LITR 5734: Colonial & Postcolonial Literature

Student Midterm 2008

Karen Daniel

February 24, 2008

The Purpose of Ambiguity in Literature

I came to this class, as I am sure many before me did, not quite certain how to define colonial or post-colonial literature, but feeling a reasonable assurance that if Dr. White was teaching it, it would be interesting and compelling.  I cannot tell you how dismayed I was to see Heart of Darkness on the reading list; however, I vowed to go at it with an open mind.  I had read this book 3 times before, once cold, for my daughter so I could explain it to her (yeah right), and twice for Victorian or British Literature classes.  I hated it each time, never quite certain I was grasping Conrad’s point, and thus feeling like I did not understand the novel. 

As it turns out, defining colonial and post-colonial literature was the easy part—coming to an understanding of Heart of Darkness would be harder. I came to recognize that colonial literature was based upon the events surrounding the (often involuntary) colonization of one country by another country.  Conversely, post-colonialism takes the opposite perspective and tends to address the events that occurred after colonization, predominately from the viewpoint of the native people of that same land. When read in conjunction with each other, these two perspectives tend to give us a more in-depth idea of the lives and feelings of all people involved in the colonization process.  

            When I set out to write this midterm, my first thought was to explain what I felt was my newfound understanding of Heart of Darkness in relation to reading it in conjunction with Things Fall Apart, however, upon deeper analysis, I have decided that my understanding of both novels goes well beyond the interaction between the texts themselves or the messages the writers were attempting to convey.  My mistake, I now believe, was in searching for answers—for Conrad’s (or subsequently Achebe’s) message—for their ultimate truths. 

            Certainly there are important things to be discovered through examining the intertextuality (objective 1A) of Heart of Darkness and Things Fall Apart or, more globally, through the comparison and interaction between colonial and post-colonial literature as a whole.  As Georgeann Ward stated in her 2005 midterm:

Studied together, the works of Walcott, Conrad, and Achebe provide students of Colonial and Post-Colonial Literature with an interesting introduction to the dialogue between traditional and modern culture.

Surely she is right, and without the comparison, valuable lessons and perspectives are lost.  She goes onto to assert that this comparison offers us a unique way to address the issue of racism.

If, indeed, the best tool against racism is an open line of communication through which questions are asked on both sides, then examining texts in this way allows readers the opportunity to understand the world from different perspectives and fosters a humanistic rather than nationalistic understanding of the world.  

As if enriched understanding was not enough of a reason to study colonial and post-colonial texts together, many of the midterms I read tended to support the theory that much post-colonial literature stems from colonial literature, and further that in our texts specifically, Achebe owed his success in part to Conrad’s success.  If we buy into this assertion then reading the texts in conjunction with each other becomes even more valuable, for much like studying history is valuable in attempting to understand the present, to fully understand the post-colonial writings, it would seem necessary to discover and understand the texts that helped produce them. 

            All of this combines to support my original suggestion that yes, I understand Heart of Darkness better for having read it in conjunction with Things Fall Apart, but then the question arises of just what is it that I understand to be true about the texts?  What is it that I am now enlightened about that eluded me so firmly before this class?  Since I can’t answer that fully there must be something more. 

            I begin to search for this answer by reading further the class presentations and the midterms of the previous semesters.  Overwhelmingly the consensus seems to be that Conrad was either a racist, or sought to destroy or inhibit the voice of the native Africans, and that Achebe, in bringing all of this to the foreground, wrote Things Fall Apart to dispute Conrad’s portrayal of Africans as barbarians.  Most of us (stunningly) seemed to be willing to overlook things like cannibalism and wife-beating in lieu of racism.  Surely there is more.

            If Conrad is indeed a racist, what message is he sending that I pretend to understand?  I have a difficult time accepting him as a racist, especially since his anti-imperialism is so prominent in Heart of Darkness.  So, if I don’t believe he is racist, and yet his writings elicit that assertion from a writer as prolific as Achebe, there has to be a deeper meaning to his work.  I have come to the conclusion that Conrad’s ultimate purpose is that we should NOT find answers in his writings, but instead that we should find questions.  Furthermore, if Conrad’s writings are partially responsible for Achebe’s writings, and Achebe’s writings are aimed at “disputing” Conrad’s racist message, then I would assert that he is actually responding in exactly the way Conrad intended—by questioning the racist tendencies of the time in which Heart of Darkness was set.  I believe that Achebe’s mistake is in crediting the racism to the writer rather than to the characters that are of course not real and are only designed to represent an idea of racism so prominent during this time of colonization. 

            As a teacher, I have spent countless valuable minutes of class time reiterating to my students that “the author” does not mean “the narrator,” that the author is not the character, and that characters and narrators are usually not real people and are nothing more than constructs that authors use for particular purposes, and in times and places that are also not real. These things may be based upon real people or real places, but this does make them real themselves.  As literature students we all know this so why do we burden Conrad with the traits of his characters?  His characters and situations beg questions of us that have much more complex answers than the proposed racist beliefs of the author. 

            In her 2005 essay, Pauline Chapman discussed the function of the character of Kurtz.

The character of Kurtz is often made into a universal symbol, but for this discussion he is looked at for what the author intended within the colonial context.  The example of Kurtz could be a warning to any Europeans who had grand ideas about what could be accomplished with Africa. 

Pauline’s argument that Kurtz is a warning is a compelling one, and I would extend that to the idea that Conrad wanted all Europeans, and by extension, all Imperialists, to question their beliefs about colonization. Whether Kurtz was a racist, ignorant, or simply corrupted by the power he so easily fell into, the question is the same.  Regardless of what the reader thinks of Kurtz, he causes us to question the very foundations of power and Imperialism, both then in Africa, and today in our society. 

            Where I part with Pauline’s ideas, is in her later statement about Conrad’s racism:

There was reluctance in our class to label Conrad a racist, but Conrad was a product of his society and times.  That doesn’t make him right, but it makes him less culpable in 1900 than he would be in 2000.  

I don’t believe that Conrad was “culpable” at all, rather that he created intricate characters that portrayed racist and imperialistic tendencies—characters that caused both us and Achebe to ask questions and to draw conclusions about the atrocities of the colonization of Africa.  Why is it that we don’t assign the same culpability to Achebe for being “supportive” of wife beating?  What is it about Conrad’s message that elicits such emotion from us that we assign the traits of his characters to him, and subsequently burden him with the messages and the culpability?  In my opinion it is his very genius as a writer that causes us to become so emotional about this book.

            In his critical analysis of Heart of Darkness, Chinua Achebe tells readers that he finds it strange that Conrad was not aware of racism (262).   On the contrary, I believe that Conrad was extremely aware of the racism entrenched in Africa’s colonization, and that one of his purposes in writing this novel was to bring this to the forefront of discussions of Imperialism.  Once again, I think Achebe misses the mark in his critique of Conrad as unaware.  Certainly Conrad would have been help less culpable if he had come right out and stated that Kurtz and others like him were racist, but he demanded more of his readers by asking them to come up with this conclusion on their own.  Furthermore, Achebe accuses Conrad of robbing the natives of their voices; conversely, I would tend to believe that Conrad uses the lack of voice as yet another construct designed to ask the reader to question the right of Imperialists to go into another country and “speak” for the natives, all hidden behind a veil of civilizing them for their own good. 

            Interestingly, Achebe’s commissioner is as big a racist as any of Conrad’s characters, yet we don’t assign his qualities to Achebe for a multitude of reasons, not the least of which is that fact that Achebe leaves little room for doubt about the evilness of this character.  The biggest difference between this and Conrad’s approach is that we don’t have to work as hard to figure out Achebe’s intent or his message.  I don’t think this changes the ultimate message, just the vessel of delivery, and perhaps the strength of the message as it doesn’t have the same impact after having come to us so painlessly. 

            Perhaps the most complex message of all comes to us from Derek Walcott in his poem A Far Cry from Africa.  Rather than just show us one side as Conrad and Achebe did in their novels, Walcott shares the more complex issues of a colonized people torn between loyalties to their original culture and the new culture with which they have become enmeshed and comfortable. It is through Walcott’s poetry that we as readers are better able to bring the messages of Achebe and Conrad together into a more modern perspective.  Conrad shows us the view of the colonizers, Achebe shows us the view of the natives, and Walcott shows us the ambivalence with which the natives later view the entire colonization process.  By referring to the respective cultures as British worms or flies, Walcott expresses his dissatisfaction with both cultures, and only through the unity of black and white is the more beautiful Ibis depicted.  

            Like my fellow students, I tend to support the theory that all of these texts are richer and more valuable when read together and studied in terms of their intertextuality.  It is easy to see how Achebe, while disliking Conrad’s message, still owes his success in part to him, and furthermore, that Walcott’s message would not be nearly as poignant if read in isolation of the two novels.  To me, a large part of the value of Conrad’s work is its tendency to elicit questions and responses such as Achebe’s criticism and novel.  Certainly, reading these books and others from an intertextual perspective allows readers to gain a much broader understanding of the novels and the civilization upon which they are based, especially when they garner the type of emotional response and involvement that Conrad’s Heart of Darkness does—response that leads to works like Achebe’s.