"Koenig of the River"

In Derek Walcott, Collected Poems 1948-1984, pp. 379-82

 Reader ~ Ashley Salter

Respondent ~ Dendy Farrar

Recorder ~ Charley Bevill

Presentation

The poem opens with a man named Koenig on a little sailboat entering the mouth of the river.  He uses a pole to push the boat through the water.  As he travels along the river, the poem relates what he’s seeing and intersperses things he’s remembering.  We learn that he’s a missionary and that everyone else he was traveling with has drowned.  We also discover that he’s not always rational or lucid.

One of the themes running through the poem is the clash of nature and industry, or the natural and the mechanical as the previous class phrased it.  Images from the first stanza – the broken factory wheel, the unharnessed mule, and bananas like unmilked cows – see to offer the perspective of the colonizer.  All of these are resources that could be put to use, things that could be exploited. 

Walcott tells us of Koenig’s sanity: “He felt his reason curling back like parchment in this fierce torpor.”  Koenig has also lost sight of his purpose.  He can’t remember what his Bible-based mission is supposed to be.  Koenig’s confusion leads to some of the best figurative language in the poem.  For example, “If I’m a character called Koenig, then I shall dominate my future like a fiction.”  The poem also alternates between third and first person perspective, a technique which emphasizes Koenig’s state of mind.

A final theme, found particularly on the last page, is the idea of crumbling empires, of things falling apart.  Koenig says, “There was a time when we ruled everything . . . we ruled rivers as huge as the Nile, the Ganges, and the Congo, we tamed, we ruled you when our empires reached their blazing peak.”  In spite of the apparent decline of the empires, Koenig clutches his barge pole as if it’s a scepter, perhaps determined still to rule. 

A few useful definitions:

Shallop – (historical) a light sailboat mainly used for coastal fishing

Howdah – in the Indian subcontinent, a seat for riding on the back of an elephant or camel, typically with a canopy and accommodating two or more people

Covert – a shelter or hiding place, a thicket in which game can hide

Discussion Question

 We see this man Koenig, alone and with slipping sanity, heading down the river.  Is Koenig meant to be sympathetic?  Is he meant to be a caricature of the colonizing white man?  A mixture of these? Neither?

Discussion

Dr. White: …It’s like a story that’s been written that he’s trying to live out. The Bible has this thing about what he’s supposed to be doing and he’s trying to do it, but he can’t remember what the Bible says exactly so he’s sort of shifting back and forth between the way things are supposed to be and the way they are.

Rosalyn: …He’s a missionary. He comes to civilize the natives…uses the Bible as a tool…He’s under dire stress…to fall back on…comfort…

Kim: …He uses it like… “He knew it was noble, /based on some phrase, forgotten, from the Bible, /but he felt bodiless, like a man stumbling from/the pages of a novel, not a forest/written a hundred years ago.” He started off like the saying goes, very noble but now it’s like, is it noble because he’s the only man on the river… until he sees that other guy…

Rosalyn:… he’s sick, he’s dying, he refuses to set foot on land… it reminds me of the Greek …[Charon] pulls the dead across the River Styx… all his friends have …but he wont get off. It makes him less sympathetic because he won’t go on land.

Natalie: It reminds me of a lot of things because in the beginning it sounds like because man can’t function in chaos, we’re always trying to tame wild things, always trying to make something that we can understand: the jungle, the savages, the natives. We can’t so we try to…them and when we can’t then it becomes a conflict or the trying becomes conflict. We see that in this [poem], in Heart of Darkness, and in Things Fall Apart. Man can’t live in chaos, can’t function without reason so that’s our justification for just about everything…whatever word you want to use that’s what we try to do because we wouldn’t know how to function.

Rosalyn: …culture that we don’t understand there is chaos. I think that’s the predominant theme in Things Fall Apart. They clearly have everything functioning and it works for them. Another culture comes in and oh my God, this is not working.

Rosalyn: …Europeans come in and say this can’t possibly be civilization. You’re not wearing pants… chaos is when you don’t understand it instead of chaos meaning things are actually falling apart around you…

Emily: …He talks about the journey before the British…as his birthright. He should be able to… The church should be able to…

April: …can’t accept the fact…reverts back to the primal…

Kristy: …We try to understand the culture but we have to try to understand the Christian missionary. One of the biggest doctrines of the Bible is baptism. So he is fulfilling a major part of what he feels are the rules of his sacred text. What works sometimes is separate cultures …chose what they would of your knowledge with no strings…

Rosalyn: But that’s the catch. We may go in and say here we have medicines, etc. but we don’t like the way you treat your people and that has to stop. As a European based society, we have strings attached. Our Christian theory says we should give those things but our business mind says we should make profit off of it… quid pro quo…What are we getting for saving lives.

Kristy: …treat them as an equal…

Dr. White: …One magic word that Kristy introduced is culture. We talk about civilization and chaos…culture not quite same word as civilization in terms of the stature. Culture gives you more leeway which leads to exchange.

Kayla: …In Things Fall Apart… in the two men … in the first one they say he compromises and the second one sees things only as black and white and white is good which means black is bad. That’s were I was going with that in Things Fall Apart. Achebe makes a distinction in the way the white missionaries interact with the culture that’s already established.

Rosalyn: … I thought it was interesting that when you see the native that it’s a top-hatted native reading an inverted newspaper. If he was paying any kind of attention he would realize that’s not a good image. You have to ask yourself where he got the top hat…

Ashley: …maybe it’s not even real…

Rosalyn: If it is, where did he get the top hat…and then he’s reading the inverted newspaper. If he could read he has the newspaper upside down and yet Koenig is asking his this question…

April: I thought it was part of his hallucination.

Rosalyn: If that makes a statement about the native, about the culture, the colonizing country coming in is that even if they…the natives had their won way of doing things. They don’t care about the Kaiser…

Dr. White: While the native is reading the paper upside down Koenig is talking to him in German. The transmission doesn’t work either way.

April: …nothing is as it seems…

Dr. White: The hundred year old novel that he keeps referring to maybe is Heart of Darkness. There are a lot of parallels between Koenig and Kurtz and the river journey. When we were talking about the river it sounded like we were talking about Kurtz and Marlow.

Kayla: When Marlow gets to the first station…he sees all this trash, scrap metal this rusted out stuff that’s not being used. The ruined factory the vines growing through the spokes of the wheel. It’s progress that has been started and wasted…the futility of it…

 Alternate Discussion Question

(We didn’t get to this one but it might have made good discussion) Much of this poem could easily be retyped to look like/become prose.  The novel, a prose form, is the dominant mode of modern literary expression.  This poem contains both narrative and dialogue, the staples of novels.  So, what does Koenig’s story gain or lose by being written as poetry?