LITR / CRCL 5734: Colonial & Postcolonial Literature

Sample Student Midterm 2003

Robert Buffum
Litr. 5734
Dr. White
June 8, 2003

The Invisible Nation

     “All these hearts as of fretted children shall be sooth’d,

      All affection shall be fully responded to, the secret shall be told,

      All these separations and gaps shall be taken up and hook’d and link’d together,

      The whole earth, this cold, impassive, voiceless earth, shall be completely justified”

                                                                        Walt Whitman “Passage To India”

            Walt Whitman speaks of a time when man will come together to be one. Being one in the sense of being a part of a spiritual union within the identity of many colorful cultural backgrounds. No longer will there be a time of empire and the wiping out of a race’s history. No longer will these displaced individuals be forced to live under the Western influence of Christianity and its democratic ideals. One day far in the future this possibly could happen and create a world of peace. However, Western society has created for itself such a dark history of oppression and violence that it will be very difficult to achieve. The French and the English have been the builders of empires for many centuries, following in the footsteps of the Romans. Darek Walcott writes of this colonial building of empires in his poem “Two Poems on the Passing of an Empire”. Walcott first shows a Roman empire at the height of its power spreading forth its western version of law and culture on other defeated nations. Then comes the dawning of another oppressive empire under English rule that takes its place through dominance of violence and the spreading of its ideals and cultural influences. Walcott writes, “A veteran of the African campaign / Bends, as if threading an eternal needle” (35). This British officer is just living out the same sin of pain and evil that all other conquerors have done before him. He is weaving an eternal history of endless imperialism that will displace and destroy thousands of pure cultures that existed in a state of peace before his rule.

            Edward Said’s “Orientalism” expresses the argument that the Orient is just another invention of the Europeans to maintain cultural control over the East. Said writes, “Europe’s greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its most recurring images of the Other. In addition, the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, and experience”(87). Turning to Achebe, who speaks for the African voice, makes the same argument in writing about Conrad’s blatant racism. In Achebe’s article “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness” he writes, “ Quite simply it is the desire-one might indeed say the need-in Western psychology to set Africa up as a foil against Europe, as a place of negations at once remote and vaguely familiar, in comparison with which Europe’s own state of spiritual grace will be manifested” (251-252). Achebe states even further that, “ The Heart of Darkness projects the image of Africa as the “other world” the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization, a place where man’s vaulted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant beastiality” (252). According to both Said and Achebe, a distribution of western ideals through aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts are used a means to dominate, restructure, and keep complete social control over Africa and the Orient. This is the defining power behind colonial literature, to redefine the identity of the conquered nation and establish an enculturation process on the population. Postcolonial literature will later be formed as a response to the colonial movement. The oppressed will search for a literary way to redefine their culture that was left in a state of multiculturalism after the initial colonization period.

            In the reference book Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory, post-colonialism is defined as a term for a collection of theoretical and critical strategies used to examine the culture of former colonies of the European empires, and their relation to the rest of the world (Makaryk 155). This examination tends to take on the pervasive effects of colonialism and reclaiming a voice in the identity of the new culture, which has many remnants of the fallen empire. Conquered nations are left with a process termed hybridization where traditions of the colonizers are permanently imprinted onto the new culture. According to The John Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, Western racism is seen as a form of scapegoating that permits the West to cling to its power and leads to a violent reaction by the colonized to what is known as clashes of cultures. Edward Said’s article “Orientalism”, that I previously mentioned became the foundational text for the post-colonial movement. The most serious blow suffered by the colonized is being removed completely from history (Colonizer 91). What tremendous literary power to be able to rewrite another nation or cultures history to fit one’s own. Post-colonial literature then is the slow, painful, and highly complex means of fighting one’s way into European-made history, in other words, a process of dialogue and necessary correction (Gugelberger 582). At the heart of this dialogue is the questioning of the genesis of the literary Western canon of writing (Gugelberger 582).

            One of the best examples of dialogue between a colonialist writing and post-colonial literature is the debate between Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. Conrad’s novel is the epitome of an established western classic in the Western Canon. Achebe’s novel becomes the established cornerstone and foundation for the invention of African American Literature. Although Things Fall Apart may appear to be exclusively concerned with the imposition of colonial rule and the traumatic clash of cultures between Africa and Europe, it is also a work that seeks to address the crisis of culture generated by the collapse of colonial rule (Achebe 11). The main protagonist, Okonkwo, becomes the classic tragic figure that cannot adapt to this drastic change that takes place in his culture due to the immersion of western standards of law and religion. Okonkwo is not able to adapt due to his personal fault of leading through strength and power. He is committing the very same destructive acts that his enemies are committing. Obierika is Achebe’s heroic figure in the novel. Obierika is able to take in this new form of culture and survive within its constraints. In reality, Achebe’s family adapted to this new culture by immersing themselves in the new religion of Christianity that was brought to their village for the first time. Achabe used the western education to his advantage to achieve high goals and a voice for his own people.

            Conrad’s book Heart of Darkness is based on Conrad’s own experiences of the Congo and loosely based on factual history. Michiko Kakutani wrote an article in the New York Times on the release of a new book entitled King Leopold’s Ghost; A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa by Adam Hochschild. This book was released in 1998 and makes the claim that The Heart of Darkness stands as a remarkably “precise and detailed “ portrait of King Leopold’s Congo in 1890 (1). Kukutani writes, “Under the reign of terror instituted by King Leopold II of Belgium, the population of the Congo was reduced by half: as many as eight million Africans lost their lives”(1). The lasting debate is whether Conrad was a racist as were many of his time in history were or was he creating a detailed portrait of the violence and terrorism of the Congo by satirizing himself to look as a racist calling the heart of Africa a “deep, darkness of primal man”. Conrad writes, “Dark human shapes could be made out in the distance, flitting indistinctly against the gloomy border of the forest, and near the river two bronze figures leaning on tall spears stood in the sunlight under fantastic head-dresses of spotted skins, warlike and still in statuesque repose. And from right to left along the lighted shore moved a wild and gorgeous apparition of a woman” (60). He describes her further, “ She was savage and superb, wild eyed and magnificent; there was something ominous and stately in her deliberate progress” (60). Here we have a point of contact between two distinct cultures being exposed to each other in the Conrad’s novel. Conrad has Marlow see these natives as savage but in a way pure of outside enculturation. What is wrong with Marlow or Conrad’s view of this scene is that they are bringing their western perspective into the Congo with them. They perceive these natives as being totally savage without any form of social order or religion. Now let’s hear the post-colonial voice of Achebe concerning this same scene from Conrad’s novel. Achebe writes, “Reading Heart of Darkness, for instance,…I realized that I was one of those savages jumping up and down on the beach. Once that kind of enlightenment comes to you, you realize that someone has to write a different story” (17). Achebe’s goal in his novel Things Fall Apart-to indicate to his readers ‘that we in Africa did not hear of culture for the first time from the Europeans’- has changed the way African readers perceive their own cultures and their relationship to the colonial institutions (Achebe 17). Achebe is the man who invented African literature because he was able to show, in the structure and language of his first novel, that the future of African writing did not lie in simple imitation of European literary forms but in the fusion of such forms with oral traditions of his people and nation (Gikandi 5). Achebe is an example of the new voice of post-colonialism restructuring the past history and culture that was stolen from them by the colonizers of the West. Like Whitman expressed in his poem at the beginning of this essay, “The secret shall be told” of an oppressed nation fighting to change the voice of history to where their identity as a culture will shown for all the world to see.

 In conclusion, I want to present a quote from Conrad that was used by Dale Marie Taylor from the 2001 graduate post-colonial class. Conrad writes, “ The man presented himself as a voice…The point was in his being a gifted creature and that of all the gifts the one that stood out preeminently, that carried with it a sense of real presence, was his ability to talk, his words-the gift of expression, the bewildering, the illuminating, the most exalted and the most contemptible, the pulsating stream of light or the deceitful flow from the heart of an impenetrable darkness” (48). Man is gifted with the power of the use of words as a toll to either build up a peaceful world or drag that world down into chaos. The question to ask is which path will man choose for his future, a path of inclusion of all cultures on a road to peace, or the path to the heart of darkness, which contains evil, terror, and violence to all who do not obey those who put themselves in racial intolerance.