LITR 5734: Colonial & Postcolonial Literature

Student Midterm 2008

corey porter!

2.24.08

Colonial Words Sounded in Post-Colonial Throats:

Things Fall Apart Tells Heart of Darkness What It Isn’t

            Coming into this course, I had a very concrete and concise understanding of colonial and post-colonial texts: imperial cultures subjugate their technologically-inferior counterparts in a quest for power and self-definition. Kim Pritchard, in her essay, “Language, Voice, and Layers of Colonialism: A Dialogue Between Joseph Conrad and Chinua Achebe” defines colonial and post-colonial literature better than I could ever hope to:

“Colonial literature focuses on traditional values and norms that view Third-World cultures as alien or “other.”  As a result, colonial writers viewed the inhabitants of these foreign lands as uneducated, uninspired, and most of all, unenlightened.  However, with the progression toward post-colonial thought, readers find refreshing elements of change, resolve, and newfound identity that transcend traditional thought and values. Moreover, post-colonial ideas provide a new direction for writers and readers to formulate and communicate their newly-formed identity and awareness.”

This course has introduced to me the idea of intertextuality: When drastically different cultures meet in these circumstances, a Venn-like area of mutual interaction exists between them. In literature, this overlapping area is mapped by the colonizer, who brings with him his preconceived understanding of the world and an unyielding will that his is the only truth. Over time, however, the colonized takes refuge in this space, and uses the language of the colonizer to tell the story of the colonized. I’ve since felt that this is a catch-22; in order to be understood, the colonized must adopt the language of his colonizer, trading his own voice for the tongue of another. As a means of better understating this shared space and what it represents to both the colonized and colonizer, I hope to examine the relationships between their respective texts; intertextuality is the way colonial and post-colonial works speak to each other.

“The inner truth is hidden—luckily, luckily (30).” Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness explores the ‘dark continent’ and its inhabitants by following Marlow, an ivory collector, on his errand to recover the unsound Mr. Kurtz, a fellow ivory collector who ‘goes native,’ and recedes into the African jungle. Conrad’s central conflict is the interjection of European culture into Africa. The only shared space the two inhabit, Conrad presents as dismal and uncultured. When Marlow first arrives at his station, he describes it as a “scene of inhabited devastation (12).” In his first encounters with the natives, he recalls, “Black shapes crouched, lay, sat between the trees leaning against the trunks, clinging to the earth, half coming out, half effaced within the dim light, in all the attitudes of pain, abandonment, and despair (14).” The inhabitants are never presented as human, much less individuals. They aren’t given names or identities, save for the generalized inferiority the colonizing Europeans see in them. In fact, the people are equated with the land: Marlow fails to see a difference between the two; they are merely the backdrop against which the Europeans operate. Moreover, the story revolves around the ivory trade; it’s a simple metaphor for Europe’s charging into Africa, subjugating its peoples, and removing only what it deems valuable.

            It’s not surprising, then, that Chinua Achebe takes exception to Conrad’s Victorian portrayal of an entire continent. Nearly eighty years after its initial publication, Achebe attacks Heart of Darkness in his essay “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” He considers “the desire—one might indeed say the need—in Western psychology to set Africa up as a foil to Europe (337).” The two examples Achebe provides of this “desire” or “need” in psychology, the older college student and the younger high school student, both suggest that African culture must be taught, must be searched for to verify its existence. In both cases, the students are unaware of their own culture, their own customs. Achebe believes this is an inherent fear, expressed by Conrad in his novella: “If [one] were to visit [his] primordial relative, [he] would run the terrible risk of hearing grotesque echoes of [his] own forgotten darkness, and [fall] victim to an avenging recrudescence of the mindless frenzy of the first beginnings (338).”

Achebe asserts that the text speaks to its readers with a fear of reverting back to some devolved state. As a consequence, Africa is presented as a primordial threat which must be tamed, lest it engulf all civilization. Kurtz is the shining example of such thought: presented with a primitive alternative to his modernly Victorian lifestyle, he abandons the latter in favor of the former, along the way abandoning all that makes him “civilized.” The reason behind this psychology, this panting of Africa as a “metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity (343-44),” Achebe asserts, is to project unto Africa the “physical and moral deformities” of Europe, so that it may “go forward, erect and immaculate (348).” Achebe writes this essay with such vigor, perhaps, because fifteen years after the publication of Things Fall Apart, this Western Psychology is still so evident. Kim Pritchard says it well, “given the widespread oppression and loss of national and personal identity suffered by the colonized, no wonder readers often find post-colonial authors reacting to the traditional model of literature with vehemence.”

            Consider, identity is an abstract concept—the intangible relationship of a person’s physical, mental, and habitual characteristics is cast aside to the debit of “gut feelings,” stereotypes, and other morally-degenerative creepers—a concept textually defined as the state as remaining the same, having a likeness in interests or qualities, in the midst of varying aspects or conditions, but practically defined as an opposition: being oneself, and not another. This self-definition is as generative to the “self” as it is destructive to the “other;” everything the self is, the other is not. William Butler Yeats’ “The Second Coming” may provide a summation of Achebe’s retort: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” Besides containing the line from which Achebe took his title, the poem hints that where the falconer loses his falcon, an apocalypse begins. Perhaps the “anarchy” that Conrad sees so concretely is exactly what Achebe is redefining. By putting a human face on this jokulhlaups, by spending a majority of his novel getting the reader acquainted with Okonkwo and his tribe, Achebe is showing the world what exactly will be released upon it: cultures of consequence.

In his Things Fall Apart, Achebe provides the reader with an area in conflict between colonizer and colonized; the Igbo (Ibo) community comes into contact with Christian missionaries and British colonizers. Achebe spends a majority the novel with Okonkwo and his Igbo tribe, inundating the reader with images and descriptions of a radically different culture which provide the reader with a baseline sense of normalcy.

Okonkwo, whose “fame rest[s] on solid personal achievements (3),” is a well-respected and –admired member of the Igbo tribe, a polygamist patriarchal society where only men are allowed to own property and become members of the village council. In a tribe where “[a]ge [is] respected among his people, but achievement [is] revered (8),” there exists an abnormal amount of pressure to succeed, especially in the case of Okonkwo, whose father was a musician forever in debt. Okonkwo’s “whole life was dominated by fear, the fear of failure and of weakness (13).” Curiously, a culture such as the Igbo, which places so much emphasis on the successes and accomplishments of the individual, survives and thrives because of its devotion to the community as a whole.

When Okonkwo beats his wife during the week of peace, the priest Ezeani scolds him for the “great evil” he has committed against the earth, “The evil you have done can ruin the whole clan…and we shall all perish (30).” The prevalence of unity serves as a moral compass for the tribe. Wrongs committed against one’s neighbor are secondary to those committed against the tribe, against the earth. It is vital for the survival of the Igbo that the individual remain secondary to the tribe. As Obierika, Okonkwo’s most-trusted friend, says of Okonkwo’s adopted son, whom the tribe has ordered must die, “…if the Oracle said that my son should be killed, I would neither dispute it nor be the one to do it (67).” Obierika’s unfailing willingness to go along with the decision of the tribe would trump that of saving his son’s life. This unwavering loyalty to the community is foreign to most readers, though it becomes the standard against which the rest of the novel must be measured, for Achebe gives his reader nothing but Igbo culture through part one of the novel.

Achebe’s novel is among the first African texts written in English to receive criticism throughout the world. Post-colonial literature such as Things Fall Apart arises from a once-colonized population, so authors have direct experience and very real/personal connections with colonizing forces. Achebe is the product of this European colonialism: born into an Anglicized Nigeria to Christian parents, he was educated both in the Igbo tradition of storytelling, and that of the more formal St. Phillips’ Central School, a Christian academy. What most separates post-colonial texts from their colonial counterparts is language. Whereas Heart of Darkness is written in English for the West, Things Fall Apart is written in English for the West and those they’ve subjugated. Is it an unsettling consolation then? Must, in order to criticize the overtly racist works of the colonizer, the colonized, too, accept his language?

Perhaps in answer to Heart of Darkness, Things Fall Apart speaks with an African voice. Where Conrad’s novella speaks in English, about the English, to the English, Achebe’s novel interjects into the language Igbo terms and customs, for the benefit of both his Western and his African audiences. Where Heart depicts a foreign Africa, full of intrigue, mystery, adventure, and darkness, Things responds with an illumination of proud cultural traditions and complex social understandings. It’s very possible to read Achebe’s novel as a direct response to Conrad’s, where Things says to Heart, “you’ve got it all wrong, let me explain….”

I think it’s important this discussion begin and end with intertextuality—after all, this is a literature course. That said, I’d like to ruminate a bit on why we don’t discuss the historical aspects of the British in their quest for empire. It’s understandable that we don’t cover the full history of British colonization in a literature course (history is written by the victorious, after all), and it’s possible that discussion is class could quickly devolve from a text-centric discourse to cacophony of assumptions, believes, morals, etc., but I think it’s necessary we understand the sociopolical background for both Joseph Conrad’s turn-of-the-century England and Chinua Achebe’s twentieth-century Nigeria, especially since we inhabit an imperial, colonial, and/or neo-imperial America.

Perhaps with a little background on the European occupation and colonization of Africa, students in this course might interpret American foreign policy as a principle-based war on nouns whose cost is often astronomical and misrepresented, especially to the population of the “colonized” insurgents. I don’t mean to rant from my soap box, but I do imagine that students of this course could find a number of correlations between the bygone imperialism of Europe and today’s American “wars on ____.” If we could keep the discussion within reason, it might even lead to post-American foreign policy (colonial) texts such as Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids, The Kite Runner and others, providing an opportunity for intertextual analysis between them and American-written literature (not that I know of any that exists regarding Japan or Afghanistan—just something I’ve been thinking about).