LITR / CRCL 5734: Colonial & Postcolonial Literature

Sample Student Midterm 2003

Emily Masterson
Dr. Craig White
LITR 5734
Midterm Essay 

Literature 5734:  Initial Impressions and a Brief Survey of Human Identity Themes in Assigned Texts

            In order to describe my initial reaction to the materials presented in this class, it might be useful to first detail my response to the course title.  Unenlightened about this topic, I weighed my summer course options carefully because “Colonial and Postcolonial Literature” seemed like the kind of typically obscure topic often offered for graduate students in the course catalog.  Since I had never heard of colonial literature, and could only wonder which country was postcolonial, I found and questioned experienced fellow students who had already completed the class.  I cringed when Heart of Darkness was mentioned, mostly because of a traumatic experience in junior high with author Joseph Conrad (I remembered the book as complicated and excruciatingly boring).  However, I signed up for the course with a friend’s syllabus in hand, wondering how Heart of Darkness could possibly relate to the kinds of global books we would also be assigned to read. 

This uninformed judgment was soon to change after the first day of class, when I realized, much to my delight, that we would be using literature as a kind of cultural barometer, gauging period-wide prejudices of colonizing countries and gaining feedback from those colonized.  Thinking of myself as fairly open-minded, I was horrified to realize how little I really know about non-European countries and their cultures—that I need to deconstruct my American-centric world view by becoming acquainted with real faces and real names of those “savages” I had assumed England had conquered as a natural course of events.  After all, through history, hasn’t every mighty empire reached across the globe in the spirit of domination?  My initial, and admittedly rather ignorant views of British imperialism have matured in a matter of a few classroom readings and heated discussions. 

            Literature 5734 is a unique course because it gives voice to the proverbial “other side,” allowing the colonized to respond to imperialistic actions and methods.  I would venture that few Americans are familiar with the frustrations and cultural consequences that arise when one land is colonized by another country.  Too often, images of faceless people groups situated thousands of miles across the globe fail to cause us to question our cultural ideologies.  We might simply assume that the Europeans are justified, unconsciously siding with western counterparts overseas, giving little thought to suffering of “uncivilized” people groups.  By reading books like Chinua Achebe’s novel, Things Fall Apart, an entire page of National Geographic springs to life.

But rather than blame all white Europeans for the act of imperial-driven domination (though many class members are tempted to do so), this course attempts to reconcile uninformed, hasty classifications of an evil England or a blameless Africa.  This may be the most admirable feature of a course that seeks not to preach a message against imperialism or to impose a racially divided guilt-complex, but to honestly expose social injustices within the borders of all countries discussed.

            Another benefit of taking this course is becoming involved in a rather heated academic discussion, a kind of specific discourse community involved in thinking and rationalizing an often troublesome past.  Because the classroom is one of student-centered dialogue, everyone benefits from the myriad of opinions expressed, some unclear and some extreme, but all eager voices struggling to grapple with a monumental topic, which includes varying questions from cultural ethics, definitions of nationhood and imperial values of race and gender. 

Personally, I found the discussion in class repeatedly stirring strong emotions as discussions touched on concepts that prick my core belief system.  Though the old adage warns to avoid topics such as religion and politics in polite conversation, this course would be impossible to conduct because both religion and politics are so influential in both sides of the colonization spectrum.  In this classroom, imperialism and colonization are irrevocably attached to students’ personal ideologies—their personal world view that they see through the lenses of their religion and political affiliation.  Because of this, dialogue-centered class time is always intriguing.      

            The view of literature within the boundaries of colonial and postcolonial study is different than you might find in a typical literature course.  According to the Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory, “the emphasis, therefore, is bound to be on the political and ideological rather than the aesthetic.  By no means, however, does this exclude the aesthetic, but it links definitions of aesthetics with the ideology of the aesthetic […] (Makaryk 582).  Literature in this context serves as a springboard for academic discussion, for example, the dilemma of human identity issues, a common theme easily recognized in Heart of Darkness, Things Fall Apart, and the poetry of Derek Walcott.     

            Countless themes might be discussed that are found in every colonial/postcolonial text we have been assigned up to this point.  One popular theme is the issue of human identity.  Specifically, in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, we repeatedly find images of the dehumanization of Africa’s people groups.  At one point in the novel, the character Marlow articulates his apprehension concerning the inhabitants of the newest addition to England’s empire:

No they were not inhuman.  Well, you know that was the worst of it—this suspicion of their not being inhuman. […] 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.  (Conrad 38) 

Conrad’s narrating character is reluctant to view the natives as fellow humans in the same sense that he recognizes humanity in other Englishmen.  Because the Africans are not “civilized” in the same way that Marlow is acquainted with European notions of civility, the wildness of the Africans poses an insurmountable barrier in Marlow’s view of them as intellectual and emotional equals.  In Chinua Achebe’s critical article, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” Achebe describes the aforementioned passage as a telling indication of Conrad’s unredeemable racial prejudice.  Achebe portrays Conrad as a man who “wants everything in its place,” (An Image 254) a reference to Marlow’s reaction to an African firefighter, saying, “to look at him was as edifying as seeing a dog in a parody of breeches and a feather hat walking on his hind legs” (Conrad 39).  Achebe stresses that though Conrad might not specifically deny humanity to the Africans, he dehumanizes them by denying them brotherhood, or true human equality: “He would not use the word brother however qualified; the farthest he would go was kinship” (An Image 257).   

            There are other examples of Conrad withholding human identity from the natives.  He refers to them in dark spatial images, as “a black figure” (Conrad 64), “that shadow” (65), “dark human shapes” (60), “quivering bronze bodies” (66) and “shapes of intense blackness” (63).  Conrad’s descriptions most closely resemble spiritual beings rather than fleshly ones, and readers may feel that the natives are darkly inhabited or unearthly in nature.  Conrad’s Africans are sensory compositions, made up of mystical sketches.  They are missing components of human reason or human suffering, albeit Marlow admits he is surprised when the cannibals on his boat show restraint despite their hunger (43).  Marlow wonders aloud at this impossibility:

Restraint!  What possible restraint!  Was it superstition, disgust, patience, fear—or some kind of primitive honour?  […] Restraint!  I would just as soon have expected there was the fact facing me—the fact, dazzling, to be seen, like the foam on the depths of the sea […]. (60)     

Conrad seems to recognize signs of humanity and seems aware of the standards of inequality, but at the end of his novel, fails to make a substantial contribution to debunking severe racial inequalities.  Perhaps this is understandable for a European male, immersed in a nineteenth-century social structure where today’s standards of inequality were non-existant. 

            Themes of dehumanization are prevalent within Heart of Darkness, but do not always shed light on racial issues alone.  Through the descending character of Kurtz, Conrad artfully demonstrates how a man, morally bankrupt and driven mad by greed, power and hatred, can become unalterably savage-like, as base and depraved as Kurtz imagines the Africans.  Kurtz seems to have begun his career full of western ferver.  When Marlow defends Kurtz as “a remarkable man,” he is soundly rebuked by the station manager, who corrects Marlow by stating, “he was” (61).  Kurtz seems, at first, to be a man who has achieved all the worldly success that can be obtained.  He is a symbol of someone who has reached the apex of military grandeaur, admired and respected by peers.  But, the antithesis of his success is soon illustrated as Conrad depicts an unstable, god-like Kurtz, his descent into the depths of depravity slowly revealed toward the ending pages of the work.  When Marlow finally meets Kurtz, his mixed admiration is palpable:

And, don’t you see, the terror of the position was not in being knocked on the head—though I had a very lively sense of that danger too—but in this, that I had to deal with a being to whom I could not appeal in the name of anything high or low. […] There was nothing either above or below him—and I knew it.  He had kicked himself loose of the earth. (65)

Marlow’s “terror of the position” is in his fear that Kurtz has rejected the God of Europeans, stripping Kurtz of a sacred deity and moral concience.  Marlow describes Kurtz as possessing a sane intelligence, but that his “soul was mad.”  Perhaps by this description of madness, Conrad intended to convey insanity beyond the cognitive.  Rather, he pens a depravity of the human spirit, an inability to find or give compassion, a soul that survived as a wild beast, keen of mind but devoid of a moral or social conscience which makes all of us so undeniably human.  Kurtz morphs into the very essence of all that is hated by the English: lawlessness, brutality, godlessness, incivility and a governless existence ruled only by the brutishness of the human senses.  Conrad’s image of Kurtz is a portrait of unraveling humanity as it spirals into a man who rivals his dehumanized territory.  Kurtz is no longer fully human, but a maddened hybrid of civilized human and primitive impulse.

            In Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, other human identity issues are addressed in the manner that Achebe gives life to the African tribe of Umuofia in an attempt to rehumanize a section of the world whose culture is largely overlooked by “civilized” cultures.  Specifically, Achebe focuses on the tribe’s reaction to European colonization.  Achebe’s simplistic sentences and attention to character create a sympathetic backdrop for the tragic figure of Okonkwo, an unbending man of position within his tribe.  Since Achebe is writing to make this specific tribe memorably human to a vast western audience, it becomes important for him to give Africans a strong, complex identity. 

One way Achebe sucessfully sculpts this identity is by the length of time he spends writing about the day to day life of the village of Umuofia.  Out of 209 pages, the first emergence of European people begins on page 138, allowing time for the reader to become emotionally enmeshed in the lives of the Africans.  Achebe needs this vehicle to further his cause of telling the African’s side of the colonizing story.  Many westerners have a stagnant idea of what African culture consists of, derived primarily from western television programs and western magazine articles.  But Achebe wants more than a simple documentary—he writes so we will feel, not just the natives’ basic humanity, but for their loss—their plight.  In this way, the Africans are rehumanized for an audience who may have never heard these voices.   

            Possibly the most poignant paragraph in Achebe’s novel is found near then end of the book, when Okonkwo realizes the clan will never return to its previously untouched state: “Okonkwo was deeply grieved.  And it was not just a personal grief.  He mourned for the clan, which he saw breaking up and falling apart, and he mourned for the warlike men of Umuofia, who had so unaccountably become soft like women” (Things Fall 183).  Like an ancient Greek tragedy, Achebe’s creation of African identity for readers is what makes Things Fall Apart unforgettable—characters arise that the reader will see again and again while watching the nightly news.    

            Similarly, the poetry selections by Derek Walcott demonstrate passionate angst at the dehumanization of his land, notably, in “A Far Cry From Africa.”  According to a 2001 Student Poetry Presentation by Brady Hutchinson, Hutchinson points out that class discussion on “A Far Cry From Africa” primarily “focused on the process of assimilation and the creation of hybrids” (Hutchinson 1).  Clearly, Walcott is a man searching for an identity.  Walcott writes in the third paragraph, “I who am poisoned with the blood of both,/ Where shall I turn, divided to the vein” (Walcott 18)?  Walcott’s sense of division is mixed, because of his love for both Africa and parts of English culture: “The drunken officer of British rule, how choose/Between this Africa and the English tongue I love” (18)?

            Walcott’s conflict is not merely a surface division of longing for cultural roots, but one of a search for being through his emotional turmoil:

A wind is ruffling the tawny pelt/

Of Africa.  Kikuyu, quick as flies,/

Batten upon the bloodstreams of the veldt./

Corpses are scattered through a paradise (17). 

Walcott’s fierce images move seamlessly from lovely and nostalgic to horrendous depictions of a battered Africa.  In this same sense, Walcott seems torn himself, torn between two kinds of separate, desperate identities, a poet without a country.  Readers are shown the human side of colonization through Walcott’s gripping words and obvious inner anguish, a wrenching voice brought to the forefront through the vehicle of literature.   

Through all the books read so far in this course, we are learning about our humanity, ours and those of people we have never met.  We are learning that modernized cultures are really not so very far away from traditional cultures, and when the two collide, whole groups of people are fiercely impacted.  We are becoming reacquainted with countries we formally only knew through crude maps in our history textbooks; we struggle with weighty issues of western colonization and nervously meet entire groups of people who are split by one nation’s “progress.”  It is this theme of human identity, both of dehumanization and the rebirth of rehumanization in this course that causes me to give pause as I read the required texts, thoughtful, regretful, but hopeful that with knowledge, we might learn from the mistakes of the past.