warp & woof,

[Otto Sell]

>
>
> Otto Sell wrote:
> >
> > >
> > > I don't think that Achebe has forgotten something, he makes
> > > many of the same points you have, he says, it's not Conrad's
> > > fault, he was born 1857, christians... and so on.
> > >
> >
> > But how can he than say that Conrad is a "bloody colonist"? He must know
> > that this is not true.
> >
> > Otto
>
> Let me just quote from the essay I have referring to so we
> don't get confused.
>
>

This is a very good idea.

>
>
> "The point of my observations should be quite clear by now,
> namely that Joseph Conrad was a thorougoing racist."
>
> Africa as setting and backdrop which eliminates the African
> as human factor. Africa as a metaphysical battlefield devoid
> of all recognizable humanity, into which the wandering
> European enters at his peril. Can nobody see the
> preposterous and perverse arrogance in thus reducing Africa
> to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European
> mind?

Of course I can see it and Conrad felt it too - he chose it because this was
what had happened to people he had met or heard about. Conrad is the one who
does not reduce Africa to a "beautiful" or "strange" setting, contrary to
his contemporaries. I don't agree at all with Mr. Achebe here. This could
have happened to any mind and it has so to African minds after the Europeans
went.

> But that is not even the point. The real question is
> the dehumanization of Africa and Africans which this age
> long attitude has fostered and continues to foster in the
> world. And the question is whether a novel that celebrates
> this dehumanization, which depersonalizes a portion of the
> human race, can be called a great work of art. My answer is:
> No, it cannot. I do not doubt Conrad's great talents...But
> all this has been discussed in the last fifty years. His
> obvious racism has, however, not been addressed. And it is
> high time it was!
>
> From Norton Critical Edition, HoD, Third Edition, Edited by
> Robert Kimbrough
>
>
> Chinua Achebe, "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart
> of Darkness" (An amended version (1987) of the Second
> Chancellor's Lecture at University of Massachusetts,
> Amherst, February 18, 1975.

I'm sure I could find some more criticism on Achebe's handling of women
affairs in his novels if I wanted too.
http://landow.stg.brown.edu/post/nigeria/women.html
This is very lame.

It was high time that someone told me what the *real* questions are:
Proverbs for Paranoids, 3: If they can get you asking the wrong questions,
they don't have to worry about answers.
Means: put it in the right context and of course you can prove that Conrad
is a racist, but than we, Terrance, are necessarily and inevitably racists
too, even if we able to love "Hod" and "Things Fall Apart" the same.

Otto

ps must get to the cab now for sat-night