Dark Paradises: David Dabydeen s and Abdulrazak Gurnah s Postcolonial Re-Writings of Heart of Darkness

Pietro Deandrea (University of Torino, Italy) pietro.deandrea@unito.it Dark Paradises: David Dabydeen s and Abdulrazak Gurnah s Postcolonial Re-Writings of Heart of Darkness Every generation, it seems, feels the need to recycle Conrad s Heart of Darkness, that voyage into the interior blackness of the human condition. William Golding had done it in the 1950s for middle-aged readers like himself. Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola s 1979 film, had recycled Conrad for thirty-yearolds those, that is, who ten years earlier had been burning their draft-cards. Alex Garland s The Beach did Conrad for the late 1990s. John Sutherland, Reading the Decades (152) 1. Writing Back and Rewriting Postcolonial literatures have undoubtedly been founded, amongst other things, on the notion of writing back. Generally speaking, the concept of rewriting is far from being exclusive to postcolonial literatures, but should be contextualized in wider concepts regarding various forms of communication within literature and the ways in which texts speak to texts, such as classical imitatio or postmodern intertextuality. More specifically, in their writing-back dialogue with canonical books from the centre of the Empire, many postcolonial works show some specific traits connected with the ontological basis of the postcolonial realm, ie those cultural forms which mediate, challenge or reflect upon the relations of domination and subordination economic, cultural, political between (and often within) nations, races or cultures, which characteristically have their roots in the history of modern European colonialism and imperialism and which, equally

characteristically, continue to be apparent in the present era of neo-colonialism. (Moore-Gilbert 1997, 12) This implies an attempt at subverting and undermining all cultural products which replicate those colonial paradigms that have been (and sometimes still are) taken as axiomatic and universal, ie the inferiority of the colonized and the righteousness of Western domination. The Empire Writes Back, one of the texts which established (from its very subtitle) the definition postcolonial, albeit still a very controversial one, quoted Rushdie on the issue: A characteristic of dominated literatures is an inevitable tendency towards subversion, and a study of the subversive strategies employed by post-colonial writers would reveal both the configurations of domination and the imaginative and creative responses to this condition. Directly and indirectly, in Salman Rushdie s phrase, the Empire writes back to the imperial centre. (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin 1989, 33) The most direct version of this phenomenon is certainly the re-writing of works belonging to the British canon, such as the South African J.M. Coetzee s Foe (1986) vs. Daniel Defoe s Robinson Crusoe (1719) or the Caribbean Jean Rhys s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) vs. Charlotte Brontë s Jane Eyre (1847). This essay intends to study two such examples: Caribbean David Dabydeen s The Intended (1991) and Tanzanian Abdulrazak Gurnah s Paradise (1994) re-write Joseph Conrad s Heart of Darkness, addressing it more or less overtly. Heart of Darkness s voyage into the Congo has inevitably lent itself to several postcolonial reflections, triggering off an ongoing critical debate around the novel s supposed eurocentrism/racism or anti-colonial stance: does Conrad s inhuman depiction of Congolese natives makes him a bloody racist? (Achebe 1977, 788) Or, rather, should one agree with the number of vigorous defences of Heart of Darkness highlighting Conrad s critical stance towards

imperialism and also the wide acceptance of racist language and categories in the late Victorian period? (Brantlinger 1996, 277) The debate is still being nourished by a wide range of subtle intermediate positions between these two extremes nay, between and beyond them: as Sutherland s introductory epigraph shows, rewritings of Heart of Darkness do not always fall into the postcolonial category. This world-literature resonance might be explained by referring to all the interpretations of the novel that are only marginally (sometimes remotely, to say the least) connected with the historical phenomenon of colonialism. Various critical schools have been reading Marlow s voyage as a parable for self-discovery, self-analysis, the classical descent into the Underworld, man s failure to connect with others, language s failure to communicate, and so on. This is probably why any attempt at writing about it must necessarily also touch on several schools of criticism from the Anglo-American academia, such as psychoanalysis, reader-response, deconstruction, new historicism, gender, and so on to the point of marginalising any colonial connotations. The Nigerian poet and critic Niyi Osundare, for instance, complained about the several racial blindnesses of a Case Study in Contemporary Criticism dedicated to the novel (1993, 11-19). 1 Not only does this essay intend to focus on how The Intended and Paradise communicate with Heart of Darkness from a postcolonial perspective, it also shows how they interact with Western critical theories on it. They are both fresh, genuine, moving buldungsromane. Dabydeen and Gurnah are literary academics based in the UK, though; an analysis of their novels can bring to the fore how theory-informed they are behind their apparent simplicity and 1 Osundare was referring to a volume edited by Ross C. Murfin (New York: St Martin s Press, 1989). Curiously, the second edition of this volume (1996) is the source of many critical interpretations of Heart of Darkness included here; if compared to the first one, its selection of essays seems more postcolonially oriented, as if the editor had taken heed of observations such as Osundare s. In his Editor s Preface, Murfin writes that the second edition was undertaken to produce a more useful and current resource for introducing students to the latest trends in contemporary criticism, and signals its references to Achebe s notorious essay, so influential in recent postcolonial and cultural investigations of Conrad s work (viiviii).

straightforwardness (and biting humour, in Dabydeen s case). In other words, they offer a chance of employing fiction to discuss theory, and not the other way round. Furthermore, they seem to hint at ways of seeing Heart of Darkness and its related theory in the context of the third millennium and of its neo-colonial phenomena. 2. The Intended The Intended is a re-visitation of Heart of Darkness in manifold ways and contains (from its very title) a great number of references to Conrad s novel, both overt and implicit. The first parallelism between the two books is structural. Dabydeen s work revolves around a fourfold voyage that the 15-year-old unnamed protagonist undergoes, strongly reminiscent of Marlow s penetration into the heart of the Congo. First of all, readers follow the protagonist s voyage into the heart of sex; his sentimental/sexual education plays an important role from the very inception of the novel, steering his fears, desires, and discussions with his age-mates. The mysteries of sex are described as a world of darkness, like the darkness of the X-rated cinema they attend (7-8). Secondly, the sexual theme is developed side by side with a voyage (presumably at the beginning of the 1970s) into the heart of London. Coming from the Indian subcontinent, the protagonist and his friends represent a significant though limited portion of London s cultural, religious and linguistic multiculturalism. The former, for example, is an Indian West-Indian Guyanese (5), descendant of those indentured labourers who migrated to the Caribbean in the 19 th century to work in its plantation system. This circle of youths is riven by internal conflicts (devout vs. westernised, Pakistanis vs. Indians) and is threatened by external violence. When Nasim ends up in hospital after being

attacked by a racist gang, his bandaged figure becomes for the protagonist a disquieting symbol of his own racial identity: I hated him. A strange desire to hurt him, to kick him, overcame me. [ ] He was a little, brown-skinned, beaten animal. His wounds were meant for all of us, he had suffered them for all of us, but he had no right to. It was Nasim s impotence which was so maddening, the shamefulness of it. I knew immediately that Patel, Shaz and I could never be his friend again, because he had allowed himself to be humiliated. We would avoid him in school because he reminded us of our own weakness, our own fear. [ ] I knew then that I was not an Asian but that these people were yet my kin and my embarrassment. I wished I were invisible. (14-15) Such self-denial triggers off a series of connections typical of the chronological and geographical shifts characterising the protagonist s first person narration analogous to Marlow s disrespect for linear storytelling. In the space of five pages, for instance, that shame leads the narrating voice to recall his embarrassment when seeing Asians in the London Tube, which in turns reminds him of his Guyanese native places before moving back to the Tube setting (15-20). This is where readers meet the protagonist s third voyage, the one into the heart of his origins, which unveils the root of that identitarian discomfiture. His memories of Guyana depict a rural society which envisions England as a sort of myth, an idealised promised land. Symbolic names like Albion village and the Duke of Kent bus are only the most evident examples of this attitude to British culture, a recurrent trait in the popular culture of many postcolonial societies (see, for instance, Fanon 1967, 138). The young protagonist has been sent to England to live with his alcoholic father, who has abandoned him to the care of the Welfare System. His exploration of the British model is also conducted by way of literature, which constitutes the fourth facet of his voyage of discovery: it helps him make sense

of the first three, and it is the one most relevant to investigating Dabydeen s reinterpretation of Heart of Darkness. The narrator s passionate study of literature is a potential way, through successful exams and access to a prestigious university, to abandon his poor financial situation. Besides, it also offers readers an insight into the British canon from a peculiar, non-canonical, sometimes satirical perspective, touching on, amongst others, authors like Blake, Chaucer, Milton, Shakespeare, Shelley and Wordsworth. In the course of the novel, this will imply a shifting perspective on the British literary canon less respectful, more postcolonially subversive. This is evident from the very first pages of the book, in the comical description of Patel s G.C.E. examination. Having memorised two grandiloquent passages on dawn and dusk provided by his uncle and meant to introduce and close his paper, he began to fill the page, pouring out his exquisite soul, its emotions recollected in the tranquillity of the examination room. But after a while he realizes that the essay title quotes the first lines of Blake s The Tyger, in the forest of the night : Fuck! They wanted the tiger described in the night-time, whereas he had begun his essays in daylight. What was he going to do? [ ] he would switch the memorised passages [ ] The tiger would be hunted by men bearing torches and riding an elephant because it had snatched an Indian village baby whilst the family were asleep. It would be caught and killed early the next morning, and the meat given to the Untouchables [ ] since only they were cannibalistic enough (Patel seemed to remember his mother saying this) to eat man-eating animals. He put pen to paper once again, congratulating himself for his cleverness in manoeuvring out of a tight spot ( unlike that bloody stupid tiger, he thought), imagining the surprised look on his uncle s face when he told him of the predicament and ingenious solution. (10-12) Significantly, Conrad s novel enters into play only with the introduction of Joseph, a West Indian of African origins who meets the protagonist in a Boys Home run by the Social Service. After some periods in Borstals for car-related

crimes, he has turned into a Rastafarian interested in Black History. He cannot read or write, speaks in rambling patois, is jobless and aimless, and is not even sure about his own age. Nevertheless, he offers the narrator a new, decentred outlook on life and literature through his off-the-wall eloquence (Christopher 1991, 1016) and sheer power of creative vision. When he attends the protagonist s lessons to Shaz, he is not very respectful of formal critical skills. On the subject of poetical metre, for instance, he objects: Poetry is like bird, he said, and it gliding or lifting and plunging, wings outspread or beating and curving, and the whole music is in the birdwing. Birdshit! Shaz retorted on my behalf, convinced of my superior book knowledge of Form. Joseph was equally adamant. What you doing with your pentating and strokee and all dem rules is putting iron-bar one by one in a spacious room so the bird flying round and round and breaking beak and wing against the wall trying to reach the sunlight. You turning all the room in the universe and in the human mind into bird cage. But what you know about poetry? Shaz challenged him, and you can t even write your own name! I don t need to write it, Joseph said fiercely, I know the sound of it, (95-96). Joseph applies the same oral, instinctual approach to Heart of Darkness, entering the abovementioned endless debate on Conrad in his own peculiar way. Many pages of The Intended are dedicated to Marlow s story, thus turning the novel s intertextuality to what Gérard Genette would call metatextuality (1982, 10). Joseph s questions about the grove of death passage ( But what bout the way he talk bout black people? [ ] the bit about them lying under the trees dying? ) are not to be satisfied with the protagonist s formal, abstract reply ( That s part of the theme of suffering and redemption which lies at the core of the novel s concern, I stated cogently and intelligently, putting the book down ; 97-98; cf. Conrad 1996, 31-32), and therefore inspire in this illiterate

Afro-character a passionate interest in the novel. He starts voicing Conrad s voiceless Congolese characters, likewise belonging to oral cultures, those victims of colonialism Achebe and others complain about. From a theory-oriented perspective, what Joseph seems to reject is a widespread critical tendency to universalize the theme(s) of the novel. In his Reader-Response essay on Heart, Peter J. Rabinowitz focuses on the critics community and defines this tendency as the Rule of Abstract Displacement, where good literature is always treated as if it were something else (1996, 139). Regarding Conrad s novel, this rule points towards specific directions such as the Nature of Man or, more deconstructively, the failure of language (1996, 138): while all these critics point us toward different things which are designed as primary, they all point us away from the same thing which is deemed to be secondary: Conrad s specific descriptions of the horrors of an imperialist venture, precisely those aspects of the novel that might prompt a reader to think seriously about the problems of racism. (1996, 142) Rabinowitz considers this attitude as having clear political implications (1996, 143, 144). 2 Joseph appears to be aware of the political implications behind the protagonist s rarefied suffering and redemption and unmasks the latter s abstract displacement, but does not limit his own comprehension of Conrad to a thumpingly pedestrian colonial reading. His hearing of the novel is enough for him to develop a theory on colours which shows an understanding of Conrad s 2 One should also add that non-colonial interpretations of the novel do not necessarily end up putting the issue of colonialism aside. Zdzislaw Najder, for example, while focusing on Conrad s rapport with the classical world, agrees with Lillian Feder and Robert O. Evans in claiming that Heart cannot be reduced to an alleged descent into the abyss of the unconscious [ ] The underworlds of Homer, Virgil, and Dante are visions of man s idea of eschatology; but they are peopled with other, historically real and very specific, human beings. They also refer, painfully, to the concrete social and political conditions of the human existence of their respective times (2005, 24).

symbolic style (incidentally, could his name be the same as Conrad s only by coincidence?) without renouncing an anti-colonial stance: The white light of England and the Thames is the white sun over the Congo that can t mix with the green of the bush and the black skin of the people. All the colours struggling to curve against each other like rainbow, but instead the white light want to blot out the black and the green and reduce the world to one blinding colour. [ ] The white man want to clear everything away, clear away the green bush and the blacks and turn the whole place into ivory which you can t plant or smoke or eat. Ivory is the heart of the white man. (98-99) 3 Joseph floods the protagonist with questions, the most intriguing of which concerns colours again, ie the chromatic conspicuousness of the Russian harlequin (99). Moreover, his approach to Conrad does not prevent him from grasping the subtle conception of the undecidability of language, at the basis of the deconstructive critical approach. Starting from the ambiguities and hesitancies of Marlow s narration, J. Hillis Miller, one of the most distinguished scholars of Deconstruction, claims that the novel is posited on the impossibility of achieving its goal of revelation, or, [ ] it is a revelation of the impossibility of revelation (1996, 212) an interpretation that Rabinowitz considers emblematic of his Rule of Abstract Displacement. Despite his markedly racial reading of the novel, Joseph performs his own intuitive elaboration this further established interpretive paradigm applied to Heart: the postmodern, deconstructive conception of language as supple impossible to encase in monolithic meanings: 3 The quotation above can also suggest a grasp of the exterminating project implicit in the colonial enterprise, seen by Hannah Arendt as the root of 20 th -century totalitarian genocides (1958, 185-207); in her description of the horrors of European imperialism in Africa, she quotes Heart of Darkness extensively (see especially 189-91). Sven Lindqvist later developed this idea into an unsettling study of the connections between 19 th -century European scientific culture and colonial and totalitarian exterminations of entire peoples, likewise employing the imagery of Heart as a constant term of reference (1998, passim).

Words are so full of cleverness [ ] I wish I could learn how to read and write them. Every word is cat with nine separate lives, it come up to you for tickling and stroking and feeding, or it wander away and walk along neighbour s garden fence, or it crouch and concentrate when it see bird or it fall asleep under the bonnet of nearest parked car. That s silly, Shaz retaliated, words are just a bunch of letters we form to identify things. How many lives the word and have for example? Joseph took up the challenge: without and the whole sentence would collapse like one of those high-rise blocks of flats in Stockwell. And was the steel girder holding up the flesh of concrete. [ ] And was like Marlow s rivets he was always crying out for that made the boat hold together. (103) The passage above makes clear how Joseph carries his autodidactic conception of language to bear on his own life experience and on Marlow s story, when faced with Shaz s simplistic reply which is reminiscent of the surpassed notion on the pre-eminence of the referent, and of the one-to-one identification between signifier and signified. This realization inevitably impinges on the growing decentred perspective of the protagonist, by way of Joseph; with regard to this, Roberta Cimarosti rightly points to the convergence between colonial and linguistic issues, whereby the protagonist gains awareness, which his friend has conveyed to him, that meanings are arbitrary constructions and that [ ] the manipulations of forms and structures become central activities in man s existence. (1997, 288) In the course of the novel, Joseph s curiosity about Heart of Darkness will develop into an attempt at shooting a video based on it (a form of art not requiring written words; 108). Still later, he develops this into an interest for nothingness and colourlessness (133, 164) as if to neutralise historical forms of domination possibly his own personal version of Conrad s nihilism. From such premises, his parable will meet a tragic conclusion; the sadder wiser narrator,

with a brilliant career at Oxford looming ahead, will be left to make sense of what happened to his friend. 3. Paradise Like The Intended, Abdulrazak Gurnah s Paradise (1994) is a bildungsroman. If compared to the former, its engagement with the issues raised by the debate around Heart of Darkness is less overt and metatextual, but nonetheless substantial. Its narration focuses on the formation of the twelve-year-old Yusuf, another (coincidental?) namesake of Conrad s, who lives in German-ruled Tanganyika at the beginning of the 20 th century. All non-europeans seem to be under the spell of the Germans famed powers: The Germans were afraid of nothing. [ ] One of the boys said that his father had seen a German put his hand in the heart of a blazing fire without being burnt, as if he had been a phantom. (7) Such a god-like aura, recurring later in the novel (62, 72) instantly recalls Kurtz s supernatural reputation among Conrad s natives (Conrad 1996, 72). Yusuf comes from a family speaking Ki-Swahili, the language from the coast that is infused with many Arab terms and was used by Arab traders as a lingua franca to communicate with all the ethnic groups of the area (today it is Tanzania s main national language). Yusuf s father considers Swahilis superior by virtue of their Muslim religion: We are surrounded by savages, he said. Washenzi, who have no faith in God and who worship spirits and demons which live in trees and rocks. They like nothing better than to kidnap little children and make use of them as they wish. (6; see also 99-100)

He prefers his son to play with Indian children, who in their turn despise Yusuf: such a stereotyped language of othering (Jacobs, 6) is often repeated in the course of the novel. This complexly layered colonial society from German dominators down to the savages living in the heart of the continent inevitably echoes one of the critical remarks often levelled at Conrad: his description of natives as a single, undifferentiated body of people: It is clearly not part of Conrad s purpose to confer language on the rudimentary souls of Africa, writes Achebe with bitter irony (1977, 786; cf. Conrad 1996, 67). Paradise does not homogenise all non-europeans simply as Africans, and reproduces all the socio-ethnic strata of that specific African region. Some recent criticism has attempted a similar approach to Conrad s novel and not always to the detriment of the Polish author s viewpoint. Robert Hampson s analysis of the languages present in Heart, revolving around the Russian Harlequin, is a case in point, and represents an interest in the issue of cultural translation typical of postcolonial-oriented criticism. Marlow s failure to recognise the Cyrillic script this character has written, Hampson argues, opens a gap between Marlow and Conrad because the latter was certainly familiar with that alphabet. And, Hampson continues, this is particularly important in relation to the representation of African languages in the text. Marlow sees the natives as speaking amazing words that resembled no sounds of human language (Conrad 1996, 84), whereas the Russian sailor shows an ability to discriminate: I don t understand the dialect of this tribe (1996, 78). Marlow s incomprehension, then, or at least its linguistic facet, is positioned as a far cry from Conrad s perspective (Hampson 1999, 203-204) In Paradise, Yusuf is soon plunged into a darkling environment. When he leaves his family with Uncle Aziz by train, his fears reverberate Marlow s voyage, as in the following sentence about a railway tunnel: The darkness outside was a measureless void, and he feared that the train was too deep in it to

be able to return safely (19). When they reach their coastal destination, he starts working in Aziz s shop, and slowly realises this man is not his uncle: actually, he has had to abandon his family in order to pay his father s debt with the wealthy merchant Aziz. Thus begins Yusuf s involvement with trade and trading caravans towards the interior of Africa. Historically, the local riches usually traded at the time were gums, oil, skins and corals, which were all exchanged with the natives by offering them weapons, beads and silk. The 18 th century had also seen the boom of the slave trade. Most of all, in the 19 th century Zanzibar became the biggest world exporter of ivory, creating a commercial empire that extended far into Central Africa (Jacobs, 3-4). Therefore, Paradise offers another perspective on the commercial penetration into the African heart of darkness, this time from the opposite direction westwards rather than eastwards. Not only is such a perspective useful to view the scramble for ivory under a more global light (Aziz is aware of the Belgians moves towards the heart of the continent; 91), but it can also suggest further discussion on one of the most debated issues around Conrad s novel, ie cannibalism. The postcolonial critic Patrick Brantlinger reconstructs the cruel, bloody 1891-94 war between Belgians and Arabs, both employing native soldiers; heads were stuck on poles and bodies eaten by both sides, newspapers reported, and Conrad was likely to use them as sources for his emphasis upon cannibalism: the omission of Arabs means that Conrad does not treat cannibalism as a result of war, but as an everyday custom of the Congolese, even though he probably saw no evidence of it when he was there. [ ] In simplifying his memories and sources, Conrad arrived at the dichotomous or manichean pattern of the imperialist adventure romance, a pattern radically at odds with any realist, exposé intention. (Brantlinger 1996, 286)

Brantlinger s is not the only intriguing analysis resulting from a reconstruction of the context in which Heart was born. The gender critic Sally Ledger, for instance, approaches the matter from a seemingly New Historicist perspective, thanks to a study of the imagery of Marlow s voyage side by side with some cultural products of that period, such as Stanley s In Darkest Africa (1890), William Booth s Darkest England and the Way Out (1890), Margaret Harkness s In Darkest London (1891) and other contemporary novels about British cities. In emphasizing the similarities between Conrad s Congo and London s East End as it emerged in such texts, she claims that The relationship between Conrad s text and the urban slumland fiction of the finde-siècle has in general been understated by literary critics. [ ] One of the most striking coincidences [ ] is the suggestion of cannibalism attributed to the indigenous populations both of Whitechapel and of the African Congo. (1999, 222) Ledger also notices how Marlow s reference to the famous explorer John Franklin omits to mention how his lost crew desperately resorted to cannibalism (1999, 223; cf. Conrad 1996, 18-19). Similarly to Brantlinger, then, she focuses on cannibalism to theorize in Conrad s work a shift of non-african features onto African people and cultures, a projection onto foreign climes of conflicts and tensions on home soil at a time when both the working class and women were challenging the socio-political and economic status quo. (1999, 217) When Yusuf is taken on a journey by Aziz, he feels a terror reminiscent of Marlow s metaphysical one in the face of the forest: The terror he had felt was not the same as fear, he said. It was as if he had no real existence, as if he was

living in a dream, over the edge of extinction (Gurnah 1995, 180). 4 He also becomes aware of how trade has spread its corrupting influence over the whole of society, beside his non-free status of human pawn: You ll come and trade with us, the caravan leader Mohammed Abdalla ominously tells him, and learn the difference between the ways of civilization and the ways of the savage (52). Such words are re-echoed a few pages later, when some members of the caravan exchange a series of stereotyped comments on the Masai (59). Civilized commerce, then, is identified as the root of the above-mentioned inequality and subjection among different ethnic groups including, but not limiting itself to, imperialist European capitalism (Jacobs, 4). This is obviously reminiscent of Marlow s lugubrious reflection on the merry dance of death and trade (Conrad 1996, 29) an image that, similarly to Gurnah s, points its accusing finger at European bourgeois capitalism but at the same time goes beyond that, in his case evoking the 15 th century genre of the danse macabre. 5 In the course of the plot, the novel s title is referred to through a series of ideal loci that, to Yusuf, assume the guise of paradises: Aziz s garden back on the coast, the mountains he admires on his first trip. Predictably, such heavens will not withstand the assault of the abovementioned trade-infested reality and its resulting commodification of human beings, which viciously leads each group to become a potential oppressor (Schwerdt 1997, 94-95) and will wipe away any possible exoticism from the novel s scenario (Bardolph 1997, 78). Aged seventeen, when Aziz finally takes him deep into the interior, he is a witness to tributes paid to local sultans and widespread violence among idyllic landscapes (129-77). Aziz s words on the past glories of Arab slave-dealers (a 4 Like The Intended, Paradise is sprinkled with references to Conrad s text: compare, for instance, Yusuf on his journey, feeling he was a soft-fleshed animal which had left its shell and was now caught in the open, a vile and grotesque beast blindly smearing its passage across the rubble and the thorns (179-180), with Marlow s Kafkian description of his steamer, a sluggish beetle crawling on the floor of a lofty portico (Conrad 1996, 51) 5 This could also be linked to Ricardo s definition of society and life in Conrad s Victory, the buying and selling gang that bosses this rotten show (1995, 113).

kind of goods he always refused to trade in) before the ruthless Germans dominance convey the utter ruin brought by commerce in these regions: When they started to come here, buying slaves from these parts was like picking fruit off a tree. They didn t even have to capture the victims themselves, although some of them did so for the pleasure of it. There were enough people eager to sell their cousins and neighbours for trinkets. And the markets were open everywhere [ ] Indian merchants gave credit to these Arabs to trade in ivory and slaves. The Indian Mukki were businessmen. They lent money for anything, so long there was profit in it. As did the other foreigners, but they let the Mukki act for them. (131-32) After crossing Lake Tanganyika and further hardships, they finally reach the town where ivory should be traded. This is where the local leader Chatu aggressively treats Aziz s caravan, explaining his subjects behaviour as if he were voicing Conrad s voiceless Congolese, analogously to Joseph in The Intended: You have come here to do us harm. We have suffered from others like you who have preceded you, and have no intention of suffering again. They came among our neighbours and captured them and took them away. [ ] All these goods you brought with you belong to us, because all the goods produced by the land are ours. So we are taking them away from you. (160) Even though Aziz and his men are rescued by the Germans, the trading caravan has failed to collect the planned gains. Back to the coast, Yusuf has to make sense of these events while he falls in love with the young Amina, who lives in Aziz s house. Once again, though, naive sentiments can afford no place of their own in a society dominated by reified relations of subjugation and servility verging on complicity. Amina turns out to be Khalil s sister, married to Aziz as a repayment of her father s debt. In addition, Aziz s first wife unsuccessfully tries to seduce Yusuf, thereby turning from oppressed and secluded wife to

corrupting oppressor. Yusuf, then, comes to a full realisation of the rottenness of that way of life: he had done nothing shameful, it was the way they had forced him to leave, forced all of them to leave, which was shameful. Their intrigue and hatred and shameful acquisitiveness had forced even simple virtues into tokens of exchange and barter. (236) Therefore, Yusuf takes the most surprising decision. When German soldiers forcefully recruit natives by force to use them as porters in the First World War, he first hides as he was advised to do; then, when the column of soldiers and captives has left, he is confronted with an epiphanic scene, yet another image from the novel involving the misery of dogs: he found several piles of excrement, which the dogs were already eagerly nibbling at. The dogs glanced suspiciously at him, and [ ] shifted slightly to shield their food from his covetous gaze. He looked for a moment in astonishment, surprised at this squalid recognition. The dogs had known a shit-eater when they saw one. [ ] Now, as he watched the obliviously degraded hunger of the dogs, he thought he knew what it would grow into. The marching column was still visible when he heard a noise like the bolting of doors behind him in the garden. He glanced round quickly and then ran after the column with smarting eyes. (247; see also 2, 26, 52, 56, 79, 186) Thus Paradise closes. In order to break the degrading deadlock enthralling him, Yusuf chooses unaware to risk the Germans ruthlessness and the carnage of war, to follow the dreadful course of European history and see where it takes him. 6 He does not conform to the prevailing state of things, unlike Marlow s reassuring behaviour to Kurtz s Intended. Both The Intended and Paradise, then, 6 According to Jacobs (8), this ending shows that there can be no absolute freedom from colonial figurative mapping, only ongoing engagement with its subjection; revision is not erasure.

close on the beginning of a new voyage. Both protagonists, despite the different epochs they live in and their different levels of awareness, appear determined to escape the social degradation stifling them, to take cognisance of their own identity and try to modify their subjugated or neglected status. 4. Conclusion: Heart of Darkness in the Third Millennium The two postcolonial novels examined here rewrite Heart of Darkness, and can be seen as informed by several theoretical approaches to Conrad s novel. In addition, their writing back to it also seems to bring to the fore its contemporary relevance. In The Intended, for instance, Joseph listens to Marlow s voice and can therefore acquire awareness of the way in which society constructs him as a dangerous black youth, of his state of stereotyped victim in a Western nation, which might remind one of the disabling, paralysing condition of many immigrants in what Stuart Hall calls fortress Europe (Hall 1999, 43): 7 And don t you think, he said, that when Marlow say nothing about Kurtz in the end, is because nothing left to say, because Kurtz become nothing? He become a word, just a sound, just the name Kurtz, like the colour black? Conrad break he down to what he is, atoms, nothing, a dream, a rumour, a black man. I know what Kurtz is. When I was in borstal I was rumour. They look at me and see ape, trouble, fist. And all the time I nothing, I sleep and wake and eat like zombie, time passing but no sense of time, nothing to look out of the window at, nothing to look in at, and no ideas in my mind, no ideas about where I come from and where I should be going. (101) For his part, Gurnah deepens the historical, social and ethnic context of Heart, and in doing so he widens the time frame of the exploitation of the Congo 7 As Hall reminds us, we are living in a hard iron epoch when the movement towards Fortress Europe is a stronger movement than the movement toward cultural diversity (1999, 43).

towards the past, while also leaving readers to trace links with our contemporaneity. The first years of the 21 st century have not ceased to provide striking illustrations of the continued relevance of Joseph Conrad s Heart of Darkness. Cases in point are many: the much-belated institution of a commission of historians funded by the Brussels Royal Museum for Central Africa to investigate the 1880-1920 Congolese genocide, prompted by the publication of Adam Hochschild s King Leopold s Ghost (Osborn 2002, 18); the plunder of Central African ivory allowed by the socio-political anomy caused by the Congo war from 1999, as denounced by a WWF report in December 2003 (Forti 2003, 12); the experts panel appointed by the UN Security Council to investigate the massive spoliation of local natural resources during the same war, whose October 2003 report denounced the widespread illegal mining activities that are amassing profits for Western/Asian corporations and for the bordering governments which smuggle arms into the country (Piano 2003, 9); the dependence of world technology on the local extraction of coltan, a conductor indispensable for the assembling of computers, mobile phones, playstations and ballistic missiles (D Eramo 2003, 2); the illegal fortunes that coltan has created, which led to a world embargo on its import from the Congo in 2001 (D Eramo 2003, 8), and to the scandal roused by an official Belgian enquiry on its traffic in 2002 (D Argenzio 2003, 3-4). Third millennium events, in other words, daily testify to the ceaseless, apocalyptic and grotesque merry dance of death and trade in the centre of the African continent. 8 8 Not to mention the ever-growing significance, in our times of pre-emptive wars, of the moment when the French steamer taking Marlow to the Congo blindly shells the bush in order to hit enemies : There was a touch of insanity in the proceeding, a sense of lugubrious drollery in the sight (Conrad 1996, 29).

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