LITR 5734: Colonial & Postcolonial Literature

Student Midterm 2008

Matt Richards

February 22, 2008

Conrad, Achebe, and Walcott:  Together they give the complete story

            When I signed up for this course I was surprised that we were reading Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” along with several novels from both European and non European writers that are about non-European countries.  Like most Americans, I thought that colonial and post-colonial referred to America and maybe other countries such as England and Germany.  Pauline Chapman says in her midterm, “Most Americans would assume colonial and postcolonial literature refers to the American colonial period” (Chapman 2005). This is true because my parents did not really understand why the course was focused on colonial and post-colonial issues in such countries as Africa, India, and Pakistan and did not include America. 

As Americans, we mainly focus on our own issues and cultural backgrounds.  Typically, we do not know very much about other countries and their cultures, but other countries seem to have a greater depth of knowledge about the United States.  It is usually because our culture does not want to know about these people or that we simply don’t care.  America has always had difficulty believing that our country is not the best or most highly educated.  We would like to think that we are but the problem is that our country is very close minded when it comes to knowledge of other countries.  For example, in Achebe article he says,

An older man going the same way as I turned and remarked to me how very young they came these days.  I agreed.  Then he asked me if I was a student too.  I said no, I was a teacher.  What did I teach?  African literature.  Now that was funny, he said, because he knew a fellow who taught the same thing, or perhaps it was African history, in a certain Community College not far from here.  It always surprised him, he went on to say, because he never had thought of Africa as having that kind of stuff, you know.   (Achebe 336).  

It is clear in the quote just how ignorant the man in Massachusetts is when it comes to a culture that is not his own.  I guess he didn’t think that Africans are like him. Most people feel that it is sufficient enough to be able to locate a country on the map or know what type of food they eat.  I believe that if more Americans took this course they would see how truly limited their knowledge of other countries and their cultures and hopefully they would make an effort to change for the better. (Objective 3).

            My previous experience with “Heart of Darkness” has been in two different types of classes during my undergraduate career.  The first time was for a British Literature class that I took during the summer semester.  The professor did not even talk about the colonial aspects of the novel at all.  He treated “Heart of Darkness” as a novel that was written to show what it was like in the Congo during that time period.  He mainly focused on Conrad’s narrator within a narrator and how the character of Marlow has inner monologue so we can see what he sees.  Basically, the time we spent on the novel completely avoided such issues as racism, colonialism, and since we did not read Achebe’s article or “Things Fall Apart,” there was not any mention of a dialogue between the texts. 

            The other class that we read “Heart of Darkness” in was my English 3000 class.  In this class, we did read Achebe’s article on Conrad’s racism but we did not talk much about whether Conrad was a racist or not.  We focused on the notion that Conrad wrote the novel with the intent to make fun of or satirize his fellow Europeans for being cruel to these people of the Congo.  She thought that Kurtz was an example of a man who learns at the end that all peoples are the same. 

            These views that my past professors took towards “Heart of Darkness” is not that much different the attitude that most Americans take when dealing with this type of literature.  They miss the complete picture of what is really going on with the novel. This happens because reading the novel alone is like only getting the point of view from one side, the colonizer. 

            “Heart of Darkness” is a very controversial novel but it is studied in many different types of classrooms in universities across the world.  Because it is studied so much, it needs to be shown from the perspective of both the colonizer and the colonized people.  In this class, we read both the novel “Heart of Darkness” by Joseph Conrad and the article “An Image of Africa:  Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness” by Nigerian author Chinua Achebe.  Reading both of these novels and looking at them side by side enables the reader to get a more complete picture.  Also it is hard to avoid such important issues in the novel especially the racism and exploitation of the Africans in the Congo. 

            Another benefit of reading both of these authors together is the dialogue between the two texts becomes very apparent.  It is clear that Achebe was not very happy with the way the African natives were treated in “Heart of Darkness.”  He knows that Conrad is using racism in the novel and is convinced that he is a racist man.  He does not buy into the fact that the person telling the story is a sailor who heard it from Marlow means that Conrad didn’t put his own racist feelings into the novel.  Achebe says

Certainly Conrad appears to go to considerable pains to set up layers of insulation between himself and the moral universe of his history.  He has, for example, a narrator behind a narrator.  The primary narrator is Marlow but his account is given to us through the filter of a second, shadowy person.  But if Conrad’s intention is to draw a cordon sanitaire [French for barrier] between himself and the moral and psychological malaise of his narrator his care seems to me totally wasted because he neglects to hint however subtly or tentatively at an alternative frame of reference by which we may judge actions and opinions of his characters.  (Achebe 342).

With this quote, Achebe writes this in direct response to “Heart of Darkness” which is an example of how two texts can have a dialogue with each other.  In this dialogue, Achebe is stating his position against the tradition view of this novel which was the Conrad wrote the “Heart of Darkness” as a satire against the racist Europeans of his day.  Most American college students tend to think that the novel is a satire but there is no evidence to prove that to be true. In fact, there is evidence that shows racism at least from the Belgians and from Marlow if not directly from Conrad himself.  For example, the Africans in the novel are not given their equal place.  Conrad uses them as background or as the others who are non Europeans.  Achebe points out that Conrad shows the natives as inferior to the Europeans especially in the way that they speak.   I think that most American students who love to believe that Conrad wrote it with the intention of changing the minds of his racist Europeans contemporaries but they probably just want to believe that is the case because they wouldn’t know how to deal with the novel if it was clear that it was an intentionally racist novel.  Of course, it is not possible for us to truly know what Conrad’s intention was with the novel. 

Another issue that we as Americans have limited knowledge in dealing with is sexism.  Sexism, when found in a novel or other text, is often overlooked because many people find it uncomfortable to discuss.  For this class, it is important to learn how to talk about the gender issue because Achebe’s novel “Things Fall Apart” has problems of gender superiority in it.  Sure it is easy to completely avoid the sexism among the Ibo tribe but the reader wouldn’t be receiving the complete picture from both sides.  For example, Okonkwo beats his wife and is not punished simply because he beat her.  He is punished only because he beats his wife during the “Week of Peace” in which no one was to harm anybody for any reason.  In the Ibo culture, wife beating is not a crime and happens quite often.  They believe that the man is superior to the woman and she has to do anything that he wants her to do.  Achebe puts this in so subtly that we really don’t notice or realize how bad of a thing has just occurred in the novel.  For example, at the wrestling match, Ekwefi talks to her friend about Okonkwo beating her.  The two women talked as if it was very common and an everyday thing that had happened.    It wasn’t until we read the Kirsten Holst Petersen, "Problems of a Feminist Approach to African Literature" handout that I truly noticed how sexist the novel was.    This may be shocking but that is only because our society in the United States does not allow such vulgar behavior and we treat women as equals to men.  Sexism also occurs in “Heart of Darkness” especially when Marlow meets Kurtz’ intended.  She asks him what Kurtz’ last words were but Marlow wants to protect her so he says, “The last word he pronounced was your name.” (Conrad 71).  The other main example of the sexism in “Heart of Darkness” is when Marlow is describing his aunt.  He thinks that she is foolish because she lives in her own world.  Actually, he thinks all women do.  Another reason that Americans need to learn about other countries and cultures is because many people around us are of many different cultural backgrounds.  Derek Walcott grew up in St. Lucia and struggled with the fact that he was both of British and African ancestry.  He wrote in his poem, A Far Cry From Africa, “Between this Africa and the English tongue I love? Betray them both, or give back what they give?  How can I face such slaughter and be cool?  How can I turn from Africa and live?” (Walcott).  In the poem, Walcott is showing that he can not turn his back on either identity but has to live with both.  His poem shows us that if we want to live in the future we must accept what is unchangeable.

In conclusion, Americans can learn a lot from this course not only about other countries and their cultures but about themselves as well.  I believe that Conrad, Achebe, Walcott, and Petersen if read together can give reader a more complete picture and can help us see both sides of the story.  Hopefully, we can become a more educated and culturally experienced America because of it.