Colonial Symbolism in Heart Of Darkness and Burmese Days

In this research paper I am going to argue that through Joseph Conrad s Heart Of Darkness And George Orwell’s Burmese Days colonialism was found to be an oppressive, hierarchical, and exploitative system conducted by white Europeans in order to control the natives and establish colonies, essentially under the pretext of bringing civilization and negating a ancient culture of their own.
Therefore, How do the two novels reflect upon relations between the colonizer and the colonized? What principles of colonialism be detected in the text? Do colonial powers control land, exploit the economy and environment, and enslave the indigenous people?

Postcolonial Reading of the Two Novels
A. Heart of Darkness

In Heart Of Darkness, Joseph Conrad explores the nature of colonialism. He ironically shows the truth about colonialism. Through his many symbolic characters, and through what he sees as the noble cause, he reveals the weak points of colonialism, and the capitalistic approach of the Europeans through Marlow’s journey in Congo. Conrad states through his character Charles Marlow:
Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for Maps. I would look for hours at South America,´-or-Africa,´-or-Australia, and those myself in all the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a man (but they all look that) I would put my finger on it and say, ‘When I grow up I will go there. (Conrad 9-10)
One of the many basic purposes of colonialism is the control of the native’s natural resources and culture, and this is resulted from the superior and oppressive mindset that Europeans have in regard to the “Blank spaces on the earth". Conrad primarily concentrates on what the Company informs the public-;- that they are going to the Congo to civilize the natives. The Europeans, highly propagated, aim at altering the people of the Congo region’s culture to a European one. Through a reciprocal process, the Europeans benefit from the help of the natives to obtain ivory, and the natives abandon their villages, looking for a better financial opportunity, and in the process they relinquish their own way of life.
Marlow admits that he “passed through several abandoned villages” (Conrad 30), and concludes that the natives have given up their earlier way of life so as to pursue a better life with the Europeans. While Marlow sails up the river when he hears the cries of the natives coming from behind the vegetation:
The prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to us, welcoming us—who could tell ? We were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings-;- we glided past like phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled, as sane men would be before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse. We could not understand because we were travelling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving hardly a sign and no memories. (Conrad 57-58)
This representation of the natives reflects the inclination of the European to cultivate, improve, and teach the natives in the European way of life. The Europeans think of the natives to be inferior, and therefore they must be cultured. In the unjustified ambition of civilizing the natives, there lies the true definition of colonialism. After the Africans abandoned everything to take up the European lifestyle, Conrad describes colonialism as a cruel and savage process. The natives are propagated by a temporal sense of safety and then enslaved by the European colonialists. The natives matter only if they supply Europeans with ivory and other materials. Marlow makes a very clear observation of the cruelty the natives are subject to, after they no longer can work. They are left to die slowly, starving, and easy subjects to disease. They are physically abused and in many occasions hanged so they could be an object lesson for others. Thereby, the Europeans who went to civilize the people of Africa were profusely relentless and savage themselves in regard of the population.
As a result of colonialism’s cruelty, the natives felt threatened and taken over by the colonialists, therefore the Europeans were in favor of such a course of events and used that in order to get what they wanted. “What can you expect? He came at them with thunder and lightning” – states the time when Kurtz showed up with weapons and scared them so bad that they gave him as much ivory as he wanted (Conrad 93). Conrad reveals the true purpose of colonialism – gaining control over all the natural wealth of the country for personal benefits. Civilizing the natives is not as of great importance for the Europeans as ivory is. In order to collect all the treasures they damage the land – "To tear treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire, with no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe" (Conrad 48). According to Marlow, colonialism began because of the ivory, which the Europeans were ‘hungry’ for. Kurtz, Europe’s personification, says: “my intended, my ivory, my station, my river, my--” (Conrad 80).
For Conrad, Kurtz represents the true face of colonialism and therefore the continuant longing and need for more ivory, domains, and slaves. Additionally, another aspect of colonialism can be detected. It is clear that Europeans intended to control the natives, yet they ended up being controlled by the incomprehensible wilderness, and what could happen To them when taken away from their institutionalized and organized communities, the coming speech is addressed to Charles Marlow as an explorer and reporter of the true European colonialism :
He had taken a high seat amongst the devils of the land—I mean literally, you can t understand. How could you ?—with solid pavement under your feet, surrounded by kind neighbours ready to cheer you´-or-to fall on you, stepping delicately between the butcher and the policeman, in the holy terror of scandal and gallows and lunatic asylums—how can you imagine what particular region of the first ages a man s untrammelled feet may take him into by the way of solitude—utter solitude without a policeman—by the way of silence—utter silence, where no warning voice of a kind neighbour can be heard whispering of public opinion ? These little things make all all the great difference.(Conrad 80-81)
It is basically the European man s heart that becomes uncontrolled, oppressive, and dark, Conrad wants to inform the unexperienced and civilized society about the truth of colonialism. Heart Of Darkness tells colonialism’s dark sides and its savage systems that aim at uprooting indigenous cultures, invading other people s homelands, for further control and capitals. Conrad reveals that colonialism is basically an unjustified action to dominate and exploit a foreign territory. All the way through Marlow’s journey up the Congo river and into the heart of darkness, colonialism and the European capitalist method is revealed.
As hes been seen, Heart of Darkness is a novella by Joseph Conrad about a narrated voyage up the Congo River into the Congo Free State in the so-called heart of Africa, the narrator, Charles Marlow tells his story to sailors aboard a boat anchored on the Thames river. This setting provides the basic frame for Marlow s story of his obsession with the ivory trader Kurtz, which enables Conrad to create a parallel between what Conrad calls "the greatest town on earth", London, and Africa as a place of darkness. For major analyses of the novella, this darkness is often linked to the primitiveness that every person possesses in his´-or-her mind and heart. However, many current critical racial readings have clearly revealed the racism and discrimination that was common during the author s lifetime. In this analytic attempt I am going to analyze "an Image of Africa :Racism in Conrad s Heart Of Darkness" by Chinua Achebe.
Thereby, what has the writer read and could be read as racist, and if so could the novella be viewed as only a failed attempt to deliver and criticize what was happening at that time?
Through the harsh behaviour and word choice of the characters and narrator, Conrad shows the uncivilized perception and treatment of the nonwhites that happened during the period of colonization. The problematic begins with the Nigerian author Chinua Achebe. In his essay he writes that "Heart Of Darkness projects the image of Africa as the ‘other world’, the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization, a place where man s vaunted intelligence and refinement are mocked by triumphant bestiality". In his point of view Conrad was a "throughgoing racist". His work is often understood as a triumph of anti-colonial spirit, yet it is as racist as you could normally expect nineteenth century writings about Africa to be.
Achebe s claim is that despite Conrad thinks poorly of just about everyone he writes about, he believes the Europeans to be the victims of colonization in addition to its perpetrators. The mysterious and biased de-script-ions that Conrad s narrator uses to refer to the Africans and also the places he encounters on his journey basically serve to represent, rather than a positive´-or-negative portrait of Africa and its people, no image at all.
Africa is a dangerous environment, Achebe asserts, devoid of all humanity, a space in which the wandering Europeans lose their sanity. By privileging the European perspective, he makes African characters wholly mute and indistinct masses of savagery, the novella celebrates the dehumanization of Africa and its people. Conrad reaffirms the old narrative of Europe s superiority over Africa, suggesting, by Achebe s account, that Africa should be avoided by Europeans because of its otherness, its mystery, ant its inferiority.
Throughout his essay, Achebe detects how Conrad used Africa as a background only, and how he "set Africa up as a foil to Europe", and how he repeatedly manifests the image of Africa as the ‘other world’ as previously mentioned. Through his own reading, Achebe shows that Conrad eliminates "the African as a human factor", thereby "reducing Africa to the role of props". So as to bolster these claims, he cites specific examples from the novella namely when Marlow and other representatives of Europe were in a steamer going down the Congo river encounter the denizens of Africa and there Achebe quotes Conrad : "We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unkown planet…The prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to us, welcoming us-who could tell ? We were cut off from the comprehension of oursurroundings -;- we glided past like phantoms, wondering and secretly appaled, as sane men would be before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse…The howled and leaped and spun and made horrid faces, but what thrilled you, was just the thought of their humanity-like yours-the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar.Ugly.Yes, it was ugly enough…". For Achebe here "lies the meaning of Heart Of Darkness and the fascination it holds over the Western mind" : Ugly.
With having shown that Africa and its people were underrepresented in the novella, Achebe provides another example when Conrad describes an African as "the savage and ‘’as edifying as seeing a dog in a parody of breeches and a feather that walking on his hind legs…". He comments on this passage by saying that "Conrad might not exactly admire savages clapping their hands and stamping their feet but they have at least the quality of being in their place, unlike this dog in a parody of breeches. For Conrad things being in their place is of the utmost importance". Additionally and more significantly, Achebe reports the difference in the attitude of the novelist when hedescribes the white and the African woman. For him "the most significant difference is the one implied in the author s giving of human expression to the white European woman and the keeping away from the African woman. The native woman is sees more of a "savage…wild-eyed and magnificent", possibly even "bestial". By comparing them to each other, he explains that the savage "fulfills a structural requirement of the story : a savage counterpart to the refined European woman". This lack of human expression and human characteristics is what Achebe says contributes to the great amount of racism within Conrad s novella.
Chinua Achebe applied a post colonial reading to the novella. He read something that he did not like and wrote about what he thought to be true. Achebe found Conrad to be a racist, yet as far as I am concerned I found Achebe to be both revealing and misleading to the reader for there are no facts but only readings. The essential question that this part poses is that : could Heart Of Darkness really be racist? In my point of view yes and no. We as modern readers have been taught that certain words such as nigger (which has been used a lot by Conrad) and particular phrases are socially inacceptable. Even Achebe admits that Conrad is " undoubtedly one of the great stylists of modern fiction and a good storyteller". For me I do not consider the story as racist, yet very simply as a-limit-ed attempt to criticize what was going on. Conrad failed because Marlow could not understand and deal with Africa since he is after all, a foreigner.

B. Burmese Days

As Has been seen, Postcolonial reading examines the basic connection between humans and the environment in literary texts. It tackles the relation between the harsh treatment of the natives and the exploitation of the land. In other words, it shows the colonizer’s numerous pretexts to exploit the colonized lands and their inhabitanats. In this sense , it could be said that post- colonialism and the land reveal that nature and people were exploited, oppressed, and therefore misrepresented during colonial period.
The issue of colonization tackles more than just the struggle of native people to adjust to a new culture, an imperialist culture to be exact, an additional issue must be tackled also, which is centrally the suppression and annihilation of the colonized’s former lives and culture that comes with the new presence of an Other, an Other who believes his culture to be superior, and deep in his heart he will say that he is entitled to exploit the land under the pretext of bringing civilization. Therefore, problematics of identity and inferiority surface in the consciousness of the colonized people. Here we therefore understand the significance of postcolonial reading as a way to examine what happens when two cultures clash, both materially and non-materially, based upon one of the culture s assumptions of superiority. The field is a -dir-ect and reliable way to examine an unconsciously changed culture through its literature.
Similarly, for George Orwell, it is pretty much the same way. Yet he states clearly his perspective on colonialism in his essay “Shooting an Elephant” :
Theoretically—and secretly, of course—I was all for the Burmese and all against their oppressors, the British. As for the job I was doing, I hated it more bitterly than I can perhaps make clear. In a job like that you see the -dir-ty work of Empire at close quarters. The wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of the lock-ups, the gray, cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men who had been flogged with bamboos—all these oppressed me with an intolerable sense of guilt. But I could get nothing into perspective. I was young and ill-educated and I had had to think out my problems in the utter silence that is imposed on every Englishman in the East. I did not even know that the British Empire is dying, still less did I know that it is a great deal better than the younger empires that are going to supplant it. All I knew was that I was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make my job impossible. (Orwell 2)
As noted in Heart Of Darkness, the same representation of and attitude towards the natives are also prevalent in Burmese Days. The Indians are also seen as the other. At one point in the novel, Flory, the main character in Burmese Days, suggests that the indians should also be welcomed at the English club. However, Ellis, another Englishman in the novel, reflects the true and typical attitude of the Englishmen,´-or-broadly speaking, the Eurocentric attitude towards the indigenous people by expressing the following words to Flory:
You oily swine! You Nigger’s Nancy Boy! You crawling, sneaking, bloody bastard! … Look at him, look at him! Letting us all down for the sake of a pot-bellied nigger! After all we’ve said to him! When we’ve only got to hang together and we can keep the stink of garlic out of this club forever. My God, wouldn’t it make you spew your guts up...? (Orwell 235)
Through Ellis words, Orwell expresses the prevalent racist and predominant British belief that the white-men are superior to the indians and that they should not be welcomed at the English club in India. They instead should be excluded utterly from the white higher league . Therefore, boundaries are set and the other is known.
It is important to note that throughout the novel, many of the Indians try to adopt the British manners and eventually become themselves imitative figures. This situation is resulted from the fact that Indians have been subjects to British culture and propaganda for so long that they embrace British values without questioning. With this in mind, the discussion between Flory and Dr.Veraswami, a native doctor and friend of the latter, is also very salient. Dr. Veraswami holds a pro-British view when he addresses Flory :
My friend, it is pathetic to me to hear you talk so. It is truly pathetic... You are forgetting the Oriental character. How is it possible to have developed us, with our apathy and superstition? At least you have brought to us law and order... Consider that there are also other achievements of your countrymen. They constructed roads, they irrigate deserts, they conquer famines, they build schools, they set up hospitals, they combat plague, cholera, leprosy, smallpox, venereal disease... Your people are truly the better... Behold the degeneracy of the East without the Europeans! (Orwell 42)
Dr. Veraswami is very much in favor of the British that he feels thankful and grateful to his colonizers. While he does not see the evil cause of colonialism, Flory, Although an English, explains that the English are in India for exploiting the land and submit its people, and not for the sake of a philanthropic cause.
Under the light of the examples given above, it can be suggested that Orwell in Burmese Days defines the events in Burma as the end of British Imperialism. Also the power-based relationship between the English people and the Burmese people is understood to the reader through the symbol of the English club in Burma. In the novel, Dr. Veraswami’s inclination to join this club and his rejection by the British officers explains the fact that they could not have a middle ground due to the European dualistic mindset and their perception of the Indian as the other. Although he is educated and a doctor, no white man admits Dr. Veraswami’s willingness to be a member of the club. Being an Indian is seen as a barrier for his membership to the club. Although he is in favor of the British culture and while imitating the Englishman, he is removed from the elit of white men. He feels, in his own country, a stranger. He does not challenge the British presence in Burma, on the contrary, he supports it and, mindlessly, he believes in the Englishmen s supremacy.
Dr. Veraswami can be seen as a representative of the indigenous people, who accept colonialism and who try to co-operate with the British. Additionally, only Flory confesses that contrary to the common assumption Britain brings civilization to the colonies, in fact they destroy the unique culture of the colonies.
As has been noted, in George Orwell’s Burmese Days the true definition of the white man s burden has been analyzed. Orwell reveals that Englishmen are in Burma in order to exploit the land as well as rebutts the arguments of bringing civilization, in fact they destroy´-or-rather efface the Burmese culture. Furthermore, Flory’s committing suicide can be apprehended as his belief that English existence in Burma is not lawful and should come to an end. Flory represents the British empire as a system which can not exist any longer. Therefore, in the novel by putting an end to his existence as a colonizer in Burma, he puts an end to colonialism in Burma and subsequently free the other from its oppressive forces.

Conclusion
To conclude, both Orwell and Conrad share the same view in regard to colonialism. This is through demonstrating the inhuman and exploitative motives that were behind British imperialism, And through the ending of their both protagonists, both writers personified the weakness and the end of the British empire.


WORKS CITED

Achebe, C. and Achebe, C. An image of Africa. London: Penguin. 2010.

Conrad, Joseph. Heart Of Darkness: And, The Secret Sharer. New York : Signet Classic, 1997.

Orwell, George. Shooting an Elephant, and Other Essays. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950.

Orwell, George. Burmese Days. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace & Co, 1962.

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