Vaidyanath Nishant
Research
Scholar,
Department
of English,
Sikkim
University
Abstract
Postcolonialism
opened a new arena for debate and discourse by challenging the West. The
existing notion about the colonised were being debated and the colonised began
writing back. Within postcolonial writings, there are many debatable areas.
This paper tries to debate the notion developed in Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks.
Key Words
Postcolonialism, Chinua Achebe, Heart of Darkness.
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. By this time I was walking much faster.” (Achebe: 1961)[i]
Chinua
Achebe had encountered such an episode during his years as a teacher in
Massachusetts. Even two decades after winning independence from the European
power players, Achebe had to deal with such questions. It is not surprising
though, as the world still continues to call Africa as the Third World or a
post-colonial continent. The European nations colonised lots of countries
around the world during the post-Industrialization period. The demand for raw
materials and markets for the finished goods, as well as labour power, resulted
in the exploitation the people in South America, Asia, Australia and Africa.
The white man took upon himself the ‘burden’ of ‘civilizing the uncivilized’.
With knowledge only of his own culture, he looked at every other culture as
something inferior and thus, uncivilized. This paper would try to break down
the notions of the white mind, which is a result of years of social
construction, through which the colonised subject has been treated and
portrayed in literature. In a way, a ‘common sense’ has been created over the
years, which tries to justify the ‘white man’s burden’.
Edward Said, in his book Orientalism, explains the European’s
construction of the East as what the West is not. According to him, orientalism
is the ontological and epistemological distinction made between the orient and
the occident. It is a process of learning to manipulate the East in order to
form a proper hegemony. It creates a binary, and in this way, projects the West
as the superior entity. Chinua Achebe too writes in the same lines in his
essay, “An Image of Africa: Racism in
Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’”, when he says that the white tries to set
Africa up as a foil to Europe. They try to project Europe as the most
illuminated place and the rest of the place as dark corners. The colonizer
hence walks around with a candle, spreading light and warmth to the rest of the
world. Achebe criticises Joseph Conrad’s Heart
of Darkness which was published in 1902, a novel about a white man’s trip
through the Congo Basin and his encounter with one such dark corner on this
earth. According to Achebe, this novel projects the Western desire and need to
the fullest.
Heart of
Darkness projects the image of Africa as “the other world,” the antithesis of
Europe and therefore of civilization, a place where man's vaunted intelligence
and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant bestiality.” (Achebe: 1961)[ii]
Achebe’s Things Fall Apart
(1959), was written as a response to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Things Fall Apart was written against the notion
of Africa as a primordial and cultureless foil for Europe. Achebe took it upon
himself to rewrite the written and accepted views on Africa. His is the voice
echoing African sentiments. The novel is set in the 1890s, when the first sets
of colonisers were breaching into the lives of the Africans. It was around this
time that Marlow too takes his journey through the Congo basin. Things Fall Apart represents the
indigenous African culture and way of life that is disrupted suddenly with the
coming of the colonisers, first in the form of missionaries and then as
repressive forces. The novel further deals with the clash between tradition and
modernity; between the European colonial government and the Igbo community. Achebe
shatters the stereotypical notions constructed by the white man and gives the
Igbo culture its due respect. Through this novel he shatters the notion that
the Africans were very primordial and uncivilized, an image that the white man
had cleverly crafted for his own benefits. Achebe is more against the white
man’s mind rather than his skin. It is the ideology that he attacks and not the
individual. But the individual is a part of the society or an accepted culture.
In the novel, Oknonkwo, the protagonist, constantly is in war with the
colonisers. He is deeply affected when his own son, Nyowe, converts to
Christianity. Christianity was again used as a tool to propagate the colonial
agendas. When the missionaries first come, they seem to be tolerant toward the
native forms of religion and belief. But the tolerance soon fades away and the
traditional society is divided into two sections: the modernised natives,
following Christianity and then the others who were following their indigenous
forms of religion and fighting against the colonisers. When Enoch, a convert,
unmasks the egwugwu during the annual ceremony to honour the earth deity,
it is considered equal to killing the ancient spirit. The natives burn his house
and the Church to take revenge. This marks the beginning of the clash between
the colonisers and the colonized. Achebe has cleverly used the image of locusts
in the novel in order to portray the visiting colonisers who destroy their
entire lives and go away. With the coming of the English, the existing culture
was being questioned. The white man began to impose his culture, questioning
the existing culture. Ngugi wa’ Thiongo, in his essay Decolonising the Mind, writes about how the colonisers brought in
English education and thus killed all existing forms of education. The coming
of the new language, suppressed the existing forms of communication. Along with
language, culture too died. A land, rich with folklore and mythologies was now
becoming yet another backyard of Europe, but inferior to Europe. Achebe’s No Longer at Ease, is about a Nigerian
youth, educated and working in Europe who faces a dilemma being a misfit in his native place, after his return, just as he could not be at home in Europe being coloured. Things Fall Apart represents the decay of an existing rich culture
due to the dominance of another culture that claims to be superior. Gabriel
Garcia Marquez too emphasizes on this aspect in his Nobel Acceptance Speech, The Solitude of Latin America (1982) He
argues against the white man’s claim of finding the others strange. Every
culture is rich and superior in its own ways. The white man failed to accept
this and thus went about prophesising his own culture above others. The novel
ends with the colonizers winning over the native leaders, and thus establishing
their superiority through power.
Achebe portrays the African culture as a culture with its own
significance and beauty, which the white mind had failed to see. In his essay,
he begins with the comparison drawn by Conrad between the rivers, namely,
Thames and Congo. One represents peace and tranquillity whereas the latter
represents darkness and fear. The Congo River is portrayed as the anti-thesis
of river Thames. The development of such a binary is an act of the white man’s mind,
which has been constructed over the years. Conrad, a white man above all, too
succumbs to such stereotypical views and hence represents Africa, just as the
white man wants in his novel. As Marlow, his protagonist travels into Africa,
his first impression is something to be read, internalized, criticized and
re-constructed:
We were
wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an
unknown planet… We were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings; we
glided past like phantoms, … we were traveling in the night of first ages, of
those ages that are gone, leaving hardly a sign -- and no memories.” (Conrad:
2001, p.57)
The very eyes and mind of the
white man is questionable here. The usage of words like ‘frenzy’ in order to
describe existing, yet ‘unexplored’ land and the terming of the native as a
‘prehistoric’ man proves the ignorance of the white mind. The white mind here
considers ignorance as bliss as it helps him in asserting its superiority. The
greedy Englishman took this journey not because he was in the dire need of it,
but for the sake of it. And now that he was here, anything that was new to him
seemed either prehistoric or alien. The above passage is filled with binaries
that the white mind has been fed with and is continuously feeding on.
The earth
seemed unearthly. 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.
(Conrad: 2001, p.58)
Conrad here was about to mention
that the natives were not even human beings, but he stops himself. This land
for him was pre-historic and unearthly. Just because the trees that grew around
him were not the ones seen back at home, he felt this place did not belong to earth.
This once again proves how narrow minded and ignorant the white man was. Conrad
finally makes the colonial mind’s confession when he uses the word ‘ugly’ in
order to describe the native man. The passage carries subversively, the
atrocities of the colonizers against the natives. They were treated as animals,
chained and made to obey orders.
Achebe deduces
the white man’s mind, his needs and desires through the quoted passage above.
The word ‘ugly’ conforms to the western idea of the natives. And Conrad himself accepted that his novel
cannot be just kept aside as fiction when he claimed that his novel
was an experience: “but it is experience pushed a little (and only a very
little) beyond the actual facts of the case for the perfectly legitimate, I
believe, purpose of bringing it home to the minds and bosoms of the readers.” (Heart of Darkness) Marlow actually holds
the very legitimate views that any European is expected to have. If he fell
apart from such an ideological grid, he would be lost and not accepted in his very
own society. When Kurtz became intimate with the natives, he was portrayed as a
mad man who has lost his sanity, from the point of view of the western
writer/reader. He became more of an animal than a man. Marlow, however does not
allow his emotions to predominate him.. Conrad strikes another binary when he
describes the two women in Kurtz’s life. His native mistress is portrayed as
raw and emotionless as she stands on the banks of the river as a dying Kurtz is
taken away. But his lover back home is very faint, dressed in black and breaks
down as silently and in a ‘civilized’ manner when she hears the news of Kurtz’s
death. More interesting is Conrad’s
description of a native. He portrays a native as the following, “A black
figure stood up, strode on long black legs, waving long black arms. . ” (Conrad:
2001, p.109). The racist in Conrad comes out best possibly here. But many of these aspects were overlooked when
this novel was published as these were commonly accepted notions during that
period. The black native was indeed an alien to the ‘civilized’ white. Conrad’s
novel is not just an example of his mind-set, but it is a product of a society
of a particular period, which accepted this novel, read and celebrated it.
Edward
Said criticizes writers like Conrad and Forster who represented the colonies
through the white man’s eyes in a way the white man wanted and desired it. In
fact, William Jones in his translation of Kalidasa’s Shakuntala distorts the whole text by making it suitable for the
English audiences’ palette. Said writes in his book Culture and Imperialism (1993), “This imperial attitude is, I
believe, beautifully captured in the complicated and rich narrative form of
Conrad’s great novella Heart of Darkness,
written between 1898 and 1899.” The novel served as a manifesto to the
imperialistic agenda that was coming into play during this period. It provided
as a perfect read for the European reader who got what he expected. This novel
served the basic argument that of representing Africa as how the West wanted
the world to see and render and thus supporting the Western world’s argument of
Africa being inferior.
Bibliography:
Achebe,
Chinua. Things Fall Apart (The
African Trilogy); Everyman’s Library; Possneck; 2010
Achebe, Chinua. An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s ‘Heart
of Darkness’; 1961
(Web)
Conrad,
Joseph. Heart of Darkness; Rupa
Classics; New Delhi; 2001
Fanon,
Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks; Grove Press; New York; 2008
----------------The Wretched of Earth;
Penguin Books; London; 2001.
Said,
Edward. Culture and Imperialism;
Vintage Books; New York; 1994
---------------- Orientalism; Vintage Books; New York; 1979
Thiong'o,
Ngugi Wa. Decolonozing the Mind: The
Politics of Language; London; 1986
[i] Achebe, Chinua. "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's 'Heart
of Darkness'" Massachusetts Review. 18. 1977. Rpt. in Heart of Darkness,
An Authoritative Text, background and Sources Criticism. 1961. 3rd ed. Ed.
Robert Kimbrough, London: W. W Norton and Co., 1988, pp.251-261 http://kirbyk.net/hod/image.of.africa.html
(25-03-16)
[ii] Ibid.
