LITR / CRCL 5734: Colonial & Postcolonial Literature

Sample Student Midterm 2003

Krisann Muskievicz

Dialogue and Empire

Having recently completed a class on Human Rights and Social Justice, my mind is tuned to the rights of native cultures and the lasting ravages of colonial empires.  The class’s study of the seemingly arbitrary division of Africa among the victors of World War I revealed the lack of consideration paid to the cultures pre-existing European colonization.   However, my previous study of Africa and colonization centered on anthropologist’s journals and resource distribution graphs.  This semester, the dialogue between colonial and postcolonial literature allows me to hear the voices behind the articles and charts.   Joseph Conrad, Chinua Achebe, and Derek Walcott offer differing viewpoints on colonization and the ideas exchanged between their works offer a deep understanding of the effects of the European empire.

A recurring concept in Human Rights and Social Justice is the reconciliation between the concepts of forgiveness, revenge, boiling remembrance, and forgetfulness.  In considering conflict, human rights students discover that forgiveness is sometimes granted at the cost of willfully forgetting the wrongs.  On the other hand, many examples demonstrate a focus on remembering pain as inciting a cycle of revenge and hindering progress toward healing.  The approach of literary dialogue offers students another guide to finding the productive, but narrow, path among these hazards.  When examining an idea as large as colonization, it is useful to seek geographic breadth, historical depth, and diversity of voice.  As an addition to studying statistical analyses, the dialogue between colonial and postcolonial literature addresses this breadth, depth, and diversity while giving voice to the struggle of nations emerging from empire. 

For example, a resource inventory illuminates the physical needs of a population.  However, a comparison of written works, like Heart of Darkness and Things Fall Apart, serves to illustrate the social and emotional impact of imperialism’s conflicts, as in this example of African colonization.  The power of the literary voice is its ability to offer characters with which readers may contemplate forgiveness, revenge, remembrance, and forgetfulness.   In choosing to consider Conrad and Achebe’s works together, along with Walcott’s poems, the comparison addresses variations in geographic locations, points in history, and unique voices.  

The dialogue between colonial and postcolonial literature brings the viewpoints of the colonizers and the colonized together for consideration.  Representing the voice of European colonialism, Joseph Conrad shows us a vision of Africa as a commodity.  Chinua Achebe, in reaction, illustrates the destruction of a native culture at the hands of imperialism.   Heart of Darkness depicts the natives of the Congo as an “other,” while Things Fall Apart represents Nigeria’s Igbo culture before Europeans arrived to see them as this other.

Considering the view of Africa during Conrad’s life, his representation of Africa is not an abstraction or individual political statement. A common purpose of African colonies during imperialism is the exploitation of natural resources.  Conrad’s depiction, through the narrator and Marlow, is based on the ivory trade.  Marlow discusses his adventures as a trade agent, describing the natives as mysteriously exotic and frustratingly in the way.  The native culture is shown to be an “otherness” to be conformed, trained, and fixed.  The inhabitants are peripheral to Marlow’s purpose, serving Marlow when convenient for him.  Their only legitimacy arises from Marlow’s employment of their services.

For example, as Marlow enters the Congolese jungle, he sees the indigenous population as wild beings, not refined humans: “You could see from afar the white of their eye-balls glistening.  They shouted, sang; their bodies streamed with perspiration; they had faces like grotesque masks – these chaps; but they had bone, muscle, a wild vitality, an intense energy of movement…They wanted no excuse for being there” (16).  The natives appear animalistic to Marlow.  They are part of the terrain, they do not look like he does, and they share a wild unpredictability with other creatures of the scene.

Marlow’s interaction with the native population is limited.  The tale he chooses to tell is based on economics and adventure, and the natives serve to either bring him closer to his economic end or act as supporting players in his tale of danger.  Marlow does not experience the authentic Africa and does not know the culture of the people.  His inclination to bully through the Congo leads to an interesting admission during a moment of frustration.  As the steamer crawls toward Kurtz, Marlow states, “We could have fancied ourselves the first of men taking possession of an accursed inheritance, to be subdued at the cost of profound anguish and of excessive toil” (42).  Marlow internalizes the difficulty of the land, the people, and the task, pitying himself and his situation.  In reality, it is this Eurocentric style of thinking that indeed leads to the cursed legacy of imperialism.

In contrast, Achebe, in Things Fall Apart, validates the Igbo community as pre-existing colonial intervention.  During imperialism, it seems that the Western concept of “civilization” validates community in the eyes of the Europeans.  However, Achebe offers an example of an African community functioning in a civil and respectful tradition.  The role of the native population moves from “other” to prominence in Things Fall Apart.  As Georg M. Gugelberger states in Postcolonial Culture Studies, “In 1958, the Western narrative paradigm in which an author-anthropologist fabricates the other was seriously questioned in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, which clearly illustrates the sensationalism and inaccuracy of Western anthropology and history” (581).  Further, Achebe, in “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” directly accuses Conrad of inaccurately representing Africa as a “metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity, into which the wandering European enters his peril” (257).  Achebe asserts that Things Fall Apart describes the true Africa, not Europe’s Africa.  Nor Conrad’s.

Achebe’s novel makes the case that Europe does Africa no favors through colonization.  In fact, when the Western missionaries come to “save” Umuofia, they break down the social structure and devastate their community.  A clear example of this loss is seen in Okonkwo.  Beaten, tricked, and dismayed by the Westerners’ actions, Okonkwo’s suicide is a compelling sign of the breakdown.  Achebe writes, “Obierika, who had been gazing steadily at his friend’s body, turned suddenly to the District Commissioner as said ferociously: ‘That man was one of the greatest men in Umuofia.  You drove him to kill himself; and now he will be buried like a dog’” (191).  

Arriving with the stated goals of brotherhood and acceptance, the Europeans’ examples promote anything but.  Christian missionary work often brings along government and capitalism, leaving little room, or tolerance, for traditional practice.  Achebe shows how the Western notion of salvation for the individual leads to the demise of traditional native culture.  The traditional culture will never again be pure.  Interestingly, Achebe’s passionate protest against colonization and the Western representation of empire is written in English.

Sylvia Krzmarzick, of the 2001 class, posts an interesting reflection on
Achebe’s use of English: “By dismantling universal European values and using the English language to do so the colonized people are using the dominant culture’s words and/or values against them to not only pick apart these values, but to hold a mirror up to what has been lost by the native people of a particular land.”   Achebe is successful in posing the question of loss and domination, laying the foundation for an intertextual dialogue between his work and that of Joseph Conrad.

Though it is tempting to take sides in the dialogue between Heart of Darkness and Things Fall Apart, I remember the most common thread among the discussions in Human Rights and Social Justice to be the need for all voices to be heard.  The struggle is the attempt to represent and balance these voices, often resulting in a hybridization of ideas.  As a voice of hybridization, a useful addition to our conversation about colonial and postcolonial literature is the poetry of Derek Walcott.

Derek Walcott’s poems give words to the effort of representation and balance.  Because Walcott is a hybrid and strives to reconcile his own national identity, his poems voice the complications resulting from imperialism.  The colonized nation never regains purity, and the colonizing nation will always be guilty of spoiling that innocence.  The inhabitants are, at once, who they were and who they are to become – members of an indigenous community and citizens of an approaching nation.  An element of confusion and rejection arises out of this relationship.  Walcott reacts to the duality of a colony’s inhabitants in “Two Poems on the Passing of an Empire.”

In “Two Poems on the Passing of an Empire,” Walcott shows England to be both colonized and colonizing.  In reminding England of her history as a colony under Rome’s trampling feet, Walcott seems to implore her to be compassionate in her reign of her growing empire.  As children sing “Rule, Britannia, rule,” Walcott questions if they would believe in either a flag or a sieve, or even see the difference.  If they do not, the responsibility of the ruler to resist exploitation of the ruled is great.  Through his pointed question, Walcott calls for integrity on the part of the empire.  Possibly because of his hybridized culture, he can see this potential in the empire.  Yet, Walcott recognizes the past transgressions by the concept of imperialism.  The voice of dual representation is an interesting layer of our dialogue.

The breadth, depth and diversity addressed through the comparison of Conrad’s, Achebe’s, and Walcott’s works are influential components in the study of our evolving world.  George P. Landow, Shaw Professor of English and Digital Culture, National University of Singapore, addresses the importance of a colonial/postcolonial dialogue: “The refusal to admit any distinction between colonial and postcolonial periods often accompanies historical amnesia that remembers only colonization. One effect of such ignorance or willful forgetting of pre-colonial times takes the form of a politically ineffective idealization of the past.”  Landow alludes to the correlation between the studies of POCO literature and human rights.  The importance of productive remembrance, in opposition to willful forgetfulness, is one path toward a fair analysis of history.

Gugelberger confirms the importance of our study: “Postcolonial writing, 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” (582).  The audience for postcolonial writing consists of those willing to see the “others” as the majority and question the accepted histories as one side of the story. 

The dialogue between Heart of Darkness, Things Fall Apart, and Derek Walcott’s poetry has been a useful expansion to my study of African colonization.  The analyses of the colonialism’s maps, as well as the charts explaining the traits of the empires, are obviously important.  However, the powerful voices in the literary dialogue add humanity and personification to the ideas represented by statistics.  The willingness to question sanctioned histories opens our exploration of the past and seems fitting for the study of culture and expansion. 

Work Cited

in addition to course texts

Landow, George P.  Political Discourse – Theories of Colonialism and Postcolonialism. National University of Singapore.  Accessed 6/3/03.  <http://www.scholars.nus.edu.sg/landow/post/poldiscourse/themes/gplpoco.html>