As I began to engage with the critical essays on Ethnicity and Post-colonialism, I decided to revisit an essay I'd read in the past, Chinua Achebe's "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness." I first encountered this essay after reading Heart of Darkness for a Post-colonial literature class, and at the time, I really struggled with how to deal with some of the ideas that Achebe puts forth.
Issues like post-colonialism can be highly sensitive, and it can be hard, for me at least, to be critical of Achebe's essay. While I don't agree with everything Achebe has to say in this essay, at the same time, I realize that my own world view is very limited, and I can never fully understand or empathize with Achebe's perspective. What I found especially hard to understand about Achebe's essay was how we all could have had it so spectacularly wrong about Heart of Darkness.
Even before I first read Heart of Darkness, I had long heard the praise for the way the novella portrayed with unflinching clarity the brutality inflicted upon the people of Africa by European settlers. After I had read Conrad's work, I viewed the story in much the same way as the critics who had praised it, admiring the way Conrad showed the evils of the European settlers, and in particular, the terrible savagery of Kurtz.
I read Achebe immediately after I first read Conrad, and the essay raised some poignant questions for me about the way Heart of Darkness portrayed Africans. Did we view them as just metaphorical tools to act as a foil for Conrad's alter ego, Marlow? Was it really the Africans portrayed as savages, not the Europeans like Kurtz?
The complexity of my current beliefs on Heart of Darkness prevent me from succinctly articulately them here, but in short, though I still don't endorse all the beliefs that Achebe puts forth, I appreciate the way Achebe has opened my mind up to alternative views. It was only after reading Achebe's essay that I first began to realize the importance of viewing texts through a different lens, examining the way different groups might approach the text in a way that is in stark contrast to my own approach.
Though controversial, Achebe is, in my opinion, a good place for one to begin their post-colonial studies. He does what the best critics do, in that he raises questions for his readers and provides an alternative viewpoint through which we may examine familiar texts.
2 comments:
Hi Emily
I also came across Achebe's essay after reading Heart of Darkness in a postcolonial unit and found Achebe's views to be very different to mainstream criticism of the novella. Even if I did not agree with most of the arguments Achebe presented, I understood how he was coming to those conclusions. One sentence confused me, however, where Achebe states that "the West seems to suffer deep anxieties about the precariousness of its civilization and to have a need for constant reassurance by comparison with Africa” (p. 261). It was such a huge sweeping statement with no backup on Achebe's part, that it took me quite a while to get my head around it! I believe Conrad was actually trying to do the opposite, showing that even if the West has these anxieties, Africa poses more of a threat to white civilisation rather than reassurance. Do you agree that Achebe's statement seemed to be quite a random one within his essay?
Thanks
Ellie
(from Australia!)
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