In “An Image of Africa:
Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness”
(written in 1977), Chinua Achebe performs numerous close readings of Conrad’s
novel to mark racist currents of thought that, once revealed, shows the reader
that this racist language is so blatant, it hardly requires someone with a scholarly
mind to notice. This becomes the subsequent and more exigent argument in
Achebe’s essay: Conrad’s novel, as well as Conrad himself and other writers
like him, have escaped the criticism they deserve. As the Norton Anthology of
Theory and Criticism states, Achebe’s essay is indeed a “battle cry”, but it
sets out on a course of strategies as well.
Achebe
first draws on his own life experience, telling the stories of three
communications, one with an older white man while walking on the University of
Massachusetts campus, and the reception of two letters from younger boys who
had read his acclaimed novel, Things Fall
Apart. These stories are essential for Achebe’s illustration of the varying
but equally problematic image of Africa in the Western mind across generations.
Achebe encounters the old white male in a parking lot, although the old white
male would have believed this was merely a friendly exchange. When Achebe
responds to the man’s question of what he teaches (African Literature), the man
responds that he did not “think of Africa as having that kind of stuff” (1613).
Achebe, out of the same respect for the man rendered nameless, only adumbrates
the content of the two letters. They are from Yonkers high school boys, one of
whom wrote the author to comment on being happy to learn about “the customs and
superstitions of an African tribe” (1613). Achebe takes the opportunity from
this letter to comment on how the boys own same “tribesmen” and he have odd
customs and superstitions as well.
From
here, Achebe begins to show just how backwards the customs of the Western mind
are, although focused squarely on Conrad’s novel. Like the old man’s erasure of
the legitimacy of African literature, Achebe shows Conrad’s way of erasing even
the neutrality of Africa’s own natural resources. Achebe notes that Conrad’s
novel opens with a personification of the River Thames: it “rest[s] peacefully
“at the decline of day after ages of good service done to the race that peopled
its banks”” (qtd. in Achebe 1614). As Achebe implies, the River Congo of Heart of Darkness does not receive even
the benefit of personification. Achebe implies that the river is instead, like
the people of Africa, used: “going up that river was like travelling back to
the earliest beginning of the world” (qtd. in Achebe 1614).
From
here Achebe masterfully breaks down Conrad’s compositional process to expose what
amounts to a repeated trope in the novel, a trope that depends on Conrad’s
forced voice of speechlessness in the face of the “grotesque” landscape of
Africa’s nature. He notes that Conrad, in writing his descriptions, pendulates
between “silence” and “frenzy” (1614). He shows that the silence is always
either that of the African landscape like a calm before a storm, or is owned or
interpreted by the explorers encountering a frenzy that the landscape holds.
Again, the reader can see that this is not exactly personification, but
characterized by Conrad as inchoate, and as Conrad would have the reader of his
novella believe, the landscape is erased of agency, not even connected to the
people of the country: “It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding
over an inscrutable intention” (qtd. in Achebe 1614).
Achebe
makes a very clear interpretation of why Conrad characterizes Africa and its
people in this way. He characterizes Conrad as essentially pathological,
stating that he has a desire and need to “set Africa up as a foil to Europe, as
a place of negations at once remote and vaguely familiar, in comparison with
which Europe’s own state of spiritual grace will be manifest” (Achebe 1613).
This scapegoating of Africa is not just Conrad’s practice then, but all of
white Europe and white America’s practice. It is certainly very clear in the
large selection of Heart of Darkness
that Achebe quotes in his essay. Again, although Africa is today thought of the
very foundation of human kind, in the passage from Conrad, it reads, “the earth
seemed unearthly” (qtd. in Achebe 1615). Clearly Achebe is showing Conrad as
“Othering” the African the people to the extent that their home is literally
alien, not even of our planet.
Achebe
catches Conrad stating right in print what Conrad believes to be “the worst of
it”: that Europeans and Africans are even related, that Europeans might even be
able to find meaning in the African mind. Achebe quotes more passages from the
novel creating a constellation of these kinds of nouns that render the African
as “Other” or alien: specimen, savage, devil, when describing a group of sick
Africans, shadows, junior brothers, and other slang terms. Achebe demonstrates
that the language barrier in the novella is really not just that. Instead
Conrad simply does not grant them speech, except in the one instance of the
nameless “improved specimen” who mans the boat’s boiler and speaks two phrases.
Achebe
quotes the passage that details Marlowe’s reaction when this character dies at
the feet of this speaker for Conrad midway through the novel:
And
the intimate profundity of that look he gave me when he received his hurt
remains to this day in my memory – like a claim of distant kinship affirmed in
a supreme moment. (qtd in Achebe 1618).
Achebe points out that
while this passage seems to “affirm” kinship, it is merely Conrad’s speaker
looking dispassionately upon a death he does not care about and in the end is
only memorable to him because in his dying breath, the man characterized just a
few pages prior as a specimen makes “a claim” in his look: the claim is what is
affirmed, what is desired by the African, but one need only read the novel to
realize we are only in the head of Marlowe/Conrad, and that this claim is never
granted.
From here, Achebe elevates the essay from analysis to
pedagogical proscription. He states, “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 answer is: No” (1619). Achebe has
shown that Conrad’s racism is obvious. What remains to be done is to remove Heart of Darkness from the canon, and
all books like it. Achebe does not take this proposition much further in this
essay, but this is an instance of foundational statement in Postcolonial
theory. To what extent do we allow books such as this one to be a part of our
culture and our schools? Achebe’s emphatic “No” to this consideration stands as
a model of taking our moral reactions from the mind and heart into everyday
practice.
What is at stake in Achebe’s essay then, is not just the
critical history of one novel, but its acting as a locus for the questions of
art for art’s sake and the decontextualization of authorial talent from plot
and message.
Therefore, from here, Achebe addresses the various
counterarguments other critics have made in defense of Conrad. Some contend
that Conrad purposefully uses Marlowe as his speaker and cypher for these
attitudes, and further complicates the narrative by designating a group of
listeners to Marlowe’s story as the audience, with the reader being further
removed. For this reason, some critics have stated that Conrad is making an
allusion to Coleridge’s figure of the Ancient Mariner, a man damned by his own
flaws who must tell his story to every man he meets in a kind of Sisyphean striving for a redemption that could
never actually grant him peace. Other critics such as Cederic Watts argue that
Conrad’s “ultimate aim is toward debunking colonialist myths” (Fleming 91).
Achebe anticipates these arguments and points out their
obvious flaws. He states that Conrad “neglects to hint, clearly and adequately,
at an alternative frame of reference by which we may judge the actions and
opinions of his characters”, meaning, the Englishmen listening to Marlow’s
tale, or even Marlow himself. There are a few times when Marlow pauses in his
story and the narrator observes him, but indeed nothing lengthy is ever spoken
about Marlow. The allusion to the Ancient Mariner does not hold up in this way,
and given the fact that Marlow is not so troubled by his own tale, as it is
delivered dispassionately across the pages of the novel.
As for the concept that Conrad seeks to expose the myths
of Colonialism, that for instance, it was not interested in proselytizing to
and improving the lives of the native people, this is beside the point of the
blatant racism that Achebe exposes. Indeed, as Achebe notes, Heart of Darkness can be read as only
one incident of Colonialism gone wrong, given that it is void of any messages
besides its image of Africa as the corrupting influence on Kurtz, not
necessarily Kurtz’s own inherent evil.
Achebe in anticipating other arguments, asks, “I may be
challenged on the grounds of actuality. Conrad, after all, did sail down the
Congo in 1890 when my own father was a still a babe in arms. How could I stand
up more than fifty years after his and purport to contradict him?” (1620).
Clearly Achebe is not ruthless toward Conrad. Elsewhere, he characterizes
Conrad with the statement, “Irrational love and irrational hate jostling
together in the heart of that talented, tormented man” (1620). Yet, as part of
his passion for the instructive, pedagogical element that he believes must
contained in any great literature, Achebe must address the issues he sees if he
is to be responsible to society and his own heritage.
Elsewhere,
Achebe is not unfair to the beneficent intentions of some Europeans who had
travelled to Africa. He even states that the liberalism that Conrad espouses in
some isolated parts of the novella had a positive influence on Europe and
America. Achebe cites the case of Albert Schweitzer, a missionary who traveled
to the same region of Africa to set up a hospital and other services,
sacrificing his career along the way. But Achebe notes that Schweitzer once
stated, “The African is indeed my brother, but my junior brother” (qtd. in
Achebe 1618). Thus even this most enlightened person of his time made the
African diminutive with his language, once again speaking to the “need” to
perform this belittling in these figures: the old man, the boy, the novelist,
and even the passionate missionary.
Some critics such as Patrick Brantlinger in more recent
times take an approach toward the conflict here, and try to find a middle
ground. He argues Heart of Darkness
“offers a powerful critique of at least certain manifestations of imperialism
and racism, at the same time that it presents that critique in ways that can
only be characterized as both imperialist and racist” (qtd. in Fleming 91).
Brantlinger seems ignorant of the problem of use and exploitation that
went into Heart of Darkness’s conception that Achebe had already
addressed.
Achebe states, “soon after Conrad had written his book an
event of far greater consequence was taking place in the art world of Europe,”
and tells the story of the birth of cubism (1620-21). White Europeans took from
the Fang tribe of the Congo a mask that was “inspirational” to Picasso and
Matisse. Achebe quotes British art historian, Frank Willet:
One
piece [from Ganguin’s visit to Africa] is still identifiable; it is a mask that
had been given to Maurice Vlamnick in 1905. He records that Derain was
“speechless” and “stunned” when he saw it, bought it from Vlamnick and in turn
showed it to Picasso and Matisse, who were also greatly affected by it.
Ambroise Vollard then borrowed it and had it cast in bronze… The revolution of
twentieth century art was under way!
(qtd. Achebe 1621)
Achebe does not feel the
need to show that this is not exactly a revolution, but the usual theft and
exploitation of African resources. Achebe adapts this exclamatory phrase
elsewhere to level more attacks at Conrad:
Consequently,
Africa is something to be avoided just as the picture has to be hidden away to
safeguard the man’s jeopardous integrity. Keep away from Africa, or else! Mr
Kurtz of Heart of Darkness should
have heeded that warning and the prowling horror in his heart would have kept
its place, chained to its lair (1622).
Achebe elsewhere close
reads The Christian Science Monitor,
“a paper more enlightened than most”, to show that in his own time, the
European mind still does not grant language to the African and others (1622). He
quotes, “In London there is an enormous immigration of children who speak
Indian or Nigerian dialects, or some other native language” (1622). The
newspaper makes a point of contrasting language with “dialects”. Achebe states,
I
believe that the introduction of “dialects,” which is technically erroneous in
the context, is almost a reflex action caused by an instinctive desire of the
writer to downgrade the discussion to the level of Africa and India. And this
is quite comparable to Conrad’s withholding of language from his rudimentary
souls. Language is too grand for these chaps; let’s give them dialects! (1623)
Thus
the essay comes full circle to an example from Achebe’s own contemporary time:
old men erasing African Literature, young boys erasing the legitimacy of
African customs, and finally the print news industry erasing the legitimacy of
African language itself, just as Conrad doesn’t grant them to his African
characters.
Achebe recognizes glaring injustices, clearly racist language, and
contradictions in the culture and counterarguments of his time to write a
straightforward attack on a canonized novel that does not deserve its admiration.
In doing so he creates an exemplary essay against the notion of art for art’s
sake, or as some people may interpret it, at least shows the dangers of this
artistic philosophy.
If anything, Achebe may be seen as restraining some of
his statements. It makes perfect sense that Achebe understates the effect that
the letter from the boy in Yonkers has on him. After all, the writer of it had
read and enjoyed Achebe’s Things Fall
Apart and wrote the letter with the intention of complimenting it. Yet
clearly the letter is also enacting an “Othering” of African culture. Achebe
notes that he could write plenty about the boys’ own culture. Arguably, though,
he does this work in his novel.
Critiques of this essay have stated that Achebe’s essay
amounts to essentially an ad hominem attack
on Conrad. However, this is not a political debate or rhetoric for a certain
cause. Achebe does not explicitly set out to have Conrad’s name struck from the
canon, and even if this is part of Achebe’s essay, it is not as if the canon is
a government organization concentrated in the hands of a few.
Instead,
for Achebe, this is understandably personal. As someone whose literary life
depends upon the world’s recognition of African literature, and therefore
African life, Conrad’s novella has the same effect as the old man’s erasure in the beginning
of the essay translated into a lasting monument of literature. If Achebe’s
attack is interpreted as ad hominem towards
Conrad, what kind of attack is Heart of
Darkness on Africa?
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