Achebe on Conrad

[jbor]

http://www.worldbank.org/wbi/lectures/africa-text.html

[ ... ]

"Or let us take another much admired 20th century figure, the first writer,
as it happens, to grace the cover of the newly founded _Time_ magazine. I am
talking, of course, about that extraordinary Polish-born, French-speaking,
English sea captain and novelist, Joseph Conrad. He recorded in his memoir
his first experience of seeing a black man in these remarkable words:


    A certain enormous buck nigger encountered in Haiti fixed my conception
    of blind, furious, unreasoning rage, as manifested in the human animal
    to the end of my days. Of the nigger I used to dream for years
    afterwards.

My attention was first drawn to these observations of Conrad's in a
scholarly work, not very widely known, by Jonah Raskin. Its title was the
_Mythology of Imperialism_, and it was published in 1971 by Random House. I
mention this because Mr. Raskin's title defines the cultural source out of
which Conrad derived his words and ideas. Conrad's fixation, admitted so
openly by him in his memoir and conspicuously present in his fiction, has
gone largely unremarked in literary and scholarly evaluations of his work.
Why? Because it is grounded quite firmly in that mythology of imperialism
which has so effectively conditioned contemporary civilization and its modes
of education. Imperial domination required a new language to describe the
world it had created and the people it had subjugated. Not surprisingly,
this new language did not celebrate these subject peoples nor toast them as
heroes. Rather it painted them in the most lurid colors. Africa, being
European imperialism's prime target, with hardly a square foot escaping the
fate of imperial occupation, naturally received the full measure of this
adverse definition. Add to that the massive derogatory endeavor of the
previous three centuries of the Atlantic slave trade to label black people,
and we can begin to get some idea of the magnitude of the problem we may
have today with the simple concept: Africa Is People."

[ ... ]

Don't know where it's actually from: perhaps _Notes on Life and Letters_
(1921) or _Last Essays_ (1926), or from the Karl and Davies volumes of the
_Collected Letters_? I don't doubt its accuracy, but like you I'd like to
see the quote in context.

best


----------
>From: Terrance <lycidas2 at earthlink.net>
>

>
>
> jbor wrote:
>
>
> That's from Jonah Raskin's "The Mythology of Imperialism
> (N.Y.: Random, 1971) 143
>
> Can't find that on the net. Do you know when Conrad wrote
> this?
>
> From that passage it's seems that Conrad had a problem.
> Achebe also cites
> a psychological study. But still, there is a lot of
> conflicting evidence.