Questions of Racism in Heart of Darkness - Admission/Application Essay Example

Questions of Racism in Heart of Darkness Texts often refer to each other and intertwine, especially if they are considered to be canonical texts. The idea of the canon, however, is something that can also be challenged from a conflict theory perspective. In the works of Ngugi, including the anti-colonialist novel Devil on the Cross, as well as in the speeches of Chinua Achebe, one can detect the use of a canon, but also a subversive look at what the canon means from a European vs. African perspective. From this perspective, there is the European canon, represented by such works as Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which sees Africa in a certain way, because of colonialism and racism. Then, there is the African canon, made, in the claim of Ngugi, through a recapturing of authentic language, voice, and narrative. This challenging point of view represents a disruption of the European canon and a challenge to Conrad’s notion of civilization and barbarity. The current research examines questions of racism and intertext in Heart of Darkness as a point of reference to see Ngugi’s arguments about the canon, a different darkness in the heart of Africa that is positive and nurturing rather than strange, alien, and horrific, as it is to Mr. Kurtz; the research also examines what these questions mean when exploring works of Kincaid like A Small Place, and ideas of Conrad’s responsibility as a producer of culture. Achebe does accuse Conrad of racism, and from this perspective, in the book Marlow’s story is that of the imperialist racist who enters the conquered territory with preconceived notions about its relativity to him as a conqueror. In a sense, he brings with him to the new territory the mechanisms and prejudices of the industrial, imperialist mindset, and hopes to foist them on his new surroundings seamlessly, bringing the comfort of home to a strange new land. The inevitable failure of this process brings Marlow to a sort of suspended, terrified disgust of the inhabitants or “savages” of the strange land and their customs. “It is clearly not part of Conrad's purpose to confer language on the "rudimentary souls" of Africa. They only "exchanged short grunting phrases" even among themselves” (Achebe 1). From Achebe’s perspective, the interplay between a pre-industrial and an industrial society can exist with cooperation and empathy, but it can also exist with preconceived notions of superiority, ideas of backwardness, and the industrialist’s abject terror of slipping into a pre-industrial state. The hypocrisy evinced in this mindset becomes evident when the imperialist is inherently overwhelmed with the newness of the locality, and this hypocrisy displays itself in any number of ways. Like Kurtz, the imperialist could be driven to great psychopathic heights of ego, or like Marlow, they could gloss over their experiences with a sort of jaded “realism” that in reality only takes into account one side of the equation. When it is stated that Ngugi uses Heart of Darkness as an intertext, this means that what Ngugi is doing is using Conrad’s work as a point of reference, as well as a point of departure. So, there are similarities as well as differences. In Conrad, Marlow sees the “pilgrims” as shallow masks mouthing the words of the old society, with nothing underneath: “it seemed to me that if I tried I could poke my forefinger through him, and would find nothing inside but a little loose dirt, maybe” (Conrad 57). Ngugi uses a similar technique when he is dealing with the members of the macabre and surreal Thieves’ Meeting. Although he is angry enough about the sham of the imperialist façade, however, Conrad’s character does not explore the possibilities that this brings up as Ngugi does; while seeing the failure of the Station society to come to terms with its surroundings, he nonetheless allies himself with them, as when he moves away from the beaten native servant in disgust to speak with the brick-maker. In a more empathetic narrative such as that taken by Ngugi’s intertext, Marlow might come around to seeing things from another point of view, like Kareendi’s. It might be argued that he does this at times, as when he sees and imagines the servants and some of the “reclaimed” at the first outpost. What Marlow is really doing here, though, is projecting his own fears and thoughts onto them, rather than being truly empathetic. When he sees one of the “reclaimed” natives raise a rifle, he thinks that it is because of “white men being so much alike at a distance that he could not tell who I might be” (Conrad 43). Ngugi of course has a different inter-textual notion, and a much more sarcastic one. “That’s why I’m very grateful to the masses of the Kenyan people. For their blindness, their ignorance, their inability to demand their rights are what enable us to feed on their sweat” (Ngugi 116). Marlow sees the Congo as an otherworldly place because he is narrowly confined by his conceptions of what the world is within the colonial sphere, and cannot be bothered to make anything but aghast assumptions about the world outside of it. The literary canon of Ngugi and Achebe is much different than the literary canon espoused by Conrad. From this perspective, seeing Africa through Marlow’s eyes, readers of Heart of Darkness are not introduced to Africa as an actual place in which human beings lead their lives, but as a backdrop against which imperialist settlers lose their minds. None of the natives of the Congo are allowed by the narrative to show any intelligence or humanity, as that would be counterproductive to the reader’s seeing them through the ocular of the imperialist visitor as incomprehensible animals and cannibals. From the very start, Conrad makes this clear, as Marlow, when walking to the first colonial outpost, sees “the body of a middle-aged Negro, with a bullet in the forehead” as something that “may be considered a permanent improvement” (Conrad 49). This shows great inhumanity. Ngugi presents a different sort of darkness in the heart of Africa: the insidious darkness of neo-colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism. The political bondage of colonialism is also shown through public structures set up in Ngugi’s Kenya, and the imposition of a foreign language and in some cases religion. This is an example of a system in which the Western power establishes its own educational system, which is imposed on the new territory and produces Kenyans who are literate in the tongue of the colonizer and may be capitalistic, and therefore who can get politically ahead in the new society than the majority of the population, which is kept illiterate and therefore largely apolitical. From Ngugi’s perspective, the true moral darkness occurs when Kenyan people are often caught in a confusing double-bind in which their native culture is made to appear pathetic and backwards to them by the colonialist school-system, and respond by developing a taste for all things European and cultivating a disdain for the pre-colonial vestiges of Kenyan society, religion, and culture. This results in a new sort of political class system in which Anglophone Kenyans (or Antiguans in the case of Kincaid), hold social and economic power, since they are looked upon as apt pupils by the colonizers and given limited bureaucratic control over their non-Westernized neighbors. Kincaid in her essay “A Small Place,” looks at the same relationship with British ex-colonialism in Antigua as Ngugi examines in Kenya. In terms of ascribing whether or not Conrad is responsible for Kincaid’s situation, it could be seen that Antigua in this portrayal does match because it was not allowed to develop industry which could be capable of competing with the colonialist power’s established might, and therefore often acted mainly as a supplier of raw materials for the European industrial invader’s home factories. As European colonizers put themselves first, it is difficult to picture them allowing any chance for factory jobs to be left to chance. And in Kincaid’s Antigua, as in Ngugi’s Kenya, capitalism keeps the masses in place. “Long may the masses stay as they are, singing praises only to the size of a man’s pockets. This will give us more time to live off the fat of the land… those who want to awaken the masses should be shown the whip” (Ngugi 117). The ex-sovereign nation, such as Kenya or Antigua, in this situation is not capable of regaining its sovereignty, though, because it is held in check by a purposefully unbalanced economic system whose purpose is to keep the new colony in a state of obeisance to the English colonialist power. This creates a vicious cycle that has repercussions even after the withdrawal of colonialist presence, as both works clearly show. In the generally unethical cultural bondage mentioned above, the colonialist society is the invader and controller of the colony, over which it claims sovereignty through the mechanisms and prejudices of the industrial, imperialist mindset. This mindset takes its own cultural history as a given and hopes to foist it on the new surroundings seamlessly without having to recognize the culture over which it is trampling. The inevitable failure of this process brings the colonialist invader to the sort of suspended, terrified disgust of the inhabitants evinced by Marlow in Conrad, which leads the European traders, missionaries, operators of capital, and hence, Europeans at home, to view the new and unfamiliar African customs, which were sovereign and functional before the colonialist takeover, as strange, savage, or backwards. REFERENCE Achebe, C. “Achebe on Conrad.” http://www.scribd.com/doc/3048094/Achebe-on-Conrad Conrad, J. Heart of Darkness. New York: Penguin Classics, 1992. Kincaid, J. “A Small Place.” Contemporary Essays. New York: Harper, 2000. Ngugi. Devil on the Cross. New York: Heinemann, 1987. Read More