LITR / CRCL 5734: Colonial & Postcolonial Literature

Sample Student Midterm 2003

Kim Herrera
Literature 5734
June 9, 2003
Dr. Craig White

Assimilation of an Empire

            When I looked through the class schedule for the summer of 2003, I quickly passed the course Colonial & Post-colonial Literature.  My focus is on British not American literature.  After thumbing the university catalog, I saw examples of text and the course was not what I initially thought.  After one week of discussions and reading of various texts, I question the effects of an empire.  The acquisition and colonization of a foreign country creates disturbing thoughts.  I can now begin to see the different perspectives colonization has created through the works of Conrad, Achebe, and Walcott.  Within these colonial and post-colonial works, the authors show the quest for expansion, the rejection of the colonizing culture, and the assimilation of both cultures – hybridization.  Joseph Conrad’s work shows the initial exploitation of Africa by Europeans, Chinua Achebe’s shows pre-colonization but mainly the effects of post-colonization, and Walcott’s poetry contemplates the conflict of cultural identity.  These different stages of colonization can be seen through the protagonists’ and speaker’s attempt to understand one’s ancestral roots. 

            Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness deals with imperialism during England’s rule.  England imposed its exploration into the heart of Africa in search of goods for trade, but its people were told that it was to spread the “good word”, that is, Christian beliefs.  When one looks at history and its great explorers, missionaries came after the initial worldly explorers reported back to their country of the resources they found.  Columbus, Cortez, Lewis and Clark were all great explorers who mapped the world into real places of wealth, which were once probably mapped out in color-coded areas such as Marlowe’s first description of seeing a map of Africa as unknown territory, a place to explore.  In his cozy aunt’s house while having tea, Marlowe’s aunt echoes the belief that Europeans should go to Africa, the unknown, to “civilize” the savages.  Her ethnocentric beliefs are her reasons for recommending her nephew to become a sea captain.  It is his aunt’s quest, but Marlowe, like any explorer, sees this adventure as a job, a quest to line the pockets of those in power and most probably, to line his own pockets with wealth, prestige, and power.  Marlowe is aware of the hidden agenda, yet when he encounters Africa and sees the exploitation, he continues to believe his ethnocentric ideas.  Yet, I also see Marlowe questioning this quest.  Conrad has Marlowe speaking in long complex sentences with numerous commas, dashes, and pauses as though he is contemplating his reasons for being in this heart of darkness, the dark side of his moral beliefs and conduct.  It is as if Marlowe is questioning the whole White Man’s Burden, the belief that white Europeans have an obligation as a civilized society to assist all others to escape their “primitiveness”.  

The title of Conrad’s novel and the repetition of the phrase, heart of darkness, suggest the protagonist’s struggle to understand his own morals and beliefs.  In his journey into the Congo and back, Marlowe’s heart, the emotional side of man, shows his dark side, the journey into the dark unknown territory.  The fear of exploring a place from which one may never return frightens Marlowe.  It is his heart of darkness as well as Kurtz’s.  Marlowe is in search of Kurtz, who ventures into the heart of darkness, the Congo, in search of white ivory.  He, Kurtz, at any cost, acquires this commodity because that is what he has been sent to do.  He murders, tortures, and steals by force – a sort of rape and pillage – to extract the fossilized ivory from its African earth.  And when Marlowe enters the heart of darkness to rescue the dying Kurtz, Kurtz believes that upon his return to England, he will be praised for doing the job he was sent to do.  Marlowe, as well as the others in the company, knows that Kurtz has gone beyond what they can control so therefore he is expendable.  It is Kurtz’s last speech, “The horror! The horror!” that suggests he knew what he had done, but it is not until he is on the boat with another white man, Marlowe, that Kurtz verbally acknowledges his wrongdoing.  Kurtz’s dark side, his savagery, reveals itself in the dark jungles of Africa.  So is Conrad saying that man has a tendency to lose (loosen) his moral values if the culture he encounters does not follow the same exact beliefs as his?  Or is Conrad saying that because Marlowe has stayed in this foreign “heathen” country so long that he has assimilated into their culture, an unchristian culture, a country full of distrustful savages, a step backwards from their own “civilized” world?  Marlowe’s statement on Africa examines his fears.

The earth seemed unearthly.  We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there – there you could look at a thing monstrous and free.  It was unearthly, and the men were ---- No, they were not inhuman.  Well, you know, that was the worst of it – this suspicion of their not being inhuman.  It would come slowly to one.  They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity – like yours --- the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar.  Ugly.  Yes, it was ugly enough (105).

Africa is not a reality to Marlowe because it does not represent his own European life as he knows it.  The unknown is a nightmare, which needs to be shackled.  Fear is Marlowe’s reaction to the unknown, and therefore, that fear must be conquered; it must be put in chains for its own good and the good of “civilized” Europe.  Throughout the text, Marlowe seems to be contemplating the kinship between the civilized and the uncivilized, and in this contemplation, he questions his own culture and its ability to commit savage horrors.  The thought of his connection or kinship with the savages thrill and disgust Marlowe at the same time for he acknowledges that if his suspicion of kinship is correct, then his wild and passionate ancestors were ugly – yes ugly.  The hint of his own cultural history (the Jutes, Anglos, Saxons, and Celtics tribes) is one of savagery, at least the Romans thought so.  As Achebe states in his essay “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness”, 

It is not the differentness [of the Thames and the Congo River] that worries Conrad but the lurking hint of kinship, of common ancestry … [b]ut if it were to visit its primordial relative, the Congo, it would run the terrible risk of hearing grotesque echoes of its own forgotten darkness, and falling victim to an avenging recrudescence of the mindless frenzy of the first beginnings. (252)

Acknowledging that his own world is somehow connected to savagery (history and Kurtz) reveals Marlowe’s rejection of England’s primitive past and present.  The idea of his Europe having any characteristics of savagery disgusts him, but the thought of kinship and Kurtz’s behavior reopen that “forgotten darkness”, the forgotten past.

It is so unlike Achebe, who looks upon his ancestry as nostalgic but with the reality that things fall apart and change and that is part of life.  He does not look back and present his origins as one of ugliness.  He looks back with a fondness but with a reality that culture by choice or force changes.  In his novel, Things Fall Apart, Achebe uses his protagonist, Okonkwo, to represent the traditional way of life.  Okonkwo is a rags to riches story.  His father, Unoka, is considered a failure by Ibo standards.  He does not have barnfuls of yams nor can he support numerous wives and children.  Okonkwo, like Kurtz, expects his life to be remembered as glorious - a man of wealth, prestige, and power, and yet like Marlowe, Okonkwo, has deep fears.  Okonkwo’s

whole life was dominated by fear, the fear of failure and of weakness.  It was deeper and more intimate than the fear of evil and capricious gods and of magic, the fear of the forest, and the forces of nature, malevolent, red in tooth and claw.  Okonkwo’s fear was greater than these.  It was not external but lay deep within himself.  (17)

His father, Unoka, is considered a failure in Ibo society, and Okonkwo, ashamed of his father, vows not to be like him.  It is as though Unoka and Okonkwo represent two extremes of Ibo society.  One is the calm peaceful native who enjoys the pleasantries of his tradition, while Okonkwo shows the (masculine) violent side of his traditional culture.  He, Okonkwo the fierce warrior, drinks palm wine from his enemy’s head; he is a great wrestler known throughout the nine villages and is a man who holds distinguished titles within his realm.  Okonkwo’s fear of losing great respect within his society juxtaposes him in Marlowe’s and Kurtz’s heart of darkness.  Yet Achebe is able to paint Okonkwo’s life with some compassion toward others: his concern for his child Ezinma, the despair he has after the sacrificing of Ikemefuna, and the refusal to accept the change in Ibo’s traditional values when the white men come with their religious and judicial systems.  Achebe’s Okonkwo is not a mere stereotype the way Conrad paints the “savage natives”, but Achebe’s main character is round.  We are able to visualize him within various situations and his reactions to those situations.  We do not see Okonkwo constantly carrying a spear, leaping, making horrid faces, or howling out incomprehensible phrases on the banks of a river and his compound is definitely not surrounded by miniature heads on spears like Kurtz’s outpost, but we see Okonkwo doing official business: representing his village in disputes over war, helping his neighbors with deciding bride prices, helping the upcoming tribal members with yam seeds to start their productive life in Umuofia.  In this post-colonial work, we see a civilized culture complete with family, religion, judicial and legislative institutions, which Heart of Darkness was unable to recognize.  Achebe gives Conrad’s “savages” a voice; we hear the other side of the story.

The effects of colonialism present another situation altogether.  It is the assimilation of dual cultures that begin to collide, and authors like Walcott begin to unfold the stories and points of view of those who share those dual identities.  Walcott’s poems suggest this emergence.  Two of Walcott’s poems, “Jean Rhys” and “Koenig of the River”, end with these lines:  “the pages goes white” (382) and the “foreseeing that her own white wedding dress / will be white paper” (429).  The reference to white is obvious, the colonizers, but the marriage of the two is what changes, and the blank paper, the white paper, is now the story that will be told from a different perspective, the ones colonized and their future children.  As the speaker in Walcott’s poem, “A Far Cry from Africa”, states in the last lines,

I who am poisoned with the blood of both, /Where shall I turn, divided to the vein? / I who have cursed / The drunken officer of British rule, how choose / Between this Africa and the English tongue I love? / Betray them both, or give back what they give? / How can I face such slaughter and be cool? / How can I turn from Africa and live? (18)

The result of imperialism leaves a culture with an identity crisis.  On one hand, the speaker is being told to choose a culture by British officials who obviously have no understanding of other cultures besides their own ethnocentric one, and on the other, how can the speaker dismiss his ancestral roots, his past, and live as if though it never existed?  The speaker loves the language of both, but the blood, the hybridization, is poisoned.  Walcott’s poetry presents this inner struggle and fits the definition of postmodernism.  The Literary Theory handout lists certain common denominators that define this term. 

The radically disparate interpretations and evaluations of postmodernism are in part the result of its particular politics and the curious ‘middle grounds’ (Wilde, Middle) it occupies, inscribing yet also subverting various aspects of a dominant culture: however critical the subversion, there is still a complicity that cannot be denied.  This strategic doubleness or political ambidextrousness is the common denominator of many postmodern discourses, and to see only one side – either the complicity or the critique- is to deny the complexity of the enterprise. (612)

Walcott’s poems suggest that the white pages are the stories or points of view of the oppressed culture, the one that is supposed to be destroyed and replaced by the empire.  The new emerging dual culture does not totally overthrow the existing dominant culture for Walcott makes such comments as “Africa and the English tongue I love.”  The voice of the future is blank and needs to be written.