant poacher. In another, Redmond buys a fetish for himself. The sorcerer is Marcellins grandfather, and he forces a fetish on Marcellin too. Until then, Marcellin has managed to avoid being drawn into religion, because he sees himself as a rational scientist and because he is afraid that once you start, you cant stop, become dependent and lose your mental freedom (172, 183). The sorcerer tells Redmond that the rainforest is haunted by a creature called Samal e, an animal of imagination and of mystery shaped like an ape but with only three, clawed, ngers on each hand (187). This creature is also said to cause the decorative scars some people have, as a sign of initiation. The travellers hear tales of sorcery in many places, and once its messengers accompany them in the guise of porters. Marcellin appears torn between belief and disbelief. Lary returns to America, and the other men set out for Lake T el e. They do not see the dinosaur, and one of their local guides claims that Marcellin promotes the story to attract Western money. Back in Impfondo, while waiting for a steamer to Brazzaville,
The foreign and over-generalising term Pygmies is increasingly considered unacceptable. The Bantu term Babinga used by Marcellin has similarly been described as derogatory (Hewlett). However, OHanlon does not oer another designation for the rainforest dwellers he meets.
2
235
Redmond falls apart emotionally over the clash of magical and rationalist thinking he has experienced. One after the other, Marcellin, Manou and Nz e come to visit him, toNze obtain their pay. Marcellin and Nz e try to get more than their due from him. DuringNze these visits, the men discuss magic, Christianity, their aims in life and the limits of a persons possibilities in their dierent countries. OHanlon refers to Andr e Gides Travels in the Congo several times, and his approachAndre resembles Gides. As a rewriter of Heart of Darkness, OHanlon tries to add what Conrad left out. Where Conrads narrator conveys his own feelings of depression and futility, Gide and OHanlon attempt to give an idea of what the readers might see if they were in the Congo themselves. On the one hand, this book contains maps and photos to show that it provides an image of reality; on the other hand, it is marked as a literary work by the mention of fellow author Bruce Chatwin, who says to Redmond: Your hands [are] so soft I dont believe you ever go anywhere. You just lie in bed and make it all up. [. . . ] And quite right too (343). Like Gides travel book, OHanlons consists of several threads. He focuses on the richness and science of nature, encounters with Africans, the self, explicit discussions of Western and African discourses, and the mutual perception of Africans and whites. The threads interact with each other far more strongly than Gides. This is partly because when OHanlon travels to the Congo, French is widely spoken there, so that more communication with Africans is possible for him than it was for Gide. Marcellin has studied in Cuba and France and knows more about white people than Gides African acquaintances. Another reason is that OHanlon sees Africans not as an object of study, but as communication partners whose aims and projects he takes as seriously as those of whites. The most intense thread is OHanlons grappling with traditional Western discourse, much of which was focused in Heart of Darkness a century before. He addresses some of it consciously, but also increasingly realises how much he has absorbed unconsciously, although he and Lary dissociate themselves from it or refer to it in playful ways. At the very beginning, at the f eticheuses, Redmond suspects that Lary has already lostfeticheuse touch with his own view of the world [. . . ] Africa has got to us (11), which echoes the idea that Kurtz goes under. In a dream, Redmond mixes up prehistoric England with Africa, heads on stakes and cannibalism (86) something he would not do when awake, which may be one of the reasons he never mentions Heart of Darkness although it is very much present in his tale (and he does mention Conrads Typhoon (140, 154)). The quest for the dinosaur reflects Marlows idea that Africa is prehistoric, an idea to which Redmond OHanlon makes frequent reference. He mostly restricts it to nature, mentioning numerous animals that have evolved very little for millions of years. This
236
Mokele Mbembe
tickles the interest in a dinosaur, especially when he adds that the rainforest in the Congo basin has remained mostly unchanged since the times of the dinosaurs. A quick internet search on Mok el e-Mbemb e will conrm that several expeditions looked for it before this one, and that there is a kind of cult biology around this and similar conjectures, called cryptozoology. This cult is one of the several meeting points between science and some kind of belief that are a major focus of No Mercy . For Redmond and Lary, the search is situated between the serious and the humorous. Nevertheless, the quasi-scientic idea of a prehistoric site may go down easily with readers who are used to the idea of Africa as Europes past, not least from Heart of Darkness. Cockroaches for instance exist all over the world and existed before the dinosaurs, but only in Africa does Redmond see them as an indication of old life that is still around. Not surprisingly, an ocial asks him early on whether he wants to investigate some kind of dinosaur? To make fun of us? To mock the African? (27). A few times, Redmond transfers the idea of something old to humans, relating them to the time when European ancestors were hunter-gatherers (157). [W]ithout thinking, he describes a man as almost from the Stone Age when he wears and carries mostly things that indeed existed in the Stone Age. Stone Age my ass, replies Marcellin, who knows why this technology and not another is the best choice in the mans situation (382, emphasis in the original). Just as Marlow travels into the biggest blank on the map, the two men choose the most dicult equatorial African country to get into, the least visited, the least explored, the most interesting (17), and select the least documented unmapped (293) segments of rainforest in it. Redmond and Lary arrive with the somewhat stereotypical and rather masculine idea that the Congo is a place where they can prove themselves, not only because it is Other but also specically because it is the Congo, a site of tropical disease, dangerous animals, unhealthy climate, corruption, crowded cities, aggressive poachers and communist soldiers with Kalashnikovs. This suggests that even if one sees Africans as just people (Achebe, Image 261), there remains enough Otherness in Africa to make it a site of extreme experience. As with Marlow, it is hard to tell whether Lary and Redmond do prove themselves. They survive, reach their geographical destination and learn more about themselves, but they also revise many ideas and parts of their self-images. Lary learns how big his own potential for fear is, and how privileged is his life in the US. He tries to handle his emotions by claiming that the Congo is an intrinsically fear-inspiring place, and often compares it unfavourably to the US. Redmond uses fewer such methods to defend himself against his own emotions, and is seriously shaken in his assumptions and beliefs. If to prove oneself means to prove ones discourse, then he learns that it is not as easy to do so in other peoples space as he had thought, and that the Congo certainly does not
237
make a good backdrop to anything egocentric. Redmond soon struggles with a tangle of religious, psychological and intercultural questions that intensely destabilise him (and many of which take up Marlows allusions). Redmond arrives with the idea that Christianity and African magic are equally dangerous, in that they impose fears and stifling rules on people who would otherwise be free to think for themselves. He is confronted with a complexity of thought that profoundly shakes this simple modernist belief. For one thing, Africans do not believe in magic in an unconditional or pre-logical way that makes no distinction between subjective and objective impressions and thoughts and confuses nightmares with waking life, as Redmond originally assumes (192). Unlike him, they usually have a very precise idea of what is magical, what is a playful reference to magical beliefs, and what is just invented by people trying to exploit magical thinking. They are conscious that they themselves invest certain animals or symbols with power because it helps them relate to the world. Redmond never nds out whether the dinosaur is a religious image or a tall tale, though everyone else seems to know what it is. He is able to record such experiences he does not understand, and writes multivocally without trying to assume a perspective that is not his own. One sign of Redmonds intellectual stress is that he spends a lot of energy seeking explanations for things he did not previously think about. Early on, in an attempt to nd out what is common to all humans rather than culture specic, Redmond and Lary try out a rather traditional, universalist Western explanation of magic and Christianity by psychology, concluding that small fears of ubiquitous spirits are easier to endure than the one big fear of death, and that it is easier to cope with death if one believes in an afterlife. Redmond also realises that Christianity, with its binary structure of angels and devils, is more restricted and less suitable for explaining what happens to a person than Animism with its complex spirits whose intentions can change (246). In another attempt to come to terms with his confusion, Redmond rethinks the concept of the unconscious. He feels that much of what he sees in Africa appeals to his unconscious, and wonders why he sees this connection. Instead of retaining their concept of the unconscious as an unquestioned truth and comparing African realities to it, he and Lary begin to wonder what the unconscious is. From a more postmodern point of view, they use semantic analysis to try and nd out how the term the unconscious is dened. In a ganja-induced daydream about Samal e,Samale Redmond oers the surprising non-universalist, historical explanation that Freud read a lot of West African ethnography. When Freud came to invent or discover or create the unconscious he used life in an African village, at night in his description of what he thought was central to human emotions, such as the screams, the beatings, the sex, the fear bumps in the night (245) (which may be more overt in Africa, where it is warmer than in Europe and people can do more out of doors). Moreover, Freud read Darwin.
238
He claimed that emotions are age-old and that the deeper layers of the unconscious are ur-human. Marlow expresses a similar thought: The mind of man is capable of anything because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future (Heart 38). The connection, which of course Conrad exploits too, between the idea of an unconscious, things people do more openly in Africa and the prehistoric-evolutionary turns out to be discursively constructed, not inevitably, abstractly true. The two white travellers thus learn that seemingly rational and absolute fundamentals of Western thinking were created in the nineteenth century with the help of contemporary Africanist knowledge, while simultaneously they experience a clash between African-magical and Westernrational thinking. Marcellin, the hybridised scientist, experiences this clash from the African side. As much as Lary and Redmond, Marcellin tries to be a rational atheist. As much as Lary and Redmond have a cultural reflex to say Christ! in emotional situations, Marcellin has an acquired tendency to identify with the belief of his clan, whose totemic animal is the crocodile, the object of his own scientic studies. Struggling with his own inheritance, Marcellin doubts that Redmond is a better bringer of the new rational-atheist discourse than himself. He tells him: Believe [Christian discourse] or not, my friend its in your head. [. . . ] You call it a part of your culture, and it is a religion with the unspeakable rites and cannibal symbols of the communion (335) (it is not clear whether Marcellin quotes Conrad, or whether OHanlon renders his statement in these words to transfer Marlows judgements to Christian religion). Moreover, Marcellin calls Redmond a nasty little liberal (229) for buying the fetish. Although he seems to like Redmond in a way, at some point he also calls him an interfering and fat mercenary (239, 361) who thinks he has no politics (234) a privileged person who too easily accepts things other people ght against. Indeed, Redmond does not take Africans seriously when he gets himself a fetish and still suggests to everyone that they give up all religious thinking. He opposes the religion of his own people but experiments with that of another, which suggests that he may nd it harmless or ethnologically quaint. Lary and Redmond try to explain Marcellins new relationship with a fetish rationally and evoke psychological experiments that show that emotions can be associated with virtually any object if there is a reason to project them onto that object (356). But this does not cover Marcellins situation, because his fetish is not any object but has a historical and discursive meaning in his society, a meaning he has been trying to escape. A fetish means more to him than to Redmond, and his reaction to it is thus more urgent and dicult for him, a threat to his identity. Redmond arrives with the rather traditional idea that whites are one step ahead of blacks with respect to religion. First Christians came to Africa and told the Animist that he is primitive , he believes in spirits, hes a savage (445, emphasis in the original), as
239
Manou assumes Redmond will tell him. Now atheist-rationalist thinkers tell both Christians and Animists that they are backward. The basic idea is still the same: a (newer) discourse originating in the West is considered better than others and champions of the new discourse will be fascinated by something residing in Africa and go under in contact with it, Kurtz in contact with his neighbours, and both Redmond and Marcellin in contact with magic. (As biologists, they do not go under to the rainforest like Kurtz.) What is new is that an African, Marcellin, is on the side of the new discourse, in danger of going under. Redmonds and Larys implicit assumption that they are bringing a new, better discourse is challenged when they cannot explain everything (including magic) with their rational arguments as they had thought would be possible. Moreover, Africans try to explain Larys and Redmonds behaviour in traditional African categories. Until the end Manou remains adamant that magic, the theory of power in objects, is better suited than psychology to explain Redmonds collection of childhood things and objects that belonged to dead friends (452). The white men feel a bit threatened by such explanations and insist that their behaviour has psychological, not magical reasons. In communication between Redmond and several Africans it turns out, perhaps not surprisingly, that religions, and the discourses that have come to replace them in some parts of the world, can act like a glass wall between people: even when they think they can see each others position through it, they still do not reach a real understanding. In their nal conversation, Redmond and Manou agree that Christianity and Islam have brought the spirit of the [. . . ] colons (445, emphasis in the original) and are not desirable, but when Redmond asks Manou to give up all religion, Manou tells him that whites really dont understand and are children in such [spirit] things (446). This shows that each religion and each atheist/agnostic rational discourse is the focal point of much that is taken for granted, natural, god-given, good sense or inevitable by one culture but not by another. Thinking outside, or between, such systems of cultural axioms is not easy. This insight also extends to the philosophy of science, for instance when the white men take it for granted that the Linnaean taxonomy of plants and animals, which gives them Latin names complemented by the names of (mostly white) researchers, is correct in an abstract, universal sense, while the Pygmies have a wholly dierent classication that they think is true because it is true, and not because someone says so. Redmonds nal breakdown is related to a very understandable, and by no means hostile, breakdown of the intercultural encounter. This breakdown is not total; Redmond continues to function and to think, and communication between him and Africans is still possible in spite of the glass wall.
240
feticheuse
The encounter with Africans is thus as intense as communication barriers permit, and Redmond becomes as interested, for instance, in Manous journey into the self in the forest (where Bantu people dont normally go either) as in his own. With this basic openness for symmetric dialogue, Redmond also experiences what is not symmetric between black and white. Not surprisingly, many of these issues remain from colonial times. Where Gide took it for granted that money often plays a decisive role in the encounter, Redmond feels guilty and unfairly overprivileged. Handing out presents, he feels a nineteenth-century satisfaction (132) from which he distances himself, but which is nevertheless there. Redmond is harassed by a European middle-class embarrassment about money. He feels that money is a taboo, morally tainted and makes an unfeeling present. Africans are less plagued by such emotions. The f eticheuse at the beginning of the book uses banknotes as currency and as symbolic objects at the same time. Rather in passing, throughout the text, the reader learns a lot about the emotional implications of money and how it determines a persons standing, about poverty, its reasons and complexity. The image Africans have of whites in this respect is paradoxical. They think that whites either exploit Africa some people suspect that Redmond and Lary are after oil, timber or diamonds or walk around, more visibly, as rich givers whom one can exploit a bit because they can aord it. Even giving is not simple and can easily backre if the giver does not know enough about local customs: the camouflage tarpaulins from the journey, which Redmond leaves with Manou, end up facilitating the hunt for his uncle the elephant poacher, because Redmond did not know that the head of a family in that culture can claim everything from its members. Such complexities, together with knowledge of failed projects from colonial times, appear as a subtle warning against all simple interference. An analysis of conflicting interests, powers and politics takes the place of the unquestioned and failure-ridden power hierarchy that prevails when whites claim that their role is that of missionary givers. Redmond and Lary are able to learn what Africans think about them. This is a long way from Kurtzs claim that Africans see whites as demi-gods, and Marlows wondering whether he looks appetising to cannibals. Intercultural learning sometimes makes an important contribution to Redmonds and Larys self-images or enables them to change, for instance when Marcellin points out that Redmond takes it for granted that all English children have schools but considers the existence of village schools throughout the Congo a big achievement. In one of their small power struggles, Marcellin says that Redmond thinks he is special and not bound by local rules (420). Such comments make Redmond realise that he measures African and European achievements and cultures by dierent standards.
241
The image Congolese people have of Westerners includes memories and knowledge of colonial activities, many but not all of which they remember as brutal, while a few have led to true personal encounters. The image also includes the impression that white scientists are too racist to give Africans jobs or scholarly credit, and that they are less civilized than the Bantu because they go marching in the forest for fun (383). Congolese people feel that whites in general are in many respects illogical, especially in emotional matters. Marcellin nds it unbelievable that they prefer painful divorces over the civilized and ancient concept of polygamy and over promiscuity without subterfuges (438). The latter may be a rather masculine standpoint. This is corroborated when Marcellin reports that his mother has begun to model herself on what he has told her about women in France and Cuba, and has rejected her husband for bringing home an additional wife. All protagonists of this book are male, and there is not much attempt at relinquishing masculine points of view. These points of view are not identical for black and white men, but have enough in common to be mutually recognisable. Marcellin claims that his need for sex is genetic, its in the skin: the blacker the man, the stronger the urge (336). This, of course, only shows that men all over the world will gladly bend facts in the context of sexual desire, but it can be read as the conrmation of an old stereotype. Marcellin, who is able to look at his own background partly from the outside and tries to explain it to the two white men, justies his promiscuity and other questionable realities by saying this is Africa (37, 61, 90, 144). While OHanlon does not endorse such ideas that dovetail with Western stereotypes, he sometimes taps into the intensity with which readers react to such images precisely because they are taboo or not politically correct. He uses some echoes from Heart of Darkness in a similar vein, specically when he feels that Africa is a site of fear in which to prove oneself: Redmond feels that Africans have taken over colonial methods and lead people as if roped together at the neck (135), produce ominous (139) drumming and have a preference for skulls of gorillas, printed, or for use in magic. Sometimes he describes them as moving or hiding such that they become suddenly visible as a collection of disjointed body parts (146, 156, 326). A humorous and disrespectful style helps approach dicult topics. Like Heart of Darkness, but not as depressively, this book criticises or satirises everyone involved. It often uses irony to relate to older Western discourse that it tries to revise. When Redmond dreams in a fever that Samal e tells him he is now infected by magicalSamale thinking (379), this is an ironic acknowledgement of acquired ideas, which are also present in Heart of Darkness. The title, too, is ironic. Readers will take it to mean that the Congo has no mercy, until the very end of the book, where the expression is used for the only time and is applied to the Christian and Muslim rationales for slavery and colonialism (445). This is a way of playing with readers expectations.
242
This book represents a new frontier, a new balancing act between discourses. Redmond OHanlon gives a map of his mind, in which dierent ideas and discourses clash. Like Joseph Conrad, he goes to the limits of what can be expressed in words. Unlike Conrad, he does this while attempting to be as clear and direct as he can. Though he may not realise that he remains dominant and insensitive in some areas, such as his touristlike wish to own an authentic fetish, his self-image is shaken. This is made possible by his openness, attempts to learn and unlearn, and an explicit grappling with dierent discourses. He learns that there may be an African logic (247) as logical as his own, of which he has only a small grasp. At the end he is not quite sure who [he is] (421). To continue with Images of Africa or with rewritings by white Western authors, skip to page 249.
3.28
Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things (1997)
Arundhati Roy (1961-), daughter of a Keralite Christian mother and an absentee Bengali Hindu father, spent her childhood in Kerala.1 Her mother lived at the margin of traditional family structures, and won a precedent-setting case involving inheritance rights for women. As a young woman, Roy lived in a squatter colony in Delhi. She later studied architecture. Instead of working in that profession, she has written lm scripts, acted in lms, and is an important Indian and international activist in the elds of social justice, globalisation and development, peace and the environment. Kerala in Southern India is a relatively rich state, with one of the most advanced educational systems in India. Keralite Christians claim that their church was founded by the Apostle Thomas, a Syrian, hence the name Syrian Christians. The Christian community lives side by side with Hindus and Muslims. Marxism was strong especially in the 1960s and 70s. The God of Small Things is the story of three generations of an upper-middle class Keralite family in the village of Ayemenem on the Meenachal River. The plot centres on the death of the child Sophie Mol in 1969. At that time, the oldest members of the household are her grandmother Mammachi, who has founded a pickle factory, Mammachis sister-in-law Baby Kochamma, a maiden aunt and ex-nun, and the cook-servant Kochu Maria. Sophies grandfather Pappachi, who was an Imperial Entomologist (47) during British rule, is dead but not forgotten. The next generation are Ammu and
1
Biographical information stems from Simmons and from Wikipedia.
3.28 ROY, THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS (1997)
243
Chacko. Chacko has read Classics at Oxford and is divorced from his British wife, Margaret Kochamma (i.e. Aunt Margaret), who has remained in Britain with their daughter Sophie Mol (little girl Sophie). Chacko has taken over the pickle factory from his mother, who as a woman has no legal standing to prevent him from doing so. He has turned it from a kitchen-table enterprise into a small industry. Though he has incurred great losses in that process, and has mortgaged family property to cover them, he feels that he is an important entrepreneur. He also considers himself a communist, but underpays his workers. Chacko exploits some of the female workers sexually. His mother and aunt accept this as a Mans Needs (160). His sister Ammu has two children, the twins Rahel and Estha. She is divorced from her alcoholic Bengali husband, and is living at the mercy of her mother and aunt and of Chacko. As a woman in her parents family home, she practically has the social status of a receiver of alms, not at all like Chacko, the man of the house, although she works in the pickle factory as much as he does. She feels that she has made one bad choice, taking that particular husband practically at random to escape from home when her parents did not try to nd one for her, and that her life is nished. As a Christian, she cannot remarry, and as a woman, she does not have many choices. Her children, seven years old in 1969, are the main characters of the story. Their perspective is followed by the impersonal narrative voice most of the time. Margaret left Chacko nearly nine years ago because he did not contribute to the household work or income. Her second, British husband Joe has just died in a car crash. Chacko, who still loves her and their daughter, invites them to Ayemenem for Christmas to help them get over the loss. Chacko, Ammu, Baby Kochamma and the twins drive to Cochin to fetch Margaret and Sophie from the airport. On the way, they encounter a communist parade in which they recognise Velutha, the carpenter and autodidactic engineer of the pickle factory. Velutha descends from an Untouchable caste, a concept which has been outlawed but is still very much alive. Veluthas father Vellya Paapen still remembers the time when a person of his caste had to walk backwards, erasing his own footsteps with a broom so a Touchable person would not accidentally step in them. The marchers stop Chackos car and taunt the family, calling them landlords and forcing Baby Kochamma to wave a communist flag. She relates her embitterment about this directly to Velutha, although he is not involved in the incident. During a visit to the cinema on their way to the airport, Estha is sexually abused by the cinemas snack vendor, the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man (5). The Indian family try to put their best foot forward for Margaret and Sophie, with an undercurrent of admiration for whiteness and Europeanness. Keralites of their social standing are bilingual, speaking Malayalam and English, so that communication is not a problem. Over the next two weeks, the twins make friends with their cousin, who is almost nine, and Ammu and Velutha fall in love. They know that society does not permit
244
a relationship between a wealthy Christian and an Untouchable, and all they can do is meet secretly at night at an abandoned colonial house on the other side of the river, which people call the Heart of Darkness. After two weeks, while Margaret and Chacko are away on an errand, Vellya Paapen tells Baby Kochamma about the relationship between his son and Ammu. Vellya Paapen has internalised his caste status and feels that his son has deled a Touchable woman. Baby Kochamma locks Ammu in her bedroom. Ammu breaks down and tells her children through the locked door that they are responsible for her unhappiness. She has rst perceived Velutha as attractive when the twins, too young to be aware of caste issues, played with him. Moreover, she has been going to the Heart of Darkness house in a boat that her children found and repaired. As the children do not know all this, they only feel the rejection. They want to run away from home, and Sophie Mol wants to come with them. The three children leave at night to row to the Heart of Darkness house, their secret hideout. Their boat is knocked over by a drifting log, and Sophie Mol drowns. Baby Kochamma reports to the police chief that Sophie is dead and the twins are missing. She also states that Velutha has tried to rape Ammu, because she cannot accept this unequal pair. The police chief sends out a posse of Touchable policemen (288) to nd Velutha. They nd him sleeping in one corner of the Heart of Darkness yard, warned by his friends against going home, and unaware that the twins are sleeping in the same yard. Assuming that he has abused Ammu and abducted the children, the policemen beat him in front of the twins, so much that he dies the next day in the police prison. When the police chief doubts Baby Kochammas version, she uses emotional violence to make Estha testify that Velutha has indeed mistreated them. By that, she denitively breaks Esthas spirit. Ammu later tells the police chief the truth, but to instill order (246), he calls her a whore and dismisses her. Chacko, manipulated by Baby Kochamma, throws Ammu out of the house. They send Estha to Calcutta to stay with his father, while Rahel remains in the Ayemenem house. Ammu tries to earn enough to get her children back with her, but never succeeds. She dies of an infection at the age of 31, four years after Sophie Mol, without seeing Estha again. Over the following years, Chacko emigrates to Canada. Estha gradually stops talking altogether. He remains a dependent member of his fathers household until he is 31 and his father sends him back to Ayemenem. Rahel grows up neglected and disoriented, studies architecture in Delhi, marries an American there and goes to Boston with him. Their childless marriage is divorced because her husband cannot understand her trauma. She returns to Ayemenem in 1993 when Estha is sent there. The twins are still able to communicate their feelings silently. They eventually have something akin to sex together, which expresses grief not joy. They see this as one of the many instances in which members of their family violate the laws that lay down who should be loved and how. And how much (31, 33).
245
The conflict in this book is twofold. Keralite society is divided along the fault lines of caste, gender and religion. This polarised society is in an ongoing contact with the West. Generational conflict is intense in both of these areas; change is as strong as tradition, resulting in immense stress for the individual. The symbolic site of all these struggles is the old house that people call the Heart of Darkness. It was originally a colonial site, where a paedophilic Englishman ran a rubber plantation and shot himself when the boy he loved was sent to boarding school by his parents. People call this Englishman Ayemenems own Kurtz (51) because he went native in his dress and habits and in his love life. There is a story that his ghost is still haunting the old house. Rahel and Estha call this site alternatively the Heart of Darkness or the History House, because Chacko has told them that history is like an old house at night. With all the lamps lit. And ancestors whispering inside. [. . . ] But we cant go in [. . . ] because weve been locked out by the British in a war of discourse, a war that captures dreams and re-dreams them. A war that has made us adore our conquerors and despise ourselves (51-52). The twins (and nobody else) think he refers to this house. The Heart of Darkness-History house is a symbol with many facets. For Chacko, it stands for the ambivalent image he has of himself and of whites. He says that his family are a family of Anglophiles. Pointed in the wrong direction, trapped outside their own history and unable to retrace their steps because their footprints had been swept away (51, emphasis in the original). This image also implies that the privileged Syrian Christians (who claim to descend from Brahmins) have a similar status vis-` a-vis the British as the former Untouchables had with respect to the higher castes. Indeed, caste and Indian colour-consciousness2 have opened the door for an admiration of whiteness that is far from over. English is used as a language of prestige throughout the book even between native speakers of Malayalam. To have white acquaintances or work for whites is consistently seen as a status symbol. Euro-American culture was and is being thrust upon Indians, but they also import it themselves. The Orangedrink Lemondrink Man is the only character to ridicule this, making fun of Estha for his English songs and English words. His abuse of a rich child appears to be a question of class as much as of sexuality: he exerts power over someone with a wealthy and more Anglicised status. It is sad and cynical that nobody is able to break free from Anglophilia even if they are able to analyse it. Chacko himself is proud of his Oxford degree and his white ex-wife, and the family continue to evaluate themselves through white eyes, constantly trying to be good enough for Margaret and Sophie. Ammu rebels against this when Margaret asks her about a Keralite way of greeting people. Margarets question sounds like an
Within India, a preference or deference for light complexions is not usually called racism, but colour-consciousness.
2
246
ethnologists, and Ammu feels that her family behave like some damn godforsaken tribe thats just been discovered (171). In fact, educated Keralites read an incredible amount of British classic texts; throughout the story, all children, rich or poor, Christian, Hindu or Marxist, read and quote far more from Shakespeare, Kipling and many others than English adults and children. The resulting ambivalent self-image is mirrored in the fact that the villagers call the old house the Heart of Darkness. The sobriquet shows that they identify with Conrads Congolese to some extent. They sometimes, ironically and nearly believe that they are some godforsaken tribe. This belief matches the image Margarets British colleagues have, indiscriminately, of any former colony: they feel that she is travelling to the Heart of Darkness and advise her to take all possible medicines and supplies (252). In addition to this old image, Britain is exporting a new one: Chacko may have learned his critical ideas about colonialism at Oxford. This is not stated explicitly, but it is clear that he has embraced communism outside of the working-class movement, and plays with it from a privileged position. Similarly, his critical view of British-Indian history may just be an attitude he toys with, and may be as much of an imported influence as his communist ideas. Ammu calls his reflections on history and life his Oxford Moods (53). Rebellion is contained by the systems against which it is directed: communism in Kerala does not challenge communal divides (64), and postcolonial intellectual deance is taught at Oxford. There are overtones of (white) Mr. Kurtz in the character of Chacko, which emphasise his ambivalence. They are reinforced by verbal echoes, when he makes several statements like My house. My pineapples. My pickle (214, emphasis in the original), which sound like Kurtzs My Intended, my station, my career, my ideas (Heart 67). Like Kurtz, Chacko tries to value his own culture higher than the Other, but is irresistibly drawn to the (British) Other and has gone native with Margaret. The narrative voice shares the ambivalent admiration and abrogation of the status of Englishness. Like Heart of Darkness, The God of Small Things criticises everyone involved, including Keralites, Bengalis, Brits, Americans, Christians, the surviving influence of the Hindu caste system, Marxists, the Congress Party, the police, venomous maiden aunts and male-chauvinist men. Predictably, several communities have felt offended, and this novel has been the subject of much controversy.3 It can be read as a disparagement of Keralite traditions in front of an English-speaking world public. One of the reasons for this is that the narrative voice, along with the characters, implies that India is backward compared to the West, where there is no concept of Untouchability and lives are not arranged by older family members to the same extent. This novel
3
For a collection of critical articles see e.g. SAWNET.
247
tackles the dicult area where experience and stereotype intersect, and some foreigners (or Anglophiles) may be eager to read of the diculties and failures of the Indian family system and patriarchal structure. Then again, Roy shows that Western-style self-chosen marriages work out no better, due to the poor judgement of the partners and their failure to realise that the success of a relationship is not guaranteed by romantic feelings, but needs hard work. One could however argue that Chackos marriage fails because he is a spoiled only son, not primarily because it is self-chosen. His power over his sisters life is another case in point, so that this character caters to readers who prefer to think of Indian men as macho. Reflecting the double aliation with a Keralite and an Anglophile value system, the English language, an important lingua franca in India, is used to tell the story but is adapted with altered speech rhythms and capitalisation, and read backward or otherwise against the grain by the twins. Moreover, the ambivalence is reinforced by frequent references to both Western and Indian pre-texts. The latter include stories from kathakali (Hindu religious theatre/dance) and the lm Chemmeen , all of them tales of torn families and related violence, which show that Keralite tradition is aware of the pitfalls of arranged lives and family duties. Westernisation appears as a possible solution at rst glance, but actually inspires uneasiness and self-contempt not only in Chacko. In spite of its ambivalent connotations, the Heart of Darkness house appears as a safe space for a while. The house in which the Englishman went hybrid and violated the Love Laws (33) rst, is next inhabited by Ammu and Velutha for their crosscommunity encounter. The twins make their home away from home (250) there after the Orangedrink Lemondrink Mans molestation has taught Estha that Anything can happen to Anyone. and Its best to be prepared (186, emphasis in the original). In a crisis, they try to reach the house with their hybrid cousin Sophie. Heart of Darkness is a familiar expression from literature, and similarly, the Heart of Darkness house is familiar, old and well-known. It appears to be out of the reach of Ayemenem society, which makes it a tempting site both in a factual and in a symbolic sense. It turns out that it is not safe to try and cross the river, a symbolic division, to inhabit this space. The garden of the Heart of Darkness house is intensely described as a Paradise (289) just before it becomes the site of the twins Fall from childhood, from the kind of innocence that permitted them to disregard caste boundaries. When the posse of Touchable Policemen (288) arrive and Dark of Heartness tiptoe[s] into the Heart of Darkness (290), it turns out that the site is not safe from danger. This danger lies in the caste hierarchy that the policemen want to re-establish: Structure. Order. Complete monopoly. It was human history, masquerading as Gods Purpose (293). The policemens feelings are primal yet paradoxically wholly impersonal [. . . ] civilizations fear of nature, mens
248
fear of women, powers fear of powerlessness (292). This abstract desire for order is closely related to the idea of colonialism and of civilisation in Heart of Darkness, which entails hypocrisy and lies and is worshipped regardless of its human cost. In contrast to Marlows idea of remote kinship (Heart 38), the policemen have lost all sense of kinship with Untouchables long ago; their desire for order is purely binary. Roy describes their intervention as History in live performance (293). Throughout the novel, History is an autonomous subject that nally square[s] its books (190) with the murder of Velutha. The pessimistic view of human nature that is implied in this is common to Conrad and Roy. Roy calls it Mans subliminal urge to destroy what he could neither subdue nor deify. Mens Needs (292). Though this is a gendered need, Baby Kochamma is one of its main champions. Baby Kochamma and Mammachi have internalised their gender role complete with self-disdain. Babys life also shows that a person who has wanted to transgress social and religious order and has not been able to, can turn into its most violent advocate: she has earlier desired and not obtained a cross-community love alliance with a white Catholic priest. Order and the needs of society are the Big Things, against which individuals can often not defend their own needs and decisions, the Small Things. Kurtz loses himself because of a lack of societal control, and wants to exterminate all the brutes to restore order. Velutha, Ammu, Sophie and the twins are destroyed because others want to impose too much order. The price to pay for order in The God of Small Things is the extermination of Velutha and of the hybrid child who inhabits the liminal space between the divides, and the emotional destruction of others who tried to make their home in this space. In spite of the emphasis on her Englishness, Sophie Mol is a hybrid character, and her death stands, in a way, for the perils of hybridity. However, Sophie is not punished for her own origin, Chackos crossing over into the group with the higher status, but for Ammus crossing into that with the lower one. Both Indianwhite and Indian-Indian hybridity are dangerous, but in the end the twins dreams are re-dreamed (278) by caste issues, not by Anglophilia as Chacko feared. Here, the term Heart of Darkness is transferred from colonialism to purely Indian issues. However, the colonial Heart of Darkness-History house is not simply taken over by an Indian darkness that is back in power since independence. It remains a site of problematic cross-cultural encounters. When the twins meet again in 1993, the house has been turned into a hotel, in which white tourists experience only the beautiful facade of Kerala. Small Indian houses have been transplanted from their original sites and arranged around the old colonial house in attitudes of deference, as Toy Histories for rich tourists to play in (120) with a tall wall to screen o the (harsher) world all around (119). It also screens o the river, which has been hemmed in with a dam that creates an ordered riverbed. It is smelly and poisoned with pesticides bought with
3.29 KINGSOLVER, THE POISONWOOD BIBLE (1998)
249
World Bank loans (14) by powerful Indians who want to boost their harvest and income. The initially beloved waterway, in which Sophie Mol has then died, all but dies itself. The hotel oers truncated kathakali performances adapted to the short attention span and supercial interests of the tourists. Indian history and culture are watered down for whites, while Baby Kochamma and Kochu Maria, the last inhabitants of the crumbling family home, become addicted to television and watch mostly imported content. This shows how a globalised and commodied, shallow cultural exchange, not quite an encounter, is becoming available to Europeans and Indians. In the Heart of DarknessHistory house, there is a new kind of darkness that locks people out from real history. To continue with the next geographical category in Path 2 (Caribbean-born authors), skip to page 127.
3.29
Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible (1998)
Barbara Kingsolver (1955-) was born in Kentucky and currently lives near Tucson.1 When she was eight years old, she spent a year in the Congo with her parents. She studied Biology and Ecology and worked as a science writer and journalist before turning to popular ction. Kingsolver has also published poetry and non-ction, and is an activist in matters of the environment and of human rights. In The Poisonwood Bible , Nathan Price, a Southern Baptist minister, takes over the mission in the small village of Kilanga on the Kwilu River in the Belgian Congo in 1959 with his wife Orleanna and their daughters Rachel (15 years old), the twins Adah and Leah (14), and Ruth May (5). The ve females take turns in telling the story, while Nathan does not have a voice. Nathan tries to impose his faith on the villagers ruthlessly. A few outcasts try out his church services, but nobody wants to be baptised in the river. Nathan does not take the trouble of learning about the Kilangans and only realises very late that they are scared of the river because of the crocodiles in it. He also botches his sporadic attempts at learning their language, Kikongo, and consistently mispronounces a word so that instead of Jesus is precious, he says Jesus is poisonwood (an allergenic shrub). Nathan is especially taken aback when he learns that the Kilangans accepted and loved his predecessor, the Catholic priest Brother Fowles, who comes to visit at some point. Fowles has married a Congolese woman and is now travelling around, distributing medicines, studying birds and adhering to a hybrid Christian-Animist faith of his own
1
Biographical information stems from HarperCollins.
250
making. Nathans wife and daughters learn about the Congo and the Congolese, each in her own way, and some of them nd friends in Kilanga. The Mission League wants the Price family to leave the country before its independence, but Nathan feels that it is his religious duty to stay. When the Congo gains independence on June 30, 1960, his stipend is cut o. Orleanna and her daughters learn to live o the land and, where this fails, scrape through with the help of some compassionate neighbours. Leah causes a conflict in the village when she learns to shoot game and joins a hunt, which is traditionally not a womens task. Many Kilangans regard the family with suspicion or worse, while others remain reserved but helpful. The rst Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba, is assassinated on January 17, 1961. On the same day, Ruth May dies of a snakebite. The animal has been sneaked into their hen house as part of the power struggle over religion and gender roles, but was meant for their Congolese house employee as a middleman. Orleanna feels that she has to move around to keep her grief at bay. Nathan refuses to leave. The women walk to the nearest city. Their ways part there. Rachel marries a white South African who ostensibly ferries goods and people around in his small aircraft but really deals in diamonds, is involved in international politics and has contributed signicantly to Lumumbas death. She divorces him for a French diplomat in Brazzaville, later marries a rich white hotel owner, and ends up widowed running an expensive hotel near Brazzaville, to which black persons do not have access. Leah marries the Kilanga teacher, a missioneducated non-local Congolese, and moves to Kinshasa with him. They have four sons and live with some relatives of his. He is imprisoned several times for political work. Orleanna and Adah return to the US. Orleanna spends a lot of time thinking about her role in the Western exploitation and destruction of the Congo. She becomes a human-rights activist for some time and does volunteer work in African relief (531). Adah studies medicine and becomes a virus researcher. She loses the dierently-abled coordination between the hemispheres of her brain that earlier enabled her to read and talk backwards and have unusual visual perceptions of landscape, and caused her to drag one hand and foot. After this experience with dierence and with the way other people relate to it, she tries to understand Africa from a new angle. Nathan pursues his missionary aims alone in the Kilanga region. He eventually loses contact with reality. As he still wants to baptise children in the dangerous river, some people claim he can change into a crocodile, and kill him. Orleanna, Rachel, Adah and Leah travel in the Congo together in what is probably a dream scene in 1997 when Mobutu has been overthrown and is dying of cancer. A market woman tells them that there has never been a village called Kilanga on the Kwilu River.
251
This novel teaches recent Congolese history, with some mentions of earlier events.2 It touches upon some controversial issues, including the interventions of the US in the young Congo nation and the question whether communism was really a sucient threat to justify them. The Poisonwood Bible is a popular novel that can be read by teenagers. Kingsolver has stated in an interview that she uses the format of a family saga in order to attract readers who would not otherwise be interested in African history and politics (Kerr par. 5). Though she does not target the typical audience of Heart of Darkness, Kingsolver explicitly refers to the title of Conrads novella several times (and also cites it in her bibliography appendix). This creates the impression that it is practically impossible to write about the Congo without mentioning Conrad. Two of these references are rather casual and show how the expression heart of darkness has become a familiar term associated with the Congo. Leah describes a foreign development project that she feels has the sole aim of saddling the Congo with a large debt to Western countries. She argues that a power line across the country is not only unnecessary due to widely available hydroelectric resources, but that it is also impossible to service a utility stretching across the heart of darkness (546). Nathan and Leah get to see the independence ceremonies. A Belgian missionary translates for Leah that Lumumba wants to make the Congo, for all of Africa, the heart of light (225). This obvious reference to Heart of Darkness was most probably not intended by Lumumba, whose words were: nous allons faire du Congo le centre de rayonnement de lAfrique tout enti` ere, which is usually translated as we are going to make of the Congo the centre of the suns radiance for all of Africa, though rayonnement can mean all kinds of dissemination or spreading, not only that of light (Lumumba par. 19). The most intense reference is in Orleannas repeated equation of her marriage with colonisation, and of herself with the Congo. After an initial attraction of which traces remain, she now feels that Nathan [is] in full possession of the country once known as Orleanna Wharton, especially because she is kept busy providing for him and their four children, which she sees as a kind of hand-to-mouth survival under harsh conditions, while he has the time and energy left to have plans and projects. By the time she recognises this trap, she is lodged in the heart of darkness, so thoroughly bent to the shape of marriage [she can] hardly see any other way to stand. [. . . ] In the end, she says, her lot was cast with the Congo. Poor Congo, barefoot bride of men who
Surprisingly, this history is not always correct. For instance, Leah confuses Leopold II and Leopold III (221) and learns that (starting shortly after Conrads trip) hands were cut o people who did not bring enough rubber (176), which is inaccurate as the hands were actually meant to prove killings (Hochschild 164-65). Lumumbas death date is given as January 17, the day he was handed over to his enemies, though his actual death date is not known.
2
252
took her jewels and promised the Kingdom (244). The almost mystical identication of subjected womanhood with colonised Africa (and of both with the heart of darkness) gives the impression that white women can easily empathise with the (post)colonised and can understand them. This is reinforced when Ruth May is killed by a green mamba on the day Lumumba dies (note the phonetic closeness between the words mamba and Lumumba ). Though the white women thus identify with Africa, they also see themselves as intruders. Orleanna and Leah are aware that their native country is one of the neocolonial powers, with the result that they feel guilty and out of place for their whiteness. Leah learns that this corresponds to the feelings of many, but not all, Congolese after independence. Many aspects of the women can be seen as developments from Marlows stance or as responses to it. Back in the US, Orleanna reflects a lot on the responsibility of the apolitical bystander and incidental coloniser which she was (204), and which Marlow was too. Orleanna and a white doctor in the Congo realise how Western countries exploit apolitical aid workers and missionaries for political purposes (147). Leah keeps stressing how (mostly) Belgium and the US exploit the Congo. She sees positive aspects in some Western projects, but not in others (518). Adah feels that [n]o other continent has endured such an unspeakably bizarre combination of foreign thievery and foreign goodwill (632). She mostly thinks about failed projects, and wonders whether Western aid for Africa is eective or desirable at all. As a virus researcher, she concludes that even successful aid projects have caused as much destruction as improvement, because viruses spread further with the help of the increased mobility and aggregation of people. Although her research helps treat virus diseases, Adah wonders whether it would not be better or as good to leave Africa to natural processes. She sees this in context with the loss of her dierent ability, which she misses after a well-meaning fellow doctor has removed it, and thinks that sometimes it is better to leave circumstances as they are. However, in context with Africa, Adahs idea of natural biological and social processes appears rather cynical. She feels that scarcity is a question of the climate, and sometimes sounds as if Africans were intrinsically doomed to shorter and harder lives than people elsewhere. She argues that in Africa, [f]or every life saved by vaccination or food relief, one is lost to starvation or war (632). Adah also blames Africans for overpopulation, claiming that when families have spent a million years making nine [children] in the hope of saving one, they cannot stop making nine (631). She does not see this isolated point, which may or may not be realistic, in context with other social and political factors.
253
The Poisonwood Bible is a widely-read3 didactic novel, and its characters are on one level constructed as prototypes and are meant to show the state of play in current discourses in the US. Apparently, then, Adahs limited knowledge and cynical ideas mostly outline the limitations of these discourses. She realises that Western aid projects, which usually work with too little knowledge of African realities, have not done much towards improving African lives. She thinks that it might be better to abandon this kind of outside interference, and cannot think of any alternatives to it. Mostly, this novel acknowledges that interference and aid are often problematic, and that only vague speculations without an empirical foundation are available to most Westerners in this area. When Adah blames some of the problems on Africans or on the climate, this mostly underlines that with todays knowledge, or at least with the oversimplied versions available to a Western general public, it is nearly impossible to imagine alternatives to traditional aid projects. Leah on the other hand can think of some possible approaches, which would be to enable Africans to use their own (mineral) wealth for their own good, and to stop fostering commodity agriculture and urbanisation in climates that do not support them. She feels that social processes would change if the ordinary African people could restructure them without foreign and internal exploitation, which is not at all the same as Adahs idea of leaving them to nature. Africans suggest two models themselves. The Kilangans share out any surplus to prevent it from going to waste, which the novel implicitly presents as a possible approach without discussing how it could be put into practice across continents. Leahs husband Anatole suggests letting Africans distinguish (344) and choose between adequate and inadequate ideas, products and policies brought by foreigners, on the basis of complete information. By translating Christian and political content, he mediates such information to Kilangans himself. While the women thus respond to many of Marlows thoughts, Nathan can be seen as an inverse or re-interpreted Kurtz. He is a fanatic with an idea. The echo of Kurtz, the pitiful Jupiter (Heart 59) who came to them with thunder and lightning (56) is reinforced when Nathan begins his rst sermon in Kilanga by raising one arm above his head like one of those gods they had in Roman times, xing to send down the thunderbolts and the lightning (31). He also writes a report to US Baptists, which only documents his lack of understanding for Kilangans (357). While Kurtz may go under because he gets too close to Africans, Nathan Price goes under because they refuse to
This novel is a New York Times bestseller and an Oprahs Book Club selection, cf. cover of edition used.
3
254
accept him. Africans are as important for him as for Kurtz, but Kingsolvers Africans are suciently strong and alert to reject their Kurtz (while they accept the more adaptable Brother Fowles), and they are suciently important to the white man to destroy him. While Kurtzs idea is not strong enough to withstand acceptance, Nathans religion is not strong enough to withstand refusal. Kingsolver rejects the idea that Africa acts as a fascination and nemesis for the white man. Both Nathans wish to convert Africans and his descent into madness are aspects of his own personality, not of Africa. Nathan appears as a mist who goes under because he does not learn from his surroundings, unlike his wife and daughters, who may not learn enough to t in with the Kilangans, but enough to survive. Learning and accepting help from Africans is an important theme. Initially, the Price family assume that they know enough, and that they have come to teach, not to learn. While the women slowly realise that they have to learn if only to survive, they also realise how many vital rules they violate out of ignorance. Adah muses that the Kilangan Animist priest may have put the snake in the hen house as a warning, to protect the Prices from their own stupidity, by sending [them] away (214), not out of hostility. Just as Marlow becomes wary of what he has heard in Brussels, the Price women realise that much of what they have learned in the US is not true or not adequate in the Congo. Leah realises how incompetent or intentionally biased most reporting about the struggles of the young Congolese nation is in US newspapers (198, 214-15), and how much it lags behind (282). She feels that her country invent[s] darkness [. . . ] in the service of its ideals (603). When Leah and Anatole take university degrees in the US, American students display a constant impulse to educate [Anatole, who is a political activist] about democracy and human rights (559), which they think an African cannot know about. Leah realises how widespread and unreflected such arrogance is in the US. Orleanna comes to see her unquestioned admiration for President Eisenhower as misguided, and feels that she trusted too long in false reassurances, believing as we all want to do when men speak of the national interest, that its also ours (244). When Kilangans try out American-style democracy based on voting and simple majority, both they and the Price women conclude that it is not as helpful as traditional Congolese consensus democracy and proportional power (407). Anatole helps Leah rethink Christianity. He shows her that her idea of good and bad with a simple system of (heavenly) punishment or reward is like a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. She learns that such a simple faith in justice [is] childish (372). Leah, who initially was closest to her father and wanted to be a missionary or teacher, describes her learning with the idea that she is an un-missionary and wants to nd out how to be in Africa without doing everything wrong (629).
3.30 TAYLER, FACING THE CONGO (2000)
255
Like Heart of Darkness, this novel presents a snapshot of Western confusion and puzzlement about interference in the Congo. Some tendency to turn this questioning into a white drama remains. At the same time, Kingsolver constantly emphasises the limits of white perspectives and of her own approach even while she tries to show Western readers what it might feel like to live in the Congo. In particular, the switching between several narrators shows that perception and representation are as powerful as reality, as each of the ve narrators describes Kilanga according to her own set of knowledge, discourse and expectations.
3.30
Jerey Tayler, Facing the Congo: A Modern-Day Journey into the Heart of Darkness (2000)
Jerey Tayler (1961-), an American living in Russia, studied languages as well as Russian and East European history.1 He has spent most of his life travelling. For some time he worked for the US Peace Corps, a non-military foreign aid organisation, in Morocco, Poland and Uzbekistan. Tayler now writes travel books and magazine articles, many of them about the countries of the former Soviet Union. He is a regular commentator on US National Public Radio. Jerey Tayler travelled to Zaire in 1995. Facing the Congo is a non-ctional account of his journey, framed by chapters covering his motivations and insights as well as a brief history of the country from the arrival of the rst whites to late 1999. At thirty-three, feeling that he is stagnating in a dreary oce job and that he needs to nd out who he is, Jerey decides to retrace Stanleys descent from Kisangani to Kinshasa by pirogue, or dugout canoe. He says goodbye to his Russian girlfriend, flies to Brazzaville to take a crash course in Lingala, and takes the ramshackle, overcrowded ferry to Kinshasa. His immediate impression of Zaires capital is one of abject poverty and starvation, dirt, ubiquitous Mobutu portraits, and corrupt soldiers and ocials who are to a large extent no longer paid by Mobutu and are carrying on by themselves, trying to squeeze civilians for as much as they can. Later, he also meets some well-o people, foreigners who work in banks or deal in diamonds, or clergy and missionaries who have the security of their churches to see them through. He realises that the city is split between the victors and the victims of history. After some days, shock and
Biographical information stems from Coyne and from Potts. I use Tayler to denote the author and Jerey for the character he is in his own book, as people address him by his rst name. For a magazine article on the upriver journey to Kisangani see Tayler, Vessel of Last Resort.
1
256
pity cease to dominate his outlook, and he begins to recognise smiles and liveliness in the poorer neighbourhoods. When he inquires about a passage to Kisangani, all the shipping company can oer him is a spot on the deck of a crowded cargo barge, which he thinks he cannot handle. A Zairean teacher of English, whose curiosity is aroused by the sight of a white man, approaches Jerey and introduces him to the director of transportation. The director is adamant that Jereys endeavour will require permission and protection from the military. He introduces him to a colonel who is close to Mobutu. The wealthy (and greedy) colonel, who trades in diamonds and other merchandise, has just bought a tugboat and barge as an investment, and invites Jerey on the maiden voyage to Kisangani because he feels that a white man is an entertaining rarity. As the river transportation company has practically broken down, merchants travel on such private crafts, and the tugboat and barge are soon overcrowded with passengers. Amid the poverty and hunger around him, Jerey feels obscene (81) with his stocks of food and money. Nearly everyone with whom he talks thinks that he is after diamonds or other lucrative resources, and nobody can see the point in his planned pirogue trip. Many fellow travellers warn him that it is perilous to descend the Congo River in that way, both because of dangerous currents and animals and because some people along the river are rather aggressive. From Kisangani, a crumbling colonial city which is split between the rich and the poor like Kinshasa, Jerey sets out by pirogue with his guide Desi, a young merchant he has met on the colonels ship. In spite of their dierences, the two men learn to rely on each other. For the areas reputed to be dangerous, they also hire a soldier, Amisi. The colonel has given Jerey a letter of recommendation to the local commanders, and has instructed one of them to give him the soldier. On their journey, the men are confronted with dicult weather, some dangerous animals, and all kinds of riverside communities, some friendly, some wary of intruders, some with an oddly drugged appearance, and some who are aggressive and try to rob the travellers. For some time, the three men can brave all hardships. They run into a serious problem when Desi falls ill about half-way to Kinshasa. Villagers direct them to a tugboat travelling to Kinshasa with several barges, and others help them dock their pirogue to it. On the ship, Jerey is asked to act as an interpreter for three Spaniards who, strangely, have spent their holidays in Zaire and are afraid of missing their flight from Kinshasa. He nds out that there is a flight to Kinshasa from the next port of call, and rushes with them to catch it. Desi, who has recovered, appears to be in diculties because there is a rumour that someone died on their voyage, but he walks away from the four whites, and Jerey has no time to resolve this. He feels bad for leaving Desi like that, but is glad to get back to Russia.
257
Jerey can now appreciate why his Zairean acquaintances have never understood why he would risk his life unnecessarily in Zaire when he has everything to live comfortably in a much richer country. He concludes that it was insensitive of him to use the country as a playground on which to solve [his] rich-boy existential dilemmas (249) and that history [. . . ] between blacks and whites in Africa, has left a mark that at least in part of the continent has barely begun to fade, so that some people see him as a redoubtable invader (258). He soon discards the idea of retrying and completing his river trip. Instead, he marries his girlfriend and resolves to value what life has given him, and to make the most of it. Jerey Tayler cites Stanleys books and Naipauls A Bend in the River as inspirations for his journey, but never Conrad.2 Although the phrase the heart of darkness occurs in the subtitle of his book, he regards it as a clich e (and the title may have beencliche designed by the publisher). While planning his trip, Jerey feels that in Zaire, long infamous in the West as the heart of darkness (from Joseph Conrads novel of the same name) [. . . ] the tendency to exaggerate [the dangers for the traveller] would be especially pronounced (xxi). In Brazzaville, a Peace Corps worker reacts to his plans with the words Going to Kisangani, eh? The heart of darkness! (7). Again, Jerey replies that he considers this an exaggeration. These are the only explicit references to Heart of Darkness. They show that, ironically, the connection between the Congo and Joseph Conrad is a part of general knowledge today, just as Conrad superimposed the general knowledge of his day on the Congo. This heart of darkness clich e does not take intocliche account the complexities of Conrads novella, which are discussed by literary critics, but simply associates the negative metaphor of its title with a place. Jerey feels attracted to Zaire because it is still incompletely mapped even in our unromantically precise age (xv). In this and in its descriptions of nature, Facing the Congo does remind one of Heart of Darkness, which shows how much todays writers have consciously or unconsciously absorbed Conrads style and perception. Most strikingly, Tayler echoes Conrads use of repetition and the intensity with which he creates the atmosphere of the rainforest. His omnipresent descriptions of the riverbanks produce a haunting impression of an overwhelming vegetation bathed in tropical mist for much of the time. He avoids the oppressive eect that the rainforest has on Marlow by describing individual plants and trees, and variations in the landscape. Several times, Jerey thinks of the forest or of a traditional riverside house as beautiful, peaceful or even as an Eden (191). As in Patrick Whites Voss , there are numerous passages in this account that might be seen as echoes of Heart of Darkness, but with most of them it would be hard to decide whether they are specically echoes of the novella itself, or more generally
2
The same is the case in the interviews by Coyne and Potts.
258
of the discourses that it condenses. Unlike the ones in Voss , Taylers echoes refer not to the social or political situation but mostly to a pre-departure obsession with the river (xxii), a tense silence, as if the forest, frightened by an intruder, were holding its breath (202) or a dim domain of giant trees (160). Jereys project is partly concerned with the struggle of man against the forces of nature, and he feels that [i]f we perished in this wilderness, the forest would absorb us and continue silent and impassive, an eternal, if unfathomable, life force apart, [. . . ] indierent to anything we feared, felt, or thought (236), just as Marlow claims that the silent wilderness [was] great and invincible and without a sound took [an African] into its bosom again (Heart 26) or closed upon [the Eldorado expedition] as the sea closes over a diver (35). Jerey feels that high-flown words of mission and drama (like Stanleys) mean nothing in the face of this wilderness (232). Sometimes, Conradesque visual details include descriptions of people. Jerey sees a face as ivory teeth set in an ebony mask (19), and cautious villagers as eyes, drumbeats, and crowds coming forth to the bank (228). He makes casual references to the idea of Africa as a site of the past, with respect to both humans and nature. They lived now as their forefathers had (119), and the hunger, the forest, the hunters and shermen, the life measured in meals appear to Jerey as something very old, something ancient, even, and true (73). He also sees birds like pterodactyls [in their] prehistoric domain (98), and from the plane the river looks like during the Jurassic period and we might suddenly spot the head of brontosaurus (256). In spite of this casual use of traditional images, Jerey undergoes an immense learning process and describes it with great honesty. Unlike Marlow, he is as much, or more, interested in what people think about him than what he thinks about them. He really has two kinds of encounters with Africans. In many riverside villages, people run away from him or shout at him and try to drive him away. Most Zaireans think that Jerey must either be a priest or a vicious mercenary or exploiter, and with his non-local guide and the soldier, he appears to many to be the latter. Jerey comes to sympathise with those who feel that he is trespassing or suspect him of ulterior motives. From the encounters with those who fear or reject him, he concludes: [i]f people wanted privacy I would leave them alone (258). With a second kind of persons, those who feel secure enough to communicate with the white man, he has some quite intense exchanges about culture and value systems. These are mostly men who have the privilege of wealth like the colonel or of experience in the West like the colonel and the chief mechanic on his boat; urbanites who have seen foreigners before; and men whose schools or imported Christian teachings have given them some information about whites. (Jerey hardly has any opportunity to talk with African women, but he does not go out of his way to seek it either, so his learning in
259
this area remains scant.) Among other reasons, Jerey seeks out communication with Africans when he is scared of his own journey, to keep himself from succumbing to fear and depression (68). This approach is the opposite of Marlows, who identies Africans with his fears. As much as Marlow, Jerey brings up numerous topics that are currently fashionable in the West. In contrast to Marlow, he chooses topics directly pertinent to Africa, and he discusses them with Africans. One of these is imported religion. Although Jerey is not against religions in general, he resents the legacy of Christian missionaries because of their role in subduing the people. In fact, his stance towards Christianity is ambivalent. He is wary of it, but Desis Christian belief inspires trust in him, as he associates it with a sense of responsibility and a certain Westernisation. This shows that it is not as easy to fully reject religion as Jerey thinks, an idea which Marlow may imply by his use of Biblical quotations in spite of an atheist approach. Similarly bound to tradition, Desi sometimes merges elements of Animism with his Christian belief, but Jerey does not go further into this topic. When they talk about birth rates, an emotive issue in the West, he is surprised to nd that Desi cites the imported Biblical precept to be fruitful and multiply. Jerey also learns that many Zairean men are in favour of polygamy. They are puzzled about Western gender relations and serial polygamy, which they feel means deserting women for new ones in emotional and economic ways (114-15). Though most men advocate rather patriarchal gender roles, some women are quite autonomous and self-supporting, especially female traders. On such topics, the following interesting, symmetric pattern of intercultural communication emerges. After intense communication, black and white feel astonishment about each other. Simultaneously, they feel as much astonishment about themselves, which is most evident in Jereys eventual assessment of his own project. Often, the glass wall (cf. Section 3.27) between them remains, mostly caused, as in OHanlons experience, by religions or other systems of ideas, as is evident between Jerey and those Zaireans who have embraced the teachings of American sects. Nevertheless, this development seems promising. The intense exchange and phase of astonishment lead to new insights and a larger self-distance, and not to contempt or to attempts at levelling the dierences by some kind of cultural imperialism, or at negating them in search of political correctness. Sometimes, Jerey has to accept that he does not understand. Sometimes he even learns from not understanding: his inability to understand Desi and foretell his responses helps him see and appreciate Desis and his own dierent relationships with the Congo River (194). In spite of his openness, Jerey is not immune to stereotypical discourse. He reproduces a common, more casual and less conscious version of Marlows mixture of positive and negative stereotypes and personal impressions. When people have some music and fun, he feels that this is a sign of the easy swing of African life (82). On the other hand, he mostly sees horror and suering in Zaire. He states that this has been caused
260
by Afro-Arabs and Belgians and by Mobutu with his neocolonial backers, especially the US. Jerey rather minimises the role of Central Africans in politics and history, and uses expressions like the Belgians [. . . ] granted the Congo independence (xviii), rather than the Congo gained independence. He generalises that Zaireans are tough and resourceful, each making the best of the situation. Some do this by honest means, others resort to violence, which he sees as their fault only in part, even when he is taken aback by soldiers aggressive wild-eyed faces (47, 77). The colonel seems to take pleasure in taking over white discourse (or has learned this discourse at school and takes it for granted) when he tells Jerey that the Congo is the wildest river in Africa [. . . ] dangerous for everyone (56), and its people are unregistered in any book, savages and wild (107). Tayler describes the images numerous Africans have of whites and their perception of himself. Many believe that the Belgians actually ate little children (106, 158). Today, some information is transmitted by the media. A young man on the colonels barge greets Jerey with shouts of Rambo! Terminator! Clin-ton! (78). Many encounters are partly determined by money, in two ways. On the one hand, Africans think that whites are intelligent, [. . . ] people who know how to build airplanes and that it is only logical that they use these abilities for egoistic purposes, and when they come to Africa, they must be looking for something. Like diamonds (96). On the other hand, Africans assume that a white traveller is rich (which is true given that he has been able to aord the airfare), so they try anything from pleading to threats to get money from him. Most people assume that a white-skinned person is on the level of an African fat cat, but easier to beg or trick because of a decit in experience and authority with regard to Africa. Jerey is able to meet the influential and protective colonel because people take him to their superiors, who they think are suitable communication partners for a white. The colonel, however, realises that his own wealth and social status are way above Jereys, and behaves accordingly. He assigns Jerey a crummy cabin while his own is luxurious, and although he is friendly and almost fatherly, he has a habit of ignoring Jereys questions. Jerey learns that this is not rudeness, but the manners of royalty, of an African chief who feels that a commoner should only speak when he is addressed (55). The colonel is incomparably richer than Jerey, and he has nothing like the bad conscience that the poverty of most Zaireans inspires in the white man. Jereys journey into the self gives him the insight that it was insensitive of him to use Zaire to cure his personal problems and that this use was, at least in a way, an exploitation of the country. This insight may well be influenced, directly or indirectly, by public discourse about Heart of Darkness, prompted by Achebes observation that Conrad uses Africa as setting and backdrop which eliminates the African as human
261
factor (Image 257). Only on the river does Jerey realise that he risks not only his own, but also Desis and Amisis lives in his quest for his identity. Unlike their motivations (and unlike Marlows who could plead some economic necessity), Jereys pervading anxiety and his need to prove himself are purely self-made. He realises that his personal postcolonial drama of self-actualization prove[s] obscenely trivial beside the suering of the Zaireans and the injustices of their past (260), and that he has been using other peoples daily hardship as a prop. His search for self is relegated into the background more and more as his perception of life in Zaire takes up the foreground. He increasingly tries not to project extraneous content onto his experience, but to strip it out. Once Jerey has completed his learning processes, his insights appear blindingly obvious to him. However, by comparison with the thinking of the other whites in the book, the fat complacent missionaries, the diamond traders and the Peace Corps volunteer who insists that all diculties encountered in Africa are no big deal (12), Jereys conclusions seem almost revolutionary. There are some oversimplications in his insights, especially the idea that a search for self is overcivilised or decadent, and that poor people do not conduct a search for self but a genuine and unadorned life (119), busy with survival and gratitude for the scrawniest grubs, the smallest bananas. Fatalism was necessary here, as was surrender [to circumstance] (236). He does not realise that poor people search for their identities too, they just have fewer resources to spend on this. Desi obviously searches for himself when he thinks about his position in his family, goes to see an ex-girlfriend, follows the teachings of a sect and gives money to the latter, which means that he does spend resources on an armation of identity. Until the end, Jerey condescendingly assumes that Desi knows only his river and his faith (257), without realising that religion is about identity as much as his own quest is. Nevertheless, Jerey Taylers account of his experiences gives the impression that something has come full circle in a century of dialogue with Joseph Conrad. Marlow goes into the Congo at the beginning of its colonial occupation, searching for himself against a backdrop of jungle and savages, and he is unusual for even wondering whether he and his like are welcome there, let alone needed as they claim. Tayler comes out of the Congo when its colonial and neocolonial destruction is all but complete, and is able to recognise and appreciate that in many peoples lives, he is not welcome. To continue with the next geographical category in Path 2 (white settler colonies), skip to page 102.
Works cited and consulted

I do not attempt to provide an overview or bibliographical study of the emerging eld of research into (post)colonial rewritings of Heart of Darkness. This task will certainly have to be addressed in the near future.
Achebe, Chinua. Africa and Her Writers. 1963. Morning Yet on Creation Day: Essays . New York: Doubleday, 1975. 19-21. Achebe, Chinua. African Literature as Restoration of Celebration. Chinua Achebe: A Celebration . Eds. Kirsten Holst Petersen and Anna Rutherford. London and Aarhus: Heinemann and Dangaroo, 1990. 1-10. Achebe, Chinua. Arrow of God . 1964. The African Trilogy . London: Picador (Pan), 1988. 315-555. Achebe, Chinua. Home and Exile. Oxford UP, 2000. Achebe, Chinua. An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrads Heart of Darkness . Kimbrough 251-62. Revised in 1987 from a talk given in 1975 and its rst printed version in 1977. Achebe, Chinua. The Novelist as Teacher. 1965. Morning Yet on Creation Day: Essays . New York: Doubleday, 1975. 40-46. Achebe, Chinua. The Role of the Writer in a New Nation. 1964. African Writers on African Writing . Ed. G. D. Killam. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1973. 7-13. Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart . 1958. The African Trilogy . London: Picador (Pan), 1988. 13-168. Adam, Ian and Helen Tin, eds. Past the Last Post: Theorizing Post-Colonialism and Post-Modernism . Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991. Ascherson, Neal. The King Incorporated: Leopold II in the Age of Trusts . London: George Allen & Unwin, 1963. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griths and Helen Tin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures . London, New York: Routledge, 1989. ASRC (University of Kansas African Studies Resource Center). Africa and the Democratic Wave 1999: Plenary Speakers: Ng ug wa Thiongo, 1999. August 17, 2005. Ngugi www.ku.edu/asrc/programs/conferences/archive/1999 2/speakers/thiongo. Baines, Jocelyn. Joseph Conrad: A Critical Biography . London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1960. 263
264
Ngugi
Celine
Celine
Celine
Bardolph, Jacqueline. Ng ug wa Thiongos A Grain of Wheat and Petals of Blood as Readings of Conrads Under Western Eyes and Victory . The Conradian 12, 1987. 32-49. Batchelor, John. The Life of Joseph Conrad . Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. Baumann, Oscar. The Stanley Falls Station: Description of the Topography and Inhabitants at the Seventh Cataract of the Stanley Falls of the Congo River. Mittheilungen der Kaiserlich-K oniglichen Geographischen Gesellschaft 29 (1886), 504-13, 647-56 and 30 (1887), 65-69. Translated and updated by Peter Firchow. Firchow 166-91. Benson, Eugene and L. W. Conolly, eds. Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English . London, New York: Routledge, 1994. Berger, Roger A. Writing without a Future: Colonial Nostalgia in V. S. Naipauls A Bend in the River . Essays in Literature 22(1), 1995. 144-56. Blank, Andreas. Literarisierung von M undlichkeit: Louis-Ferdinand C eline und Raymond Queneau . T ubingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1991. Blake, William. The Tiger. 1794. August 17, 2005. www.bartleby.com/101/489.html. Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry . Oxford UP, 1973. Boehmer, Elleke. Colonial & Postcolonial Literature . Oxford UP, 1995. Boehmer, Elleke, ed. Empire Writing: An Anthology of Colonial Literature 1870-1918 . Oxford UP, 1998. British Council. Abdulrazak Gurnah. British Council Contemporary Writers , n. d. August 17, 2005. www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth46. Buhle, Paul. Mr. Jones, He Dead. Village Voice Literary Supplement , July 9, 1996. 18-19. Caminero-Santangelo, Byron. African Fiction and Joseph Conrad: Reading Postcolonial Intertextuality . State U of New York P, 2005. Carroll, David. Chinua Achebe . 2nd ed. London: Macmillan, 1990. C eline, Louis-Ferdinand. Journey to the End of the Night . 1932. Trans. Ralph Manheim. London: John Calder, 1997. C eline, Louis-Ferdinand. Voyage au bout de la nuit . 1932. Romans . Paris: Gallimard (Biblioth` eque de la Pl eiade), 1962. Chiu, Manyin. Pearls and Ivory: Joseph Conrad and Leonard Woolf. Fincham & de Lange 139-53. Coetzee, J. M. In the Heart of the Country . 1977. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982. Conrad, Joseph. The Congo Diary. Kimbrough 159-66. Written as a private diary in 1890, rst published in 1921. Conrad, Joseph. Geography and Some Explorers. Last Essays . London: Dent & Sons, 1926. 1-31. First published in 1924 in a magazine, in 1926 in a book. Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Kimbrough 1-76. First published in 1899 in serialised form, 1902 in a book. E-texts of Heart of Darkness and other works by Conrad can be found on the Project Gutenberg at (August 17, 2005) promo.net/cgi-promo/pg/cat.cgi. Conrad, Joseph. An Outpost of Progress. 1898. Boehmer, Empire Writing 248-70.
WORKS CITED AND CONSULTED
265
Conrad, Joseph. A Personal Record . First published in 1908/09 in serialised form, 1912 in book form. August 17, 2005. www.gutenberg.org/etext/687. Conrad, Joseph. Preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus . 1897. Kimbrough 223-26. Coyne, John. Talking with Jerey Tayler. Peace Corps Writers , 2000. August 17, 2005. www.peacecorpswriters.org/pages/2000/0011/011talktay.html. Dabydeen, David. The Intended . 1991. London: Vintage, 2000. Damodaran, Murali. (19.) Arun Joshi. Indian Writers . Chicago: Mary Anne Mohanraj, n. d. August 17, 2005. www.mamohanraj.com/india.html. Davies, Laurence. Seductions of the Word: Conrads Kurtz, Soyinkas Professor. de Lange & Fincham 195-210. de Lange, Attie and Gail Fincham with Wieslaw Krajka, eds. Conrad in Africa: New Essays on Heart of Darkness . Boulder: East European Monographs / Columbia UP, 2002. Demarest, Marc. Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford: The Collaborative Texts, 1997. August 17, 2005. www.noumenal.com/marc/jcfmf. D oring, Tobias. Chinua Achebe und Joyce Cary: Ein postkoloniales Rewriting englischerDoring Afrika-Fiktionen . Pfaenweiler: Centaurus, 1996. Ducourneau, Jean A. Chronologie. C eline, Voyage xvii-xxxii. Celine Duerden, Dennis and Cosmo Pieterse, eds. African Writers Talking . London: Heinemann, 1972. Duyck, R. V. S. Naipauls Heart of Darkness. Aclals Bulletin 7(4), 1986. 86-94. Eagleton, Terry. Criticism and Ideology . London: Verso, 1976. Ellis, James. Kurtzs Voice: The Intended as The Horror! . English Literature in Transition 19, 1976. 105-10. Emrit, Ronald C. Marlene NourbeSe Philip. Trinidad & Tobago , n. d. August 17, 2005. www.bestoftrinidad.com/profiles/philip.html. Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. Britannica CD, Version 97. Ezekiel, Nissim and Meenakshi Mukherjee, eds. Another India . New Delhi: Penguin India, 1990. Fincham, Gail. Living under the Sign of Contradiction: Self and Other in Conrads Heart of Darkness . The English Academy Review 7, 1990. 1-12. Also excerpted in Tredell 141-46. Fincham, Gail. Agency and Mediation in Two Discourses of Imperialism: Heart of Darkness and The Expedition to the Baobab Tree . de Lange & Fincham 331-51. Fincham, Gail and Attie de Lange with Wieslaw Krajka, eds. Conrad at the Millennium: Modernism, Postmodernism, Postcolonialism . Boulder: East European Monographs/ Columbia UP, 2001. Firchow, Peter Edgerly. Envisioning Africa: Racism and Imperialism in Conrads Heart of Darkness . Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1999. Fr angsmyr, Tore, ed. J. M. Coetzee Biography. Les Prix Nobel. The Nobel Prizes 2003 . Stockholm: Nobel Foundation, 2004. August 17, 2005. nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/2003/coetzee-bio.html. Gandhi, Leela. Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction . Edinburgh UP, 1998.
266
Celine
Gehrmann, Susanne. Kongo-Greuel: Zur literarischen Konguration eines kolonialkritischen Diskurses (1890-1910) . Hildesheim, Z urich, New York: Olms, 2003. Gide, Andr e. Travels in the Congo . Trans. Dorothy Bussy. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986. First published in French as Voyage au Congo (1927) and Le retour du Tchad (1928), in English slightly abridged as one book in 1929. Gide, Andr e. Voyage au Congo, Le retour du Tchad . 1927/28. Voyage au Congo, Le retour du Tchad, Retour de lU.R.S.S., Retouches ` a mon Retour de lU.R.S.S., Carnets dEgypte . Paris: Gallimard, 1992. 5-206. Glossary. C eline, Journey 442-48. Government of Trinidad and Tobago. The History of the Flag and Other National Emblems of Trinidad and Tobago. 1962. Newsday Historical Digest , October 29, 2000. 13-14. August 17, 2005. www.nalis.gov.tt/nationalawards-emblems/history flagandnationalemblems.htm. Greene, Graham. A Burnt-out Case . 1961. London: Heinemann and Bodley Head, 1974. Greene, Graham. The Heart of the Matter . 1948. London: Heinemann and Bodley Head, 1971. Greene, Graham. Journey without Maps . 1936. London: Heinemann and Bodley Head, 1978. Guerard, Albert J. Conrad the Novelist . Harvard UP, 1958. Also excerpted in Kimbrough 192-94. Gurnah, Abdulrazak. Paradise . New York: The New Press, 1994. Hall, Stuart. The Spectacle of the Other . Representation: Cultural Representation and Signifying Practices . Ed. Stuart Hall. London: Sage (The Open University), 1997. 223-90. Hansson, Karin. Patrick White Existential Explorer. Stockholm: Nobel Foundation, n. d. August 17, 2005. www.nobel.se/literature/articles/hansson/index.html. HarperCollins. Barbara Kingsolver, n. d. August 17, 2005. www.harpercollins.com/ global scripts/product catalog/author xml.asp?authorid=5311. Harris, Wilson. Authors Note. Palace 7-12. Harris, Wilson. The Frontier on Which Heart of Darkness Stands. 1981. Kimbrough 262-68. Harris, Wilson. Palace of the Peacock . 1960. London: Faber and Faber, 1998. Hawkins, Hunt. Conrad and Congolese Exploitation. Conradiana 13. Lubbock: Texas Tech UP, 1981. 94-99. Hawkins, Hunt. Conrad and the Psychology of Colonialism. Conrad Revisited . Ed. Ross Murn. U of Alabama P, 1985. 71-87. Hawkins, Hunt. Conrads Critique of Imperialism in Heart of Darkness . PMLA 94. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1979. 286-99. Hawkins, Hunt. Joseph Conrad, Roger Casement and the Congo Reform Movement. Journal of Modern Literature 9, No. 1. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1981. 65-80. Head, Dominic. Coetzee, J. M. (1940-). The Literary Encyclopedia . The Literary Dictionary Company Limited, n. d. August 17, 2005. www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=934.
267
Heinemann. Tayeb Salih. African Writers Series . Harcourt Education Ltd, n. d. August 17, 2005. www.heinemann.co.uk/secondary/author.aspx?d=s&authorid=SalihT2745. Hewlett, Barry S. Foragers and Rural Development. R epublique Centrafricaine, Projet ECOFAC - Composante RCA, Ngotto Reserve. Vancouver: Washington State University, 1995. August 17, 2005. www.vancouver.wsu.edu/fac/hewlett/akacons.html. Hochschild, Adam. King Leopolds Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa . Boston: Mariner Books (Houghton Miin), 1999. Hueer, Ford Madox and Joseph Conrad. The Inheritors . 1901. New York: Doubleday, Page for Wise & Co, 1924. E-text at (August 17, 2005) www.noumenal.com/marc/jcfmf. Indiaclub. Arun Joshi. Voorhees: The India Club, Inc, n. d. August 17, 2005. www.indiaclub.com/shop/AuthorSelect.asp?Author=Arun+Joshi. Jay, Charlotte. Beat not the Bones . New York: Avon Books, 1952. Jay, Charlotte. Das Gift der neuen Welt . Trans. Nina Schindler. Hamburg: Argument/ Ariadne, 1999. German translation of the 1992 edition of Beat not the Bones , revised by the author. Joshi, Arun. The Strange Case of Billy Biswas . New York: Asia Publishing House, 1971. Karl, Frederick R. Joseph Conrad: The Three Lives . London: Faber and Faber, 1979. Kerr, Sarah. The Novel As Indictment. The New York Times , October 11, 1998. August 17, 2005. www.revan.com.br/catalogo/0198e.htm. Kimbrough, Robert, ed. Heart of Darkness: Joseph Conrad: A Norton Critical Edition . 3rd ed. New York: Norton, 1988. Kingsolver, Barbara. The Poisonwood Bible . 1998. New York: HarperCollins, 2003. Kipling, Rudyard. The White Mans Burden. 1899. Internet Modern History Sourcebook . Ed. Paul Hallsal. August 17, 2005. www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/Kipling.html. Knowles, Owen and Gene M. Moore, eds. Oxford Readers Companion to Conrad . Oxford UP, 2000. Kramer, J urgen. Lying as Surviving in Heart of Darkness . Journal for the Study of British Cultures Vol. 3/2, 1996. 133-47. Lagercrantz, Olof. Reise ins Herz der Finsternis: Eine Reise mit Joseph Conrad . Trans. Angelika Gundlach. Frankfurt am Main: Insel-Verlag, 1988. First published in Danish in 1987. Leiden University. Prof. dr. Mineke Schipper de Leeuw and Prof. dr. W.J.J. Schipper-de Leeuw (Mineke), biography pages, n. d. August 17, 2005. www.literatuurwetenschap.leidenuniv.nl/index.php3?c=20 and leidsewetenschappers.leidenuniv.nl/show en.php3?medewerker id=588. Leroy, Gilles. Pr eface. Gide, Voyage vii-xvii. Lindqvist, Sven. Exterminate All the Brutes . Trans. Joan Tate. London: Granta Books, 1997. First published in Swedish in 1992. Liukkonen, Petri. Authors Calendar , n. d. August 17, 2005. www.kirjasto.sci.fi/calendar.htm.
268
Celine
Ngugi Ngugi Ngugi
Lumumba, Patrice. Speech at the independence celebrations of the Congo (French original). 1960. Comp. Jean-Pierre Me Biminayi. CongOnline . August 17, 2005. www.congonline.com/Forum/Bimina22.htm. Lumumba, Patrice. Speech at the independence celebrations of the Congo (English translation). 1960. Africa Within . August 17, 2005. www.africawithin.com/lumumba/independence speech.htm. Lyrikwelt. Urs Widmer. Hagen: Gey, n. d. August 17, 2005. www.lyrikwelt.de/autoren/widmer.htm. Malouf, David. Remembering Babylon . London: Chatto and Windus, 1993. Mantex. Leonard Woolf: a biographical note. Manchester, 2004. August 17, 2005. www.mantex.co.uk/ou/a319/l-woolf.htm. Maugham, W[illiam] Somerset. The Fall of Edward Barnard and Mackintosh. 1921. South Sea Tales . London: Mandarin, 1993. 49-87, 143-82. First published in the collection The Trembling of a Leaf . Miles, Robert. Racism . London, New York: Routledge, 1989. Miller, Christoph L. Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French . U of Chicago P, 1985. Also excerpted in Tredell 128-33. Mondor, Henri. Avant-Propos. C eline, Voyage vii-xvi. Moore, Gene M. Conrads Influence. The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad . Ed. J. H. Stape. Cambridge UP, 1996. 223-38. Moss, Peter and Michael J. Tolley. Afterword to Beat not the Bones . Adelaide: Wakeeld Press, 1992. Cited from the German translation in Jay, Das Gift der neuen Welt 245-53. Mpoyi-Buatu, Thomas. La re-production . Paris: LHarmattan, 1986. Naipaul, V. S. A Bend in the River . 1979. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980. Najder, Zdzislaw. Joseph Conrad: A Chronicle . Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge, 1983. Nakai, Asako. The English Book and Its Marginalia: Colonial/Postcolonial Literatures after Heart of Darkness. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000. Nakai, Asako. Heart of Darkness Centenary Conference in South Africa. Conference report. Tokyo/Kyoto Conrad Group Newsletter , 4, December 1998. 2-3. August 17, 2005. www2.gol.com/users/kanzler/hodsan98.pdf. Newbolt, Henry. Vita Lampada. 1897. Boehmer, Empire Writing 287-88. Ng ug wa Thiongo. Decolonising the Mind . London: Currey, 1986. Ng ug . A Grain of Wheat . 1967. Oxford: Heinemann, 1986. Ng ug wa Thiongo. Writers in Politics . London: Heinemann, 1981. NourbeSe Philip, Marlene. Looking for Livingstone: An Odyssey of Silence . Stratford (Ontario): Mercury Press, 1991. NourbeSe Philip, Marlene, n. d. Authors web site. August 17, 2005. www.nourbese.com. Obendiek, Edzard. Der lange Schatten des babylonischen Turmes: Das Fremde und der Fremde in der Literatur . G ottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000.
269
OHanlon, Redmond. No Mercy: A Journey Into the Heart of the Congo . New York: Vintage Departures, 1998. First published in Great Britain in a slightly dierent form as Congo Journey , Hamish Hamilton/Penguin, 1996. Orr, Leonard. Biography. A Joseph Conrad Companion . Eds. Leonard Orr and Ted Billy. Westport and London: Greenwood Press, 1999. Pakenham, Thomas. The Scramble for Africa: White Mans Conquest of the Dark Continent From 1876 to 1912 . New York: Avon Books, 1992. Parry, Benita. Conrad and Imperialism: Ideological Boundaries and Visionary Frontiers . London: Macmillan, 1983. Also excerpted in Tredell 105-14. Penguin. Redmond OHanlon, authors prole. London: Penguin UK, n d. August 17, 2005. www.penguin.co.uk/nf/Author/AuthorPage/0,,0 1000024249,00.html. Peters, Bradley T. The Signicance of Dream Consciousness in Heart of Darkness and Palace of the Peacock . Conradiana Vol. 22, No. 2, 1990 (issue dedicated to The Influence of Conrad). 127-41. Phillips, Caryl. Heartland. 1989. Higher Ground . London: Faber and Faber, 1999. Potts, Rolf. Jerey Tayler. Rolf Potts Vagabonding , n. d. August 17, 2005. www.rolfpotts.com/writers/tayler.html. Prescott, Lynda. Past and Present Darkness: Sources for V. S. Naipauls A Bend in the River . Modern Fiction Studies 30(3), 1984. 547-59. Procter, James. Caryl Phillips. British Council Contemporary Writers , n. d. August 17, 2005. www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth80. Procter, James. David Malouf. British Council Contemporary Writers , n. d. August 17, 2005. www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth66. Ramchand, Kenneth. Pursuing the Palace of the Peacock. Harris, Palace 119-38. Rao, D. Venkat. A Conversation with Ng ug wa Thiongo (Interview). Research inNgugi African Literatures v30 i1, Spring 1999. 162-68. August 17, 2005. www.english.vt.edu/hbrizee/1106coloniallinksthiongo.htm. Reilly, Roma. Ludwig Leichhardt. Australian Explorers , n. d. August 17, 2005. members.tripod.com/romareilly/leichhardt/ludwig.htm. Robinson, Jerey. The Aboriginal Enigma: Heart of Darkness , Voss and Palace of the Peacock . Journal of Commonwealth Literature Vol. 20, No. 1, 1985. 148-55. Roy, Arundhati. The God of Small Things . 1997. London: HarperCollins, 1998. Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism . New York: Knopf, 1993. Also excerpted in Tredell 148-51. Said, Edward W. Orientalism . London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978. Salih, Tayeb. Season of Migration to the North . 1969. Trans. Denys Johnson-Davis. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1970. SAWNET (South Asian Womens Network). Arundhati Roy, n. d. August 17, 2005. www.sawnet.org/books/authors.php?Roy+Arundhati. Schipper, Mineke. Conrads Rivier . Amsterdam/Antwerpen: Uitgeverij Contact, 1994.
270
Schwerdt, Dianne. Monstering the Interior: Internal Journeys over External Landscapes. Re-imagining Africa . Eds. Sue Kossew and Dianne Schwerdt. Huntington: Nova Science Publishers, 2001. 27-41. Seaton, Dorothy. Land and History: Inter-Discursive Conflict in Voss . Australian and New Zealand Studies in Canada 4, 1990. 1-14. Sharrad et al. Bibliography of Criticism of Indian Literature in English (1970-1990). Compiled by the Research Group Identity and Cultural Dierence at the University of Wollongong, Faculty of Arts, n. d. August 17, 2005. www.uow.edu.au/arts/icd/publications/india a-nan.pdf. Shepler, William. David Dabydeen. Postcolonial Studies at Emory , 1999. August 17, 2005. www.emory.edu/English/Bahri/Dabydeen.html. Sherry, Norman. Conrads Western World . Cambridge UP, 1971. Showroom Web Services. A Very Brief History of Australia, n. d. August 17, 2005. www.showroom.com.au/aushistory.htm. Silverberg, Robert. Lord of Darkness . New York: Arbor House, 1983. Simmons, Jon. Arundhati Roy Web Site , n. d. August 17, 2005. www.arundhatiroy.org.uk. Singh, Frances B. The Colonialistic Bias of Heart of Darkness . 1978. Kimbrough 268-80. Speaking of Stories. Graham Greene, n. d. August 17, 2005. www.speakingofstories.org/Author%20Bios/graham greene.htm. Stanley, Henry Morton. The Founding of the Congo Free State . 1885. Excerpts in The Atlantic Monthly , internet sidebars. August 17, 2005. www.theatlantic.com/issues/96sep/congo/stanley.htm. Stanley, Henry Morton. Through the Dark Continent . 1878. Excerpts in The Atlantic Monthly , internet sidebars. August 17, 2005. www.theatlantic.com/issues/96sep/congo/stanley.htm. Stark, Bruce. Kurtzs Intended: The Heart of Heart of Darkness . Texas Studies in Literature and Language 16, 1974. 535-55. Stokes, John. Aestheticism. Encyclopedia of Literature and Criticism . Eds. Martin Coyle, Peter Garside, Malcom Kelsall and John Peck. London, New York: Routledge, 1990. Strickland, Galen. Robert Silverberg. The Templeton Gate , n. d. August 17, 2005. members.tripod.com/templetongate/silverberg.htm. Stuttgarter Zeitung. Urs Widmer: Im Kongo Auf den Spuren Joseph Conrads, May 28, 2003. August 17, 2005. www.stuttgarter-zeitung.de/stz/page/detail.php/433367. Tayler, Jerey. Facing the Congo: A Modern-Day Journey Into the Heart of Darkness . 2000. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2001. Tayler, Jerey. Vessel of Last Resort. The Atlantic Monthly Vol. 278, No. 3, 1996. 32-40. August 17, 2005. www.theatlantic.com/issues/96sep/congo/congo.htm. Travels in the Congo. Introduction to Gide, Travels i. Tredell, Nicolas, ed. Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness . Cambridge: Icon Books, 1998.
271
Tripcony, Penny. Too Obvious to See: Explaining the Basis of Aboriginal Spirituality. Lecture at the Queensland University of Technology, 2001. August 17, 2005. www.qiecb.qld.edu.au/html/PPL3.htm. van den Broek, Lida. Am Ende der Weiheit: Vorurteile u berwinden: Ein Handbuch. Berlin: Orlanda Frauenverlag, 1993. Vereecke, Jorg. United Nations Development Programme. Country Oce: Guyana. National Report on Indigenous Peoples and Development, 1994. August 17, 2005. www.sdnp.org.gy/undp-docs/nripd. Vitoux, Fr ed eric. La vie de C eline. Paris: Grasset, 1988. Celine Voss. Introduction to White, Voss 3. Walder, Dennis. Post-colonial Literatures in English: History Language Theory . Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. Watt, Ian. Conrad in the Nineteenth Century . London: Chatto and Windus, 1980. Watts, Cedric. Heart of Darkness. The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad . Ed. J. H. Stape. Cambridge UP, 1996. 45-59. White, Patrick. A Fringe of Leaves . London: Jonathan Cape, 1976. White, Patrick. Voss . 1957. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960. Widmer, Urs. Im Kongo . 1996. Z urich: Diogenes, 1998. Wikipedia. Arundhati Roy, 2005. August 17, 2005. www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arundhati Roy. Woolf, Leonard. Pearls and Swine. 1921. Boehmer, Empire Writing 415-30.
272
Finding Congolese literature

Unfortunately, I have not been able to nd any rewritings of Heart of Darkness that stem from the Congo itself. This has several possible reasons. The most important European language in the Congo is French, and Heart of Darkness is generally far less important in French-speaking countries than in English-speaking ones, and is not part of school curricula. The economic situation of the Congo has not permitted a large body of literature to be produced and printed. Fortunately, however, Congolese literature is gradually becoming available. There is some probability that I have simply overlooked existing rewritings of Heart of Darkness, especially since Congolese literature does not seem to have been much addressed in criticism in the English language. Gehrmann (315-22) reads a Congolese novel, Re-production by Thomas Mpoyi-Buatu (1986), that cites Heart of Darkness as one of many moments in Congolese history. These are some possible starting points for a search: Editions LHarmattan, Paris, publishes ction, poetry and non-ction by writers from the Congo, as well as literary studies and histories. August 17, 2005. www.editions-harmattan.fr. Volet, Jean-Marie, ed. DRC Congolese Literature at a Glance. Reading Women Writers and African Literatures: Congo: Democratic Republic of the Congo (Fomerly Zaire) . Perth: University of Western Australia, 2004. August 17, 2005. www.arts.uwa.edu.au/aflit/CountryZaireEN.html. Ockerbloom, Mary Mark, ed. Writers from Zaire. A Celebration of Women Writers . Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania, n. d. August 17, 2005. digital.library.upenn.edu/women/ generate/ZAIRE.html. The beginnings of Congolese writing are discussed by Gehrmann 311-22.

Print 1 A

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Print 1 A

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Print 1 A

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Colonial and Postcolonial Rewritings of "Heart of Darkness"

A Century of Dialogue with Joseph Conrad by Regelind Farn

Boca Raton, Florida USA 2005

In memoriam Jack Canavan

Using the PDF version

Doring Celine Ngugi

COLONIAL AND POSTCOLONIAL REWRITINGS OF HEART OF DARKNESS

COLONIAL AND POSTCOLONIAL REWRITINGS OF HEART OF DARKNESS

Chapter 1 Reading Heart of Darkness

Historical and biographical background

COLONIAL AND POSTCOLONIAL REWRITINGS OF HEART OF DARKNESS

1.1 HISTORICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL BACKGROUND

Cf. Hochschild 204 for a similar argument about another text.

COLONIAL AND POSTCOLONIAL REWRITINGS OF HEART OF DARKNESS

Formal techniques and impressionism

1.2 FORMAL TECHNIQUES AND IMPRESSIONISM

COLONIAL AND POSTCOLONIAL REWRITINGS OF HEART OF DARKNESS

Biographical and psychological interpretations

1.3 BIOGRAPHICAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL INTERPRETATIONS

COLONIAL AND POSTCOLONIAL REWRITINGS OF HEART OF DARKNESS

Myth, allegory and symbolism

1.4 MYTH, ALLEGORY AND SYMBOLISM

COLONIAL AND POSTCOLONIAL REWRITINGS OF HEART OF DARKNESS

Victorian ideas and the n de si` ecle

` 1.5 VICTORIAN IDEAS AND THE FIN DE SIECLE

COLONIAL AND POSTCOLONIAL REWRITINGS OF HEART OF DARKNESS

Ethics, philosophy and religion

1.6 ETHICS, PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION

COLONIAL AND POSTCOLONIAL REWRITINGS OF HEART OF DARKNESS

Politics and economy

On Darwinist discourse see Lindqvist 75-88, 97-107, 115, 117, 119-20.

COLONIAL AND POSTCOLONIAL REWRITINGS OF HEART OF DARKNESS

Influence on modernist writers

Cf. Knowles & Moore 124; Watts 49, 51-52.

1.10 RACISM AND IMPERIALISM

Racism and imperialism

COLONIAL AND POSTCOLONIAL REWRITINGS OF HEART OF DARKNESS

1.10 RACISM AND IMPERIALISM

COLONIAL AND POSTCOLONIAL REWRITINGS OF HEART OF DARKNESS

COLONIAL AND POSTCOLONIAL REWRITINGS OF HEART OF DARKNESS

Recent approaches: postcolonial criticism, discourse analysis and deconstruction

1.12 RECENT APPROACHES

COLONIAL AND POSTCOLONIAL REWRITINGS OF HEART OF DARKNESS

Chapter 2 Rewriting and rereading Heart of Darkness

COLONIAL AND POSTCOLONIAL REWRITINGS OF HEART OF DARKNESS

2.1 THE POLITICS OF REWRITING AND REREADING

COLONIAL AND POSTCOLONIAL REWRITINGS OF HEART OF DARKNESS

COLONIAL AND POSTCOLONIAL REWRITINGS OF HEART OF DARKNESS

2.3 SELF AND IDENTITY

Self and identity

COLONIAL AND POSTCOLONIAL REWRITINGS OF HEART OF DARKNESS

2.3 SELF AND IDENTITY

COLONIAL AND POSTCOLONIAL REWRITINGS OF HEART OF DARKNESS

The Janus-faced man (and how women live with him)

2.3 SELF AND IDENTITY

COLONIAL AND POSTCOLONIAL REWRITINGS OF HEART OF DARKNESS

Encounters: exploiters, givers and help racism

COLONIAL AND POSTCOLONIAL REWRITINGS OF HEART OF DARKNESS

Language: wariness, scepticism, necessary strategies and dicult dialogue