Lisa Hacker

Victim or Villain?
Examining the Voices in Colonial and Postcolonial Literature

One of the fundamental issues that intertextuality between colonial and postcolonial texts commits to address is the humanity of its characters. When the two groups collide, how is each defined? Does the colonizer automatically assume the role of a villain, dehumanizing the colonized? Or can the colonizer be a liberating force, bringing a form of freedom to the colonized that was previously absent?

Because the process of colonization has, inarguably, been an oppressive movement, the natural tendency is to assume that those who trespassed as colonizers would always be the villain. Yet the literature itself reveals that this is not always the case. Historically, some facts are not up for interpretation. But fictionally, some characters are. As a reader, we are not forced to accept the expected. If we look hard enough, we can see that the villainization of one human by another can be both blatant and subtle; it can also be open to interpretation.

One of the most debated and dividing disputes in colonial literature begins with Daniel DeFoe's Robinson Crusoe. At first glance, Crusoe does not appear to be the typical dehumanizing and colonizing villain. In fact, some do not see him as an oppressor at all, but a savior to the native Friday. After all, Friday was on the fast track to becoming a fast meal until he aligned himself with Crusoe. As soon as Friday realized he was safe from his cannibalizing enemies, he "...kneeled down again, kissed the ground, and laid his head upon the ground, and taking me (Crusoe) by the foot, set my foot upon his head; this, it seems, was in token of swearing to be my slave for ever."

The argument against Crusoe as a villain is built partially upon the assumption that, from this point on, Friday was content to serve and Crusoe was just happy to have a friend and companion. It is true that Crusoe treated Friday hospitably. He was fed, given a comfortable place to live, and spoken to in kind words. Terms like "friend" and "companion", however, carry a connotation that Crusoe never completely actualized. Friday was not his friend, but his servant, existing in a place where he had diminished rights and considerations as a human being.

Crusoe  made his intentions clear earlier in the novel when he said, "It came very warmly upon my thoughts, and indeed irresistibly, that now was the time to get me a servant." Before Crusoe had even seen the man, he had already verbalized that the time had come to "take" another human being, to acquire a native as a companion and defensive prop. In his excitement over having had "Providence" deliver this servant, Crusoe rushes to believe that the words Friday speaks are some sort of pledge or request to be taken as a servant.

The ensuing result of Friday's lack of a true voice and Crusoe's desire to have a servant is that Friday is absorbed into Crusoe's world, another benefit to his island "plantation", which seemed natural to Crusoe because of the superiority that Crusoe believed he had over Friday as a non-white, non-European man. Friday is therefore dehumanized as his existence revolves around serving another human being in a subservient role. Crusoe is a polite and gentlemanly oppressor, but an oppressor nonetheless.

A second example that merits continued debate is the role of the missionaries in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart. Here we have an example that is more typical to what is considered an intrusive and oppressive colonizer. Okonkwo's village is encroached upon by a group of Christian missionaries whose intention is to change the very existence of the group from the inside out with the message of the gospel.

While Friday began with no voice and assumptions were made for him, we see that there is a different level of communication between the missionaries and Okonkwo's people. The missionaries live on the fringe of the village, idealistically dipping their toes into the pool to get acclimated to the cold before jumping in with both feet. They reach out to the villagers, but do not force them to step over into progress.

The church's encroachment had begun before Okonkwo's exile, but when he returned, he found things even more changed than they had been before he left. White man's government had begun to infiltrate the village and surrounding areas. The white man was no longer existing on the fringes but was now more aggressively forcing acceptance of his laws and ways in the village.

 "They had built a court where the District Messenger judged cases in ignorance...These court messengers were greatly hated in Umuofia because they were foreigners and also arrogant and high-handed. ..They guarded the prison , which was full of men who had offended the white man's law. Some of these prisoners had thrown away their twins and some had molested the Christians. They were beaten in the prison by the kotma and made to work every morning clearing the government compound and fetching wood for the white Commissioner and the court messengers."

By recreating their own form of government which superceded the village's, the British presence becomes more obviously oppressive. The dehumanizing of the villagers is more clear and complete than Friday's, and now we see that what began as a humanitarian mission has become something entirely different.

The original intentions of the first missionaries now becomes lost as the village begins to lose its own identity at the whim of the British. The fragile relationship between the missionaries and the leaders of the village now becomes more strained as the village realizes that these interlopers are not going to go away.

The foothold that the village allowed the missionaries to take has now become a choke-hold, and Obierika sums it up to the frustrated Okonkwo:

"The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers , and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart."

The beauty of the passage here is not just in Achebe's writing, but is more pointedly in the fact that finally, the colonized has a voice. Assumptions were made about Friday's thoughts because DeFoe did not give us the same dialogue that Achebe gives his characters. Because this novel is written from the viewpoint of the colonized instead of the colonizer, the inhumanity of the colonizer is more clear. The village's ability to run itself with its own system of beliefs is being taken away by a colonizer who believes that its way are better.

 This is not a group that is accepting or even complacent about what is happening to its existence. This is not a group that welcomes the colonizer. There is no possibility of our misunderstanding because the oppressed now has a clear voice.

In this novel, however, we also see the addition of something unexpected. We see that some of the oppressed are embracing the oppressor. Some of the people in the village are choosing to break away from their traditional lives in order to embrace the religion and ways of the white man. They are not coerced; instead, they make the conscience decision, apparently as a result of the white man's enlightenment, to walk away from everything they know and embrace the way of the colonizer.

Part of Okonkwo's frustration is the realization that his own son has "joined" the white man's mission. Nwoye's decison flaunts the success of the white man's mission in Okonkwo's face.

The conscious decision of some to willingly leave brings up the possibility that the colonizer has functioned as a liberating force. This is tricky because in order to accept that assumption, the reader has to come to a place of accepting the oppression of some as simultaneous to the liberation of others. We can't be certain that Nwoye is not acting out merely in an effort to hurt his father, but with so many other villagers making the same decision, it is clear that there is something drawing them in.

Achebe does not present this phenomenon as a force of liberation, but the reader can certainly see the possibility of it. Without siding with either the colonizer or the colonized, we can respect the fact that a man can be given a choice to walk away from a life that he now begins to question, and that in that departure he may experience what he believes is a newfound freedom.

The beauty of Achebe's writing and the gift that he gives the reader is the ability to ponder those possibilities on our own. We can empathize and understand the position of the colonized more clearly because they have a voice, which Achebe believes is vital to presenting a true and balanced story.

Because Achebe is so adament about giving the Africans a voice, he is quite vocal as an author about Jospeh Conrad's refusal to do so. Achebe has been intensely critical of both Conrad and Heart of Darkness because he takes offense at what he sees as obvious racism in Conrad's writing.

Conrad's refusal to give the Africans a voice, other than mostly grunts and groans that are incomprehensible to the white man, can certainly be seen by the reader as an intentional act to dehumanize the African culture. Achebe believes it is so. And, it is something that Achebe sees as extending off of the written page of the novel and into today's culture as well. He sees it as a personal attack and not just a literary exploration.

One of Conrad's most infamous and potentially offensive passages reads:

"We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there—there you could look at a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly, and the men were—No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it—this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity—like yours—the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you—you so remote from the night of first ages—could comprehend."

A second passage is equally disturbing but even more dehumanizing.

"And between whiles I had to look after the savage who was fireman. He was an improved specimen; he could fire up a vertical boiler. He was there below me, and, upon my word, to look at him was as edifying as seeing a dog in a parody of breeches and a feather hat, walking on his hind-legs. A few months of training had done for that really fine chap."

Some defenders of Conrad, as well as some readers, see this as not dehumanizing, but simply presenting the African people in a manner that was consistent with the assumptions of the times.

But Achebe does not buy it.

"My humanity is not to be debated," he says in his essay, An Image of Africa: Racism in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, "nor is it to be used to illustrate European problems."

The inhumanity towards the colonized in Heart of Darkness, therefore, goes beyond the surface of the story. By choosing not to humanize the African in his novel, Conrad is not merely another Crusoe or gentlemanly oppressor. Conrad's novel, as well as the man himself, becomes crucified as the epitome of racism.

For most readers, Conrad is a much stronger, bitter pill to swallow than other writers. His depictions of Africans are harsher, but whether or not they should be extended off the written page is a question of debate.

Achebe refuses to give Conrad protection under the guise of poetic license. He continues in his essay by focusing the spotlight on the validity of Conrad's work as a whole.

"The real question is the dehumanization of Africa and Africans which this age-long attitude has fostered and continues to foster in this world. And the question is whether a novel which celebrates this dehumanization, which depersonalizes a portion of the human race, can be called a great work of art. My answers is no, it cannot."

Because one of the purposes of dialogue and intertextuality between colonial and postcolonial literature and its writers proposes to address the dehumanization of the colonized, it will also be one that draws strong feelings from readers and from those who, like Achebe, have a more obvious and personal connection to the debate.

Some postcolonial writers, like Derek Walcott in "A Far Cry from Africa", acknowledge the debate that centers around his heritage and find a place of peace in it. Walcott considers himself "divided to the vein" both ethnically as a man with mixed heritage and also personally as his allegiance wavers from his colonizer and his colonized home country.

Other postcolonial writers, like Jamaica Kincaid, tend to write from a place of anger against the colonizer that never seems to be assuaged. In her series of essays titled A Small Place, Kincaid equally berates the British and the white tourists who seem happy to enjoy the beauty of her island, but unable to see its white-washed edges.

Achebe, in contrast to both these and other postcolonial writers, separates himself from the rest of the pack by focusing not only on the injustices within the literature, but also in the hypocrisy and ignorance of the writers. He is somewhat unique in this position, and some may believe that he does not not accomplish much by attacking the character of a writer long ago dead and removed from the dialogue.

But Achebe is only doing what every other character in postcolonial literature desires to do: exercise the voice they have been given. And as in every good debate in postcolonial literature reveals, there must be, above all things, respect given to the voice.