Heart of darkness, darkness of heart
THE well-known writer Joseph Conrad was born on this day, December 3, thus giving occasion to this column today! He was also born in a year of great significance to us in India — 1857. Conrad was of Polish descent, his name was originally Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, which he changed much later. This is another connection to India. Joseph Conrad, who was then in the merchant navy, called himself by this name for the first time in a letter he wrote from Calcutta (now Kolkata) where his ship docked in November 1885.
Conrad wrote five letters to his friend Joseph Spiridion (the English name of Josef Spiridion Kliszczewski) from Singapore and Calcutta, all in English. These are said to be the first letters he wrote in the language. The signatures in these letters change from the Polish name to the English name he was to adopt. In the letter dated just before his departure, he signs as J Conrad, shortening his Polish name and changing the spelling to look English. Thus, Calcutta witnessed his birth as an English writer, as it did of others before and after him!
Conrad knew Polish and French (not only learning the language when he was a child but also spending four years in the French merchant navy), but he began to serve on British ships in 1878, when he was 21 years old. He was to make himself at home in the language and published his first novel in 1895.
This is the writer who gave us ‘Heart of Darkness’ (1899), which is still read around the world and prescribed in universities despite the trenchant critique by another famous writer, the Nigerian Chinua Achebe. It is a story about Marlow, the captain of a steamer in Congo, who describes the journey away from ‘western civilisation’ into the ‘dark continent’. It is widely held that this short novel is a critique of colonialism (this is Belgian Congo), but that Conrad, a new Englishman (becoming a citizen in 1886), did not want to criticise Britain. Marlow is seeking an agent of the Belgian company, Kurtz, who has gone native. ‘Going native’ is a fearful possibility in such foreign places where ‘white civilisational’ values are easily eroded by savage nature and the seductions of the dark! The novel seems to suggest that such a fall is made possible by colonialism — its power and exploitation degrades everyone, not just the victims.
This is the novel that has had a huge impact on many writers and other creative artistes. You can see its echoes in films — the most famous being the 1979 film ‘Apocalypse Now’, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, which is set tellingly in Vietnam. Even the Indian English writer Arun Joshi’s novel ‘The Strange Case of Billy Biswas’ (1971) may have been inspired by it — though the novel questions who is civilised, the tribals or the others.
To get back to ‘Heart of Darkness’, Achebe criticised it as a racist novel. He identified in it the need he saw in the West — to see Africa as the other, the negative to European positive. Africa was what the white world could have become but for its “state of spiritual grace”. Achebe shows how Conrad contrasts the peace and quiet of western civilisation with the frenzy and noise of the dark continent. Conrad’s fear, Achebe says, is that western civilisation has emerged from darkness and could revert to it at the slightest provocation. The narrator describes Congo/Africa as prehistoric and the ‘frenzied’ Africans as prehistoric men!
Achebe points out that this is what is fascinating to the white Europeans, the fact that they are face-to-face with what they have evolved from, that the black bodies were human too, though this resemblance was ugly. Achebe shows how the Africans are further dehumanised by being denied language (except on two memorable occasions, they only grunt or babble). It is an essay I cannot do much justice to in this limited space but it ends with an observation that even in the late 20th century, the Education Editor of ‘The Christian Science Monitor’ reduced African and Indian languages to dialects. We know that was the position taken by missionaries with a number of languages in our country. But I cannot end there. We must reflect on whether we are very different in our attitudes to tribals and others in our own land. And then, we can ask ourselves what we think of Africa and Africans.
