By
Keitha McCall
Submitted in
Partial Fulfillment
of the
Requirements for
Graduation
with Honors from the
South Carolina
Honors College
Books can be critiqued using various schools of literary criticism. Two of these are reader-response criticism and postcolonial theory. In reader-response, the critic tries to read the book as an ideal reader would read it; in this case, the ideal reader would be someone who has only been exposed to popular conceptions of Africa – television, magazines, movies, and books. Postcolonial theory deals with the portrayal of former colonies in terms of power, representation, and oppositions. Both reader-response and postcolonial criticism were employed to discover what kind of conception of Africa an ideal reader would have after reading these novels.
The first book examined shows that Saul Bellow fails to represent Africa well. He resorts to crass stereotypes and ethnocentrism in his novel Henderson the Rain King. For the most part, Africans are relegated to the background; the few African characters who have names are either treated like servants or obsessed with superstitious theories. There are no thoughtful, rational Africans in the book. On the other hand, Henderson, the white American who comes to Africa during a mid-life crisis, is endowed with both thoughtfulness and reason, as well as physical prowess and mental strength.
The second book, Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter, offers a different view of Africa but still skews reality. In this book, a white character – Major Scobie – is once again the central figure of the story. The other white characters despise living on the coast of Africa. Once again, few Africans are given names or personalities; one of the few is Scobie’s servant Ali, who is later deemed untrustworthy, resulting in his death. The other Africans are portrayed as manipulative and uncooperative. For the most part, they are mainly absent from the story line.
Both of these novels highlight the tendency of non-African writers to exclude black Africans from the central story. Both authors generalize about the continent, leaving specific cities and countries unmentioned. Most importantly, they represent Africans as being inferior to their white counterparts, either in terms of physical or mental strength or in terms of emotional capabilities. As such, their readers gain only a skewed perspective of Africa.
What
is the purpose of literature? Is literature supposed to act as an alternative
textbook, providing an education based on the author’s own experiences and education?
Or is it supposed to activate new neurons, making us think in different terms
or through a new perspective? Perhaps it is only supposed to satisfy some
indelible, innate desire for truth or beauty. When one tries to pinpoint why
man creates these abstract strings of words that do not clothe him or feed him
or provide him with shelter, it is as though one asks why man breathes or why
he loves. According to eminent American psychologist Abraham Maslow, "A
musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write if he is to
be ultimately at peace with himself.”[1]
But
many writers do not create for themselves alone. With the exception of a few
writers and poets like Emily Dickinson, who left instructions to have her poems
burned upon her death, most authors seek publication, financial compensation,
and even fame for their works. In these cases, a relationship between the
writer and the audience is implicit; the writers need the audience to
accomplish their goals. John Kennedy Toole, heralded by many (including the
Pulitzer Prize Committee, who gave their award to him posthumously in 1981) as
one of the greatest authors of this century, committed suicide in 1969 after he
failed to find a publisher for his work. It was not enough for him just to have
written the masterpiece Confederacy of
Dunces; he had to have some validation of his chosen occupation of author.
After all, one does not join the ranks of Hemingway, Dostoevsky, and Dante just
by penning words to paper – one must have critical acclaim, one must have
public accolades, and one must have, above all, readers.
Ah,
the reader, the lifeblood of many a writer. But what responsibilities does the
writer have to his reader? John Steinbeck was clear on this point: “From the
beginning, their functions, their duties, their responsibilities have been
decreed by our species...the writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate
man's proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit - for gallantry in
defeat, for courage, compassion and love.”[2]
Not all fiction strives for such heights; some novelists are content with
giving voice to political ideas or exposing fantastic imaginings. And yet there
is a responsibility to the subject of the work as well, if the author is to
make good on his or her duty to the reader. The term “poetic license” does not
excuse a writer of fiction from misrepresenting a country or a people that
lives and exists. If a writer took liberty with the reputation of a man, there
might very well be charges of libel; the same should be true of the reputation
of a nation or an ethnic group. Writers can not “celebrate man’s proven
capacity for greatness of heart and spirit" if they cannot accept that men
with darker skin than his own do not have such a capacity. As F. Scott
Fitzgerald once wrote:
To have something to say is a question of sleepless
nights and worry and endless ratiocination of subject - of endless trying to
dig out the essential truth, the essential justice. As a first premise you have
to develop a conscience and if on top of that you have talent so much the
better. But if you have talent without the conscience, you are just one of many
thousands of journalists.[3]
When
an author does take certain liberties with the portrayal of a nation or even an
entire continent, he or she is doing a disservice to the reader by not
providing “essential truth,” at least not in the terms given by Steinbeck. As
another author, Chinua Achebe wrote, a writer can be judged by “the presence or
absence of respect for the human person.”[4] There are plenty of examples of absence for respect in novels
about Africa by non-African writers. Perhaps the author shows the indigenous
population as witless or cowardly; perhaps they are endowed with mystical
properties they do not have. The author may characterize the land of a region
as being infertile when it is in fact one of the most fertile places on earth.
The inaccuracies might be because of the bias of the author or a conscious
decision to change the facts to suit the story (for instance, fertile land might
not work well in a plot where a missionary saves a starving population). In
some cases, the author may have never even visited the land in question. He or
she may rely on outdated or biased works when trying to gather information
about the place of which he or she writes. Whatever the reasons, the author may
end up with a caricature of the actual place.
In
my own readings, this seems to have happened a good deal when foreigners – in
this case, non-Africans – write about Africa. I cannot pretend to be an expert
on African affairs or history or literature about Africa. I have visited
Cameroon only once, with a fellow American who knew the country well but was
not of it. I learned enough, however, to see that most African writers treat
the continent in a different way from some non-African fiction writers. Recent
popularity of African writers like Chinua Achebe and Ngugi wa Thiong'o have
rightly shifted attention to Africans as protagonists and writers, but there is
still a large amount of popular literature that thrusts Africans to the
periphery of the story. These non-African writers, it seems, have a tendency to
generalize about the continent, to never distinguish from the desert-ridden
Sahara to the savannas of the South. It is all just “Africa,” they might say
with a sweep of the arm. The African people in these writers’ novels are seldom
treated as individuals who come from different countries, have different
ethnicities, and speak different languages – they are simply “natives” or
“negroes” or, more simply, “blacks.” It is difficult to find an African
character with a name and a face and a capacity to love or hate or even think
as much as a European. It is as though Africans themselves are not worth a
story. Instead, Europeans or Americans or even Syrians in the case of Graham
Greene’s The Heart of the Matter are
the central characters. They brave the malaria-infested jungles and trek across
the great deserts and in their own ways “conquer” Africa. From Heart of Darkness to Green Hills of Africa, the stories many
Americans read feature the white men (and women) who journey to Africa but who
are not from Africa.
I have set out to see what kind of pictures of Africa some of these non-native writers present. I wanted to see if they overlap with the Africa that I have seen and studied. In reading these texts, I discovered that the depictions of Africa are often biased, generalized, and based on stereotypes. Occasionally the inaccuracies or stereotypes are so subtle that the reader may not recognize them for what they are. In turn, these books help to reinforce these stereotypes, perpetuating a vicious cycle of misinformation. It is my contention that these authors have negatively influenced the way some Americans view Africa. Doubtless television shows and movies, being considerably more prevalent and with wider audiences than most books, have been influential in shaping Americans’ perceptions of Africa, but books retain a certain place in the American psyche. There seems to me to be a subtle feeling that when educated people write down their thoughts and experiences in an elegant or striking manner, they are to be believed. Discerning readers may recognize the pitfalls of accepting a work at face value, but avocational readers, especially those who are not so well-versed in African affairs, may take the writer’s words and ideas and make them their own. One entails quite a risk when dealing with a novel about Africa because, as George Kimble once noted, “the darkest thing about Africa has always been our ignorance of it.”[5]
There
were many books to choose from once I decided to do a small survey of
literature concerning Africa. One of my first inclinations was to review Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.
After spending a few hours in the library, I realized that writers and critics
who accused Conrad of everything from racism to narcissicism had dealt with
this book ad naseum. Chinua Achebe in
particular had published an excellent analysis of Conrad’s view of Africa in
"An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's
Heart of Darkness."[6]
Other books jumped to mind: Isak Dineson’s Out
of Africa, Ernest Hemingway’s Green
Hills of Africa, Alan Paton’s Cry,
the Beloved Country, V.S. Naipaul’s A
Bend in the River, even Alice Walker’s treatment of Africa toward the end
of A Color Purple. I finally decided
that Henderson the Rain King by Saul
Bellow and The Heart of the Matter by
Graham Greene would be worthwhile choices for several reasons. First, both
books are set almost exclusively in Africa. Both men are generally
well-respected by critics and popular with readers. Saul Bellow won the Nobel
prize for literature in 1976. Greene is known for his sympathetic treatment of
former colonies in books such as The
Quiet American and The Power and the
Glory and has won many numerous awards of his own, including the two
coveted British honors of the Order of Merit and Companion of Honor.[7]
Perhaps most importantly, both books are still in print and are still taught in
universities and high schools.
My methodology is a mixture of reader-response approach and post-colonial literary criticism. An American critic named Stanley Fish pioneered reader-response theory in the 1980s. He focuses on the reader rather than the work or the author, because “a text, whatever it be, has no real existence until it is read. Its meaning is in potentia, so to speak.”[8] According to A Glossary of Contemporary Literary Theory, reader-response criticism can assume several types of readers, including the implied, the inscribed, the model, the intended, the empirical and the ideal reader. These vary according to their relationship with the text, such as, for example, whether their relationship is intra- or extra-textual.[9] In my analyses, I chose to assume the role of an ideal reader, which is “a term used to refer to that collection of abilities, attitudes, experience, and knowledge which will allow a reader to extract the maximum value from reading a particular text.”[10] I assumed that my ideal reader had not visited Africa and had little knowledge of the continent beyond popular exposure: occasional and possibly conflicting information from school, various television programs that probably concentrated more on animals and safaris than on people, and a few National Geographic articles and television “specials.”
Postcolonial theory “refers to a way of reading, theorizing, interpreting and investigating colonial oppression and its legacy that is informed by an oppositional ethical agenda.”[11] Postcolonial theorists like Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, and Edward Said have focused on instances of racial stereotyping, ambivalence, and mimicry in postcolonial texts. These theorists also investigate binarisms, pairings and oppositions, and monolingualism.[12] In other words, when an author sets up oppositions between European and non-European, good and evil, or black and white, he or she may be guilty of binarism. When a character is lampooned for not speaking English, the author may be exercising monoligualism. And when the author constantly compares Africans to animals, or does not give them the capacity to fall in love or reason or question, or trivializes their cultures or their religions or their existence, he is reserving the “exclusivity of the human condition”[13] for the non-Africans in the novel.
My own desire is to capitalize
on both of these approaches in order to pry beneath the plots and dramas of the
stories to reach what has often been marginalized in readings of Henderson the Rain King and The Heart of the Matter – the depiction
of Africa and Africans. I do not want to become overburdened with the
complexities of a purely theoretical approach, however. More interesting to me
is the conception of Africa that an average reader would conceive, maybe even
subconsciously, by reading these books. It is the cumulative effect – all the
terms used to describe Africans, all the slights and deprecations and
indignities suffered by the African characters in the novels – that I want to
try to capture, by studying the words used to describe the landscape and the
people of Africa, assessing the role of black Africans within the story, and
evaluating the characterization of black Africans by the authors. Africa,
regardless of what authors will do to it, is not a fictional continent. When Bellow and Greene set their stories in
Africa – when they exercised their freedom to choose the settings of their
stories– they undertook the depiction of a continent. They undertook the task
of describing a place that is rarely taught, rarely visited, and rarely
understood. I wanted to see what kind of place called “Africa” these two
novelists had created.
Henderson the Rain King was published in 1959, only
a few short years after Bellow had received wide critical acclaim for The Adventures of Augie March.[14]
The style of Henderson represented a
marked difference from his other novels; it was written with a “forceful,
authoritative voice” that Bellow likened to Tolstoy.[15]
The character of Eugene Henderson was unlike any of Bellow’s other protagonists;
he was physically larger than the rest, rural in manner, independently wealthy,
and had no literary aspirations – in other words, he was not just “the
all-purpose intellectuals who more often stand in for Bellow.”[16]
Indeed, many parts of this book were a departure for Bellow. Not only was his
protagonist an aberration, his setting was as well. This was the first of
Bellow’s novels to be set outside of the United States, and in fact it was set
in a place that Bellow had never visited – Africa.[17]
Bellow visited Nigeria long after Henderson
was published and was “deeply pleased to discover how near he had come in his
story to the real Africa,”[18]
but in reality, Bellow’s Africa is little more than a figment of his
imagination.
The novel features a millionaire by the name of Eugene Henderson, who at middle age still has not found anything like contentment. He constantly hears an internal voice saying “I want, I want,” and thinks that going to Africa on a one-way ticket might satisfy that voice. He hires a guide, Romilayu, who can take him into the deepest parts of Africa, where he meets the Arnewi and Warari tribes. With the Arnewi, he learns the ways of “grun-tu-molani,” or “man want to live.” The Wariri give him the title of Rain King after he lifts the massive statue of Mummah, Goddess of the Clouds. Henderson then begins his instruction on the ways of lions under the tutelage of the king of the Wariri, Dahfu. Dahfu is supposed to be trying to catch a lion named Gmilo that harbors his dead father’s spirit; only then will he be confirmed as the rightful king. Instead King Dahfu has caught and fostered a lion named Atti, which has made him unpopular with the local religious leaders. Henderson enters this predicament unwittingly, not knowing that because he is the Rain King, he is to be the next king of the Wariri, a job that has both pleasures and dangers. After Dahfu is killed trying to catch the lion Gmilo, Henderson is able to make his escape and goes back to America with a new understanding of life.
In this novel, Bellow presents a distorted and racist view of Africa. His depiction of Africans borders on the absurd, from their religions to their science. Bellow constantly refers to the “savagery” of the Africans, especially when judged against the more civilized European standard. He uses animal imagery to describe Africans, especially women; African buildings are referred to as “barns” or “haystacks” or “hatcheries.” The White Man, as presented by Henderson, is a completely different being. He is the strongest, the biggest, the most clever. He is the center of attention in even the most crucial situations. Though he professes to respect the cultures he encounters, he disparages their palaces, their languages, even the people from whom he tries to learn. Dahfu, perhaps the most educated man in the entire novel, finds Henderson to be exceptional. In short, Bellow’s depreciative depictions of Africa and Africans, juxtaposed with the presentation of the exceptional Eugene Henderson, encourages the reader to think of Africa as an uncivilized, backward place.
From the beginning of the novel, Bellow, through Henderson, sets up a contrast between Africa and the rest of the world. Though Henderson says that he will begin with his trip to Africa, he does not begin to tell about his trip until chapter five. First, he tells about his relationship with his wife, Lily, with his children, with his neighbors, even with his dentist. During this interlude, he describes a trip to Europe. Europe is rich in culture and history and scenic panoramas: Henderson speaks of “the religion and beauty of the churches”[19] and “Yellow dust…dropping from the lime trees, and wild roses…on the trunks of the apple trees.”[20] At one point, he defies all anthropologists and claims that Mediterranean Europe is “the cradle of mankind.”[21] Later, once he gets around to describing Africa, he says that it “looks like the ancient bed of mankind.”[22] Presumably this does not mean that Africa looks like Mediterranean Europe; since this statement comes when he is descending into the valley of the Arnewi, it probably means that the valley looks primitive and unsophisticated, a manifestation of Henderson’s own preconception of the original habitat of man. This statement, then, underlines the lack of civilization of the area rather than hearkening to its historical role in the evolution of mankind. And Henderson certainly points out that Africa is different from the rest of the world. In fact, Henderson seems to respect the “real world” more than Africa. When he first meets Itelo, a member of the Arnewi tribe, and learns that Itelo has traveled to other countries, he responds: “Well, I guess it was great for you to go and find out what things are like,”[23] with the implication that one can not know how the world works just by staying in Africa. Henderson characterizes the Africans he meets who have not traveled as being “from the old universe,” a dichotomy that is both spatial and temporal. The implication is that the Arnewi and Wariri are far removed from the rest of the world, even though some of them speak English, are educated in philosophy and medicine, and travel. Bellow has King Dahfu make the distinction between Africa and the rest. “I request you to believe that I did not leave the world and return to my Wariri with an aim of withdrawal,” he says to Henderson.[24] To be in the land of the Wariri, to be in Henderson’s Africa, is to be out of the world. Even the moon is different as seen from Africa: “The moon itself was yellow, an African moon in its blue forest.”[25] That the moon is African when seen in Africa and just the moon elsewhere further dichotomizes Africa and the rest of the world (or Africa and the Euro-American world, which is all that really seems to count in Henderson’s worldview).
Henderson goes to Africa because he can find no peace in his life in America; his wife annoys him, his “occupation” of pig farmer has left him unfulfilled, and he causes undue hardship for anyone with whom he associates. Immediately prior to his decision to go is the death of his neighbor, Ms. Lenox. She dies of fright from overhearing one of Henderson’s tirades against Lily.[26] At this juncture, Henderson decides to join his old friend Charlie on a trip to Africa. Charlie himself is going there for his honeymoon, to film “the Africans and the animals.”[27] Henderson, lying, tells Charlie that he has “always been a sort of Africa buff.”[28] And so he sets off, in “an attempt to get back to that lost condition – the Africa of the imagination which, since Conrad and Hemingway, has stood as the place where man discovers the truth about himself and, by generic extension, about mankind itself.”[29] But “Africa” for Henderson and Bellow does not mean the geographic region itself; it does not even include illustrious cities like Cairo, which has only three lines in the novel describing it. Henderson specifically wants to see the “uncivilized parts of Africa,”[30] and quickly departs from Charlie and his new bride with his guide Romilayu. For Henderson, “Africa” only begins when he “first laid eyes on the thatched roofs while descending the bed of the river” and saw the Arnewi.[31] It seems, then, that any redemption that a trip to Africa might offer, any lessons that it has to teach, are not to be found in the cities where African scholars and poets study and dream, where an amalgamation of ethnic groups and religions flourish and interact and create spirited new cultures, where politics and philosophy are dynamic. For Henderson, none of these parts of Africa matter; it is as though he goes to Africa “to learn the wisdom of Tarzan.”[32]
Though wisdom may be his goal, Henderson immediately stumbles into superstition when he meets the Arnewi, a tribe that worships cattle. “The peace-loving, bovine Arnewi are a parody of the Rousseauist and Chateaubriandesque idea of the ‘savage:’ affectionate, sensual in a prepubescent way, the perfect subjects, in their Edenic innocence, for Henderson’s Faustian desire to lead.”[33] Their leaders are the Women of Bittahness, Queen Willatale and her sister Mtalba, who are endowed with a certain joy Henderson immediately wants for himself: “The queen expressed stability in every part of her body….there was a happy light in her face.”[34] The Queen tells Henderson the answer to his problems is the concept of “grun-tu-molani,” or “man want to live.” But this maxim does not help Henderson; still ill at ease with life, he tries to save the Arnewi from a plague of frogs and accidentally blows up their cistern, making himself unwelcome. Thus the queen, in all her supposed wisdom, is unable to help Henderson; her offerings are inadequate to satisfy Henderson’s thirst for wisdom. She is in effect impotent, and her power discredited. Arnewi wisdom, the wisdom of Henderson’s Africa, fails.
Next he goes to the Wariri, a tribe that the guide Romilayu calls “chillen dahkness.”[35] From the outset, the Wariri are associated with the dead. Romilayu and Henderson are forced to spend a night in a cabin with the body of a dead man, Henderson spots dead bodies hanging from a scaffold when he walks to the palace, and Dahfu’s hat is lined with human teeth. As Henderson says, “What was one corpse to them? They appeared to deal in them wholesale.”[36] The rain-making ceremony is just about to begin when Henderson stumbled into their midst. The ceremony begins with the laceration of a priest; Dahfu explains that the cuts are not deep, and “as to the blood, that is supposed to induce the heaves also to flow.” It involves all kinds of farce, including a wrestling match between an old woman and a dwarf. There is, however, a darker side to the ceremony: the king and a girl must play a game of catch with two human skulls, one of which belongs to Dahfu’s father. The spectacle of a man being forced to play a child’s game with his own father’s skull is revolting; respect for the dead is an almost universal tenet. The ceremony continues to the next segment: the Wariri beat and strike the statues of their gods. “They stepped on the feet of the statues, and bowled some of the smaller ones over and made passes at them, mockeries, and so on.”[37] The image is one of a people who have respect for no one, even the gods that grant them life; they are “violent and aggressive, determined to impose their will on the world to the extent of beating and dominating their gods.”[38] The final act is to lift the statues, one by one, and place them in a big pile. Hummat, the god of the clouds and next-to-largest statue, tests the strength of the strongest Wariri, a young man named Turombo. This man moves the statue only with great struggle, leaving him powerless to budge the more massive Mummah, Goddess of the Clouds. Enter Henderson. He is able to muscle the statue to her place with the others, earning himself the title of Sungo, or Rain King.
Henderson quickly strikes up a friendship with King Dahfu, who tells him how the new king will come to power. As soon as Dahfu is unable to keep his husbandly duties with his harem of women, they report him to the religious leader, the Bunam. According to Dahfu, he “will convey me out into the bush and there I will be strangled.”[39] The Bunam will wait until a maggot appears on Dahfu’s body; the maggot will be taken back to the Wariri and declared to be the king’s soul. Then the Bunam will take the maggot back into the bush, wait an appropriate amount of time, and bring a lion’s cub back, “explaining that the maggot has now experienced a conversion into a lion.”[40] In time, the Bunam will announce the next king, who must capture the lion to validate his reign. This mode of succession hints at two shortcomings of the Wariri: disingenuousness and gullibility. First, the Bunam’s responsibilities are to deceive the people. Presumably, he knows that the maggot does not transform; after all, someone has to find the lion’s cub to be able to further the charade. That the Bunam willingly lies to his people undermines any positive qualities the Wariri religion may have, since their leader is both a fraud and a deceiver. Second, the people accept the Bunam’s pronouncements. They do not question the transformation process itself, and, more importantly, they do not question the Bunam’s credibility. They are inactive in the process and serve only as repositories for the Bunam’s lies.
Dahfu himself is ambivalent about the process. He presents the procedure as an actual occurrence and follows the rules dictated by the tradition. “While some of Dahfu’s ideas are sophisticated and ‘Western,’ he still respects magic as a force to be reckoned with.”[41] When Henderson blunders into his life, Dahfu is preparing to go in search of the lion which harbors the spirit of his father Gmilo. In the meantime, however, he has found another lion, Atti, whom he has raised and studied, even against the wishes of the Bunam. “Any lion except my father, Gmilo, is forbidden and illicit. Atti was brought here in a condition of severest disapproval and opposition, causing a great anxiety and hardship,” explains Dahfu.[42] But he is determined to keep her anyway. He has a theory that man can learn to become like a lion, that he can take all the cunning and beauty and patience of the lion and make it his own. “What Homo sapiens imagines, he may slowly convert himself to.”[43] He bases his theory on his readings from medical school, where he learned a great deal about the human body, and his readings of mythology, particularly the myth concerning Daedelus and flight. To this end he takes Henderson as his student and endeavors to teach him the way of lions.
Henderson is a willing participant, even if he is dubious of the method, because of his great respect for Dahfu’s countenance. Henderson describes Dahfu as a “Be-er,” “all ease,” “extended, floating,” “soaring like a spirit,” and “in his colors surrounded by cherishing attention.”[44] And yet for all this praise, Henderson does not consider Dahfu his equal in terms of civilization. He refers to him as a “semi-barbarous king;”[45] he says that “this man was completely lacking in what we all know is civilized character.”[46] Henderson’s criteria for a “civilized character” are ill-defined; he himself lets his dirty pigs run around his house. And the presumption that we should all know these criteria reeks of cultural domination; not everyone in the world considers listening to Brahms and eating with sterling silver “civilized.” Despite his misgivings about the nature of Dahfu’s character, Henderson indulges the king and attempts to learn lion ways from Atti. His education is cut short, however, when Dahfu dies during an attempt to catch Gmilo, forcing Henderson to flee. In retrospection, Henderson declares that he “when you got right down to it he was a savage too.”[47] As such, Henderson rejects the King’s theory and anything else the Wariri may have taught him: “The savagery and stridency of these Africans who mauled the gods and strung up the dead by their feet had nothing to do with the emotion of my heart.”[48] In the end, then, Dahfu, like the women of Bittahness, failed in his attempt to help Henderson attain peace. Both ideologies proved to be insufficient to quell Henderson’s demanding internal voice. “In Africa, Henderson ‘discovers’ a world where spiritual balance is founded on absurdity and death, and where the wisdom that is offered is attainable only at the expense of absurd or cruel rituals.”[49]
The only other African with whom Henderson has an extensive relationship is his guide Romilayu. Contrary to all the other Africans Henderson meet, Romilayu is a Christian, a devout Methodist. Henderson himself adheres to no particular religion. The implication is that Romilayu, in his simplistic acceptance of the Christian faith, does not understand the world nearly as well as Henderson, who is looking to find spiritual satisfaction away from the Christian-dominated societies that can hold no solace for him. Though Romilayu was hired for the express purpose of being a guide, Henderson treats Romilayu like his personal servant. “Rustle up some kindling, I tell you, and make it snappy,” Henderson demands.[50] When Henderson and Romilayu encounter the dead men in their cabin on their first night with the Wariri, Henderson instructs Romilayu to go tell the people in charge that he refused to sleep with a dead man.
“Who I tell?” said Romilayu.
And I started to storm at him, “Go on,” I said. “I’ve given you an order. Go, wake somebody. Judas! This is what I call brass.”
Romilayu cried, “Mistah Henderson, sah, whut I do?”
“Do what I tell you,” I yelled. [51]
Henderson’s treatment of Romilayu is loathsome; he has no sympathy for Romilayu’s feelings concerning the dead man, and he demands that Romilayu tell “them,” when neither of them knows who to tell. Later, Romilayu is made to carry all of their belongings, most of which are Henderson’s, during the procession to the palace of Dahfu. “It was out of the question,” said Henderson, “for to me to carry anything.”[52] The question of why it was out of the question begs to be asked. Henderson himself is not royalty. True, he is a visitor to the Wariri, but so is Romilayu. Here, the color of skin is the determinate: Romilayu is black, Henderson is white, and therefore Henderson as a white man is not expected to carry his own things. So Henderson, meanwhile, gets to walk under a large umbrella carried by one of the “amazons,” and Romilayu is left in the sun to fend for the bags. Occasionally, Henderson is kind toward Romilayu, but even his kindness takes on paternalistic overtones. When Henderson thanks Romilayu for being loyal to him, Henderson “patted him on the bushy head.”[53] Romilayu, whatever Henderson may think, is not a subservient dog; he is a man in his own right, though Henderson cannot bring himself to treat him as such. Henderson also jokes around with Romilayu when the two are being led into the Wariri camp. “It could be that they want to sell us into slavery,” he suggests to Romilayu. “Or do they want to put me in a pit and cover me with coals and bake me?”[54] Both statements show the callousness with which Henderson treats Romilayu. He has no respect for African culture, African history, or Africans themselves.
Henderson’s attitude can be seen in his dealings with the other Africans he encounters as well. The ones who speak English generally command his highest respect; these do not “carry on” as the others do.[55] Horko, Dahfu’s uncle and companion on his travels, is the only one to offer to shake hands, or, for Henderson, to greet “in a civilized manner.[56] Indeed, Henderson thinks little of the African customs he encounters. The Arnewi demand that he must wrestle the largest of them, and Henderson tries to refuse, saying, “We’re too high on the scale of civilization.”[57] Later when the Wariri demand an official interview, Henderson shows his contempt: “You may guess how as a man of wealth and an aristocrat, and impatient as I am, I react to police questioning. Especially as an American citizen. In this primitive place.”[58] It is as though the Arnewi have no right to question his motives, even though he is on their land and invading their space. And why? Because he is wealthy, an aristocrat, an American aristocrat, a white American aristocrat. Once again, African history – the years of oppression and colonization and genocide committed by whites from the 1600s on – does not factor into Henderson’s feelings; he cares only for himself and his comforts. Later, he ridicules their dancing: “the women about me were dancing, if you want to call it that. They were bounding and screaming and banging their bodies into me.”[59] When invited into Dahfu’s private quarters, an honor that Henderson dismisses as such, he is met with a room full of naked women. This would have been the “height of discourtesy except that they were wild savages.”[60] In Henderson’s world there is no room for alternate moral systems or cultures; either one is a savage or one is civilized.
The “savagery” of the Arnewi and Wariri women is underscored by the words used to describe them. They are often linked with non-human objects, thus emphasizing their own lack of humanity or civilization. The large, busty women who act as Dahfu’s guard are known as “amazons,” and described in terms of fruit: “The amazons in their corset-like vests and large smooth bodies and delicate, shaved, immense heads, round like melons, oval like cantaloupes, long like squashes.”[61] The women of Dahfu’s harem “walk like giraffes”[62] or with “giraffe-like elegance.”[63] The girl playing a game of catch with Dahfu during the rainmaking ceremony is likened to “a giant locust.”[64] The mental pictures presented by these analogies are not ones of people, with their complex mental abilities and emotional capacity, but of dull fruit or dumb animals. His own wives are described in much different terms. For instance, Frances, his first wife, is “a remarkable person, handsome, tall, elegant, sinewy, with long arms and golden hair, private, fertile, and quiet.”[65] Her features are described in the usual terms used to describe humans, and he even includes personality traits in the description. Above all, she is described as a person and not as a wild animal or inanimate fruit.
Bellow also likens Africans to domesticated animals. He refers frequently to their different “breeds.” When discussing the various religions of the Africans he encounters with Charlie before going into the interior, Henderson differentiates pagan and Christian Africans as “black men of certain breeds.”[66] He attributes Dahfu’s royal posture to his training in the same terms: “He did not lie lazily in his hammock; his figure had real elegance; it showed his breeding.”[67] Later, when Henderson seeks to justify Dahfu’s appointment to King, Henderson tells him that he “was bred for this.”[68] The animal imagery is once again overwhelming; Dahfu is not considered as a person in his own right but merely as the outcome of a careful union between royal stock to ensure the highest pedigree. One speaks of prize dogs or horses in the same way. Likewise, Henderson attributes the obesity of Mtalba, the sister of Queen Willatell of the Arnewi, to her breeding: “Women are bred like that in parts of Africa where you have to be obese to be considered a real beauty.”[69] The image is of a master breeder carefully choosing the fattest of the bunch and letting them copulate to produce the finest, fattest specimens possible.
The imagery continues when Henderson describes the structures of the Wariri village. “The huts gaped like open haystacks,” he says of the houses. The palace itself is “quadrangular and barnlike;” the rooms “doorless, like narrow stalls, open and bare.”[70] The Wariris, it seems, do not inhabit structures built for humans but for animals. Even Dahfu’s chambers are described in this way: “the only thing I could compare it to in temperature and closeness was a hatchery.”[71] Taken with the dozens of naked women in the chambers, Dahfu’s palace seems to be the place where the careful breeding takes place; the fact that Dahfu will be killed when he cannot perform the most basic duties to his wives highlights the focus of procreation for the sake of good breeding only. And once he is killed, his successor will be announced; and, according to tradition, his successor will be the Rain King.
From his first encounter with the Arnewi, Henderson is portrayed as a religious, if not royal, figure. One of his first acts is to impress them by setting a bush on fire with his lighter. With Henderson standing before them like Moses and the burning bush, the Arnewi begin to speak at once: “The natives were obliged to come forward and confess everything to us.” The term “confess” is of utmost importance; “since Henderson chooses these words, which are clearly echoes of the confessional, his choice indicates a presumption of his possessing qualities of divinity.”[72] Henderson actually says, “I think maybe my person is sacred.”[73] In fact, Henderson is later given a title that substantiates this view, the title of Sungo, or Rain King. As the Sungo, Henderson is in charge of sprinkling life-giving water; women especially came to be sprinkled when Henderson walked through town in his official garb, for “the Sungo was also in charge of fertility.”[74] Henderson, then, is given one of the most important jobs in a drought-ridden village, though he is a foreigner who knows nothing of the group’s ethics or history. More importantly, Dahfu chooses him to be the next king.
“Sungo also is my successor,”[75] explains Dahfu as he is dying, and Henderson knows that Dahfu “had picked me to step into his place.”[76] If Henderson’s statement is true, then the implications are deplorable. That Dahfu – the most educated person of the Wariri, a philosopher, a student of classics, a would-be doctor – that he should choose an outsider, a non-African, a white man, of all things, to be their king is preposterous. Friendship or no, that any African man in the 1950s would hand over his family and friends to be ruled over by a white man would be contrary to all African experience. This death scene is like a picture of the Native Americans selling Manhattan for $14 worth of beads; it would never happen in the real world. The fact that it does happen in Bellow’s world just reveals how fabricated it really is.
Even before this scene, Henderson is always the center of attention. When he first meets the Arnewi, he discovers that a group of frogs have infested their cistern. With typical gusto, he sets out to help. When the moment comes to set off the bomb he has devised, he alone stands with the bomb in hand, with the attendant Arnewi crowd surrounding him. “I heard the chatter of the expectant Arnewi…as a drowning man will hear the bathers on the beach,” he says.[77] In other words, the Arnewi are merely background noise for him, the Great Henderson; of course after he has blown up both the frogs and the cistern, leaving the water to be wasted, he is not quite the hero he hoped to be. But he gets to start anew with the Wariri. Here too Henderson finds himself at the center of an adoring crowd; at the beginning of the rain-making ceremony, the spectators cheer for him. He roars in reply, and “the crowd went wild over this;” Henderson “stood as long as was feasible and luxuriated in the applause.”[78] Everyone becomes more fever-pitched when Henderson moves the giant statue of the Goddess of the Clouds: “The Wariri jumped up and down in the white stone of their stands, screaming, singing, raving, hugging themselves and one another and praising me.”[79] The special attention afforded Henderson continues through the novel. He is the only confidante of Dahfu, the only other student of the lion Atti, the only rescuer to rush to Dahfu’s fallen body, and the only hearer of Dahfu’s final words. Always, it is Henderson in the center of the main events of the novel. Romilayu disappears for pages at a time, and the still living, still writing Henderson overshadows Dahfu himself in the end. The other Arnewi and Wariri fade to the background. One critic even notes that any anthropological inaccuracies matter little “for the main thing is that Henderson has a world in which he can find himself.”[80] And this truly in a world built just for Henderson, much like the movie set built around one character in the 1998 movie The Truman Show. And like that movie, all cameras are always on Henderson.
And why not? the reader may ask. After all, Henderson is the shrewdest, strongest, and most exceptional character in the book. The characterization of Henderson itself is an ethnocentric quality of the novel. First, his mental capacities are the greatest in the novel. For instance, he is able to learn the Wariri language, which is “not a hard language,”[81] quickly even though the African characters struggle with English; even the usually eloquent Dahfu makes mistakes. Henderson’s mental strength is such that he can overcome his repulsion at having the dead man in the hut, even though Romilayu “suffered from terror of the dead,”[82] and it is Henderson who devises the surreptitious way to get the body out of the hut without detection from the Wariri. Henderson also comes up with the plan to escape the “death house” where he is being kept after Dahfu’s death even in the midst of a terrible fever; once again, Romilayu hesitatingly follows his lead.[83] Henderson, then, is able to conquer sickness and fear with his reserves of mental strength, but the “tests which usually involve his impressive physical strength…are met more successfully.”[84]
Indeed, Henderson’s physical strength is unequaled by anyone in the novel, including all the Africans he meets. Even the younger, fitter Itelo is no match for him; Henderson asserts his strength by defeating Itelo in a wrestling match. “If the contest had taken place within nature he would have won, I am willing to bet, but he was not matched against mere bone and muscle. It was a question of spirit, too, for when it comes to struggling I am in a special class,” remarks Henderson.[85] Henderson undoubtedly presumed that Itelo was lacking in this spirit; he openly says as much about Turombo, a Wariri man who attempts and fails to lift the giant statue Mummah. “ ‘Good man,’ I thought to myself. ‘You are strong but it so happens I am stronger. It’s not a personal matter at all. It’s only the fates – they willed it. As in the case of Itelo.”[86] So here we are introduced to Henderson’s philosophy, which has strange echoes of imperialism, fatalism, and racism. Henderson, the white man, the outsider, is able to overcome the strongest African man because it was God’s will, if there is such a thing. Fate has sided with the white man; if he uses his God-given strength to conquer the black man, then so be it, for fate has decreed it so. Here, though it is disguised as a passing comment from an overgrown American involved in a wrestling contest, we have a justification for slavery, colonization, and oppression.
Henderson continually manages feats of impressive strength. He lifts Mummah from the ground, gaining the title of Rain King; he overpowers three guards when he and Romilayu escape from the death house.[87] Perhaps most impressively, Henderson is able to subdue a lion that has just moments ago inflicted grievous wounds on Dahfu; the lion that kills Dahfu is no match for Henderson. “I ran and caught the rope and pulley and threw the wooden block like a bolo at the still thrusting legs; I wound the rope around them a dozen times, almost tearing the skin from them.”[88] Dahfu was helpless against this same beast that Henderson viciously subjugates. Once again, the African cannot accomplish what the white man can.
Whenever Henderson is not forcefully asserting his athletic superiority, he is boasting of it to the reader. “If I ever get my hands on any of these characters I’ll crush them like old beer cans,” he declares at one point after Dahfu’s death.[89] Later he says of the Bunam that he “could have twisted his head and pulled it off with great satisfaction.”[90] When Henderson and Romilayu are first confronted by the Wariri soldiers, Henderson says, “I would have swept them up in my arms, the whole dozen or so of them, and run them over the cliff;”[91] and concerning the one armed with a gun: I could have grabbed his gun and made scrap metal of it in one single twist.”[92] In all of these statements is Henderson’s fundamental belief that the Wariri, armed or not, are not a threat to them, that he can overpower them any time he chooses. The Wariri would be impotent to stop him; their lives are in his hands. Since his strength is proven at the rain-making ceremony and the wrestling match, one can infer that Henderson does in fact possess the strength to kill these “smaller, darker, and shorter”[93] warriors. They live only because he chooses not to take their lives.
Henderson is the exception to all rules of nature in this book. Though he learns that “man is finally defined by his human condition, which includes his mortality,”[94] this mortality, within the book, does not affect Henderson; at the end of the book, he is still alive. Dahfu’s estimation of Henderson that he is “an exceptional amalgam of vehement forces,”[95] that he has never “encountered your category,”[96] bears out; Henderson grows only stronger as he ages and more clear-headed as he sickens. Henderson is a man with a destiny, which he terms as “to go out in the world and try to find the wisdom of life.”[97] In this way, “Bellow has made Henderson appear often larger than life, a mythical figure who embodies many of the fears and aspirations of a whole generation of Americans.”[98] Henderson is a colossal individual who controls his own fate by a force of iron will, and the fact that he is juxtaposed with Africans who fall prey to plagues of frogs and crackpot theories about lions merely underscores his greatness. These Africans appear to have no larger destinies; the greatest among them, King Dahfu, dies during an absurd ritual, having accomplished nothing for his people. Henderson, though, goes back to America with a plan to enroll in medical school and a story to tell the world. His is a future that is going somewhere, whereas the Africans are a part of the less enlightened, more superstitious past.
In summary, Bellow’s Africa is replete with images of Africans who are slow-witted, gullible, physically weak, and lacking in culture and refinement: they are, in a word, “savage.” Dahfu, the most visible and best-educated African in the book, subscribes to far-fetched quasi-scientific theories and ultimately dies when he tries to fulfill a senseless ritual. The book centers on a white character who comes to Africa for its primitive wisdom, only to discover that its inhabitants are backward and irrational. Africa has virtually nothing to offer this white man from the “civilized” world; its traditions are steeped in superstition, its culture is based on death and an almost animalistic propagation of its people, lacking in art or philosophy or a “modern” religion. Henderson calls Africa “discontinuous with civilization;”[99] their belief structure and system of governance are archaic and contradictory to the rest of the world. The Africans, then, are presented as a group apart from all other humans. They are the remains of man’s evolution and are incompatible with the world around them. In Bellow’s world, Africa offers precious little beyond adventure and absurdity for the white man.
Graham Greene: The Heart of the Matter
When
Graham Greene wrote The Heart of the
Matter, he was not a tremendously popular writer. His book published
immediately prior to it, The Ministry of
Fear, sold only 18,000 copies. In comparison, The Heart of the Matter sold nearly 300,000 in Britain alone. The
book was a staggering success, giving Greene both financial and critical
success. In the words of one critic, “Greene was established for life.”[100]
When
Graham Greene wrote The Heart of the
Matter, he had been to Africa twice. He went first in 1935 with his cousin
Barbara. They set out for a three-month trek “so confidently and so ignorantly
to walk through the jungles of a country that we knew almost nothing about.”[101]
This trip, with the companionship of his cousin and a sickness that
incapacitated Greene for a couple of weeks, proved to be unsatisfying for
Greene’s immersion into African life.
He was looking not for the “real” Africa but for the Africa of his imagination – the one that all those Victorian novels and histories had portrayed. He wanted to see savages. He wanted to see animals sacrificed, natives dancing, witch doctors screaming.[102]
Thus
in 1941, when offered a chance to work for the British spy agency, the Secret
Intelligence Service, and work in Africa, Greene took the job. He was stationed
in Freetown, Sierra Leone, where the proximity of the local people’s slums to
his government house caused him constant hardship. When their dogs howled at
night, Greene “sometimes dashed out in the dark to throw rocks in the direction
of the slum, swearing at the inhabitants while he hurled his missiles.”[103]
In less than a year, Greene asked to come back to London, and his request was granted
in March of 1942. One man he met there, Captain Brodie, would later serve as
the basis for Major Scobie, the main figure of The Heart of the Matter.
The location of the book is never disclosed. The reader knows only that Scobie is stationed as a police officer “on the coast” of Africa. The story is mainly a love story; Scobie has become unhappy living with his wife of fifteen years, Louise. She disrupts the peace he wants out of life. Scobie takes a loan from a questionable Syrian named Yusef, compromising his authority and his reputation, to send his wife to South Africa. Later, when a young British girl named Helen is shipwrecked and brought ashore, he falls in love with her and begins an affair. This causes tremendous hardship for Scobie, as he is a devout Catholic, and he is eventually unable to reconcile his sins with his faith. A spy in the colony named Wilson falls in love with Scobie’s wife and stumbles onto Scobie’s affair, complicating matters further. When his trusted servant Ali accidentally overhears a tender conversation between the two lovers, Scobie doubts his servant’s faithfulness. He goes to his debtor Yusef and tacitly agrees to have Ali killed. With his sense of responsibility for Ali’s death and Helen’s unhappiness and Louise’s discomfort, he discovers he is unable to shoulder it all. In the end, he kills himself with an overdose of sleeping pills.
“Africa
will always be the Africa of the Victorian atlas,” Greene wrote in his diary,
“the blank unexplored continent in the shape of the human heart.”[104]
This sentiment pervades his novel. Africa is nothing so much as a European
construct, “discovered” and “settled” as empires sought to control everything
from gold and diamonds to peanuts and palm oil. In The Heart of the Matter, African history begins when Europeans
first landed on its shores; the old cotton tree, “where the earliest settlers
had gathered their first day on the unfriendly shore,”[105]
is one of the most prominent landmarks. The beginning of time is the moment
“they discovered…this colony.”[106]
Perhaps this is somehow appropriate, since the story centers almost completely
on Europeans. The black Africans who populate the coast, with the exception of
Scobie’s servant Ali, are relegated to a few lines, a few paragraphs – a few
reminders that the story is set in Africa. Indeed, when George Orwell reviewed
the book, he lambasted the setting: “Why should the novel have its setting in
West Africa? Except that one of the characters is a Syrian trader, the whole
thing might as well be happening in a London suburb. The Africans exist only as
an occasionally mentioned background.”[107]
His point bears out: in one of the most dramatic scenes in the novel, when
Helen attempts to break off her affair with Scobie in his car, “a few black
labourers passing down the hill looked curiously in.”[108]
They do not figure in the drama of the moment or in the story at all. They just
amble past, slightly curious, barely worth mentioning at all.
In
another instance, Scobie is in the depths of his depression. As he prays, he
pictures three horrendous scenes he has experienced. The first is a dying
English child who mistakes Scobie for her father; the second is the only
photograph of his own deceased daughter; and the third is “the face of a black
girl of twelve a sailor had raped and killed.”[109]
Of these three events, the first two are dealt with in detail in the novel; the
third, the one involving a black child, is mentioned for the first time in this
passage and never referred to again. The reader knows that the deaths of the
two white children affect Scobie intensely. There are scenes of Scobie praying
over the girl’s body, and Scobie telling the story of his daughter’s death to
Helen – a story he had told no one before – as a sign of his love. But there is
no background provided for the horrible death of the little black girl, no
careful considerations of the pain her death caused, no scenes of tears shed
for her. She is also not included when Scobie tallies the deaths during his
time in Africa a mere two days later. He mentions only “Pemberton, then the
child at Pende [the child who mistook Scobie for her father], now Robinson…”[110]
No African deaths are included in this tally, including the girl’s. She is
mentioned only in passing, as though the death of an African was an
afterthought.
Helen
further trivializes Africans when she tells Scobie that she will never be able
to see another black face without being reminded of him. For her the Africans
are truly just part of the landscape, just the servants and vendors and laborers
who work in the background while she enjoys her days at the beach, her evenings
at the social club, and her nights with Scobie. She lumps Africans with the
other things that will remind her of Scobie – “a Nissen hut,” “a Morris car,”
“a pink gin”[111] – all
specific, personal, inanimate things. She does not say “houses” and “cars” and
“liquor,” but she has no problems generalizing about living, feeling people who
happen to have dark skin.
Helen
is not alone. Many of the characters profess hatred of the continent or, at the
very least, impatience to leave it. Harris, an unimportant civil officer, is
most vocal in his ruminations about Africa. “I hate the place,” he says. “I
hate the people. I hate the bloody niggers.”[112]
Later, he calls the coast “this wild and distant part” and “the white man’s
grave.”[113] At one
point, Scobie discovers a letter written by the captain of a Portuguese ship to
his daughter. In the letter, the captain writes that the ship will celebrate,
because “Africa will be at last behind us.”[114]
Why a celebration would be in order, he does not explain, but the implication
that to leave Africa is a joyous occasion remains. And he is not alone;
Scobie’s wife, Louise, counts the days until his retirement, when they can move
back to England. In the interim, she begs to go to South Africa, which at the
time was still ruled by white Afrikaners. She tells him, “I can’t bear this
place any longer….I shall go mad.”[115]
Scobie
alone enjoys living on the coast. “The magic of this place never failed him: here
he kept his foothold on the very edge of a strange continent.”[116]
Of course, there is no evidence that he ever journeyed beyond the very edge,
and his love is less for things African than for the particular wretchedness of
the place where he resided – perhaps the primitiveness itself. Certainly the
place does not inspire him to intense emotion. As he says, “This isn’t a
climate for emotion. It’s a climate for meanness, malice, snobbery, but
anything like hate or love drives a man off his head.”[117]
Perhaps this is meant as foreshadowing for Scobie’s own love affair and
consequent irrationality, but the comment rather precludes Africans (or anyone
else in the climate) from loving as people in continental climates do, that is,
loving without being driven off of one’s head. According to this comment, the
only permissible indigenous feelings are all negative – meanness, malice, and
snobbery. As a point of fact, Scobie seems to be more taken with the
unfavorable parts of Africa than he is with any positive attributes it might
have. In fact, he explicitly states why he likes living on the coast, and the
reasons do not include anything positive about the people, the culture, or the
climate.
Why do I love this place so much? Is it because here
human nature hasn’t had time to disguise itself? Nobody here could even talk
about a heaven on earth. Heaven remained rigidly in its proper place on the
other side of death, and on this side flourished the injustices, the cruelties,
the meanness that elsewhere people so cleverly hushed up.[118]
Africa
for Scobie is bound up in his religion; evil abounds there. His desire to live
there is a masochistic preference. If anything, Africa induces and exposes the
worst of human nature, making it closer to hell than to heaven. That Scobie can
keep his faith and his integrity and his honor in a place where everyone else
is greedy and lusty and corrupt ennobles him to himself, at least until Helen
arrives. In the end, even Scobie becomes unjust and cruel, suggesting that
perhaps Africa is a place where evil prevails.
Granted,
little is known about the Africans’ proclivity for vice. But much is made about
the depravity of the Syrians. They are the only other non-white group residing
in the coastal town. They are involved in illegal diamond smuggling, bribing,
price gauging, thievery, and murder. Yet the English officers treat them with a
cautious respect because they control chains of markets that provide goods to
the officers and Africans alike. In fact, it is even acceptable to eat at their
homes; Yusef, the more notorious of the two head Syrians, has Scobie in his
home more than once, and Tallit, the other head Syrian, hosts Wilson and the
Catholic priest Father Rank for dinner. An African home, however, is never
mentioned in the story, and no English officer would dare set foot in one
except to investigate a crime. Syrians also wield political power, unlike
Africans. With their control over various markets, they could help cut supplies
to the enemy. As Yusef says, “You would be able to come to me and say, ‘Yusef,
the Government wants the Syrians to do this or that,’ and I should be able to
answer, “It shall be so.’”[119]
Yusef especially figures prominently in the story; he lends money to Scobie,
which compromises Scobie’s authority later, and he orders the murder of Ali,
after a subtle request from Scobie.
Scobie
treats the Syrians differently from the Africans; with them, he speaks regular
English, though with Africans, he always resorts to a kind of pidgin English.
“Why
you come here?” he asks an African woman. “Why you not call Corporal Laminah in
Sharp Town?”[120]
Considering that she is able to understand every other part of the sentence,
there is probably no need to leave the verbs unconjugated. After all, the woman
herself has already used the verb “broke,” and the words “landlady,”
“partition,” and “belongings,” indicating a fairly sophisticated knowledge of
the language. The only reason for Scobie to use his simplified English is
because he assumes the woman, because she is African, cannot understand regular
English. He assumes this even of Ali, his faithful servant of fifteen years. He
gives Ali orders in the same broken English: “Lay two places. Missus better…My
head humbug me…They think me bad man, Ali.”[121]
Later Ali accidentally overhears a romantic conversation between Helen and
Scobie. Scobie is nervous, but Helen tells him not to worry. “He didn’t
understand a thing,” she says.[122]
Once again, the white people doubt that the African can understand their
language, as if they do not have the mental capacity for it.
African
officers in the police force are also subject to skepticism by white officers,
but it is not their language ability that is in question; rather, the white
officers doubt their abilities and credibility. When Scobie goes to another
town to investigate a death, he goes first to see the white Catholic priest in
charge there. “There was only a native police sergeant at Bamba, and he would
like to be clear in his own mind as to what had happened before he received the
sergeant’s illiterate report.”[123]
According to Scobie’s logic, because the sergeant is a native, his report must
be illiterate. In fact, the sergeant’s report sounds like a normal police
report: “At 3:30 p.m. yesterday, sah, I was woken by D.C.'s boy, who reported
that D.C. Pemberton, sah…” At this point Scobie cuts the sergeant off. He has
already acquired the information he wants from the priest. The sergeant’s job,
then, is superfluous; a white man, even an untrained one, can do his duties and
do them better. Scobie also distrusts the black officers who patrol the wharf.
When they tell him they have already patrolled the end of the pier, he does not
believe them. “He knew they were lying: they would never go alone to that end
of the wharf, the playground of the human rats, unless they had a white officer
to guard them.”[124]
First, this comment again reveals Scobie’s automatic disbelief of anything a
black officer says. Second, it implies that the black officers are more timid
than white officers. Third, the black officers appear to be incompetent; far
from being effective guards themselves, they need a white officer to protect
them on their jobs. Thus the black guards appear to be inferior to the white.
The
average African fares no better. As one critic notes, “The natives have been
spoilt by the seedy civilization introduced by the British….They try to imitate
the civilization of the white man, who are afraid of them. It is with this
corrupt people that Scobie has to deal.”[125]
Indeed, the first image the reader has of Africans is of a group of schoolgirls
involved in the “interminable task of trying to wave their wirespring hair.”[126]
The African girls are trying unsuccessfully and almost comically to mimic the
British style. A few pages later, another view of Africans emerges: “They would
sit quietly all day in a white man’s backyard in order to beg for something he
hadn’t the power to grant, or they would shriek and fight and abuse to get
served in a store before their neighbor.”[127]
The picture presented here is of unreasonable Africans, impatient Africans,
rude Africans. Evidently the “civilization” of the British had not penetrated
far. In other instances, Africans are portrayed as almost deserving
discrimination for their uncooperativeness with authorities.
From eight-thirty in the morning until eleven he dealt with a case of petty larceny; there were six witnesses to examine, and he didn’t believe a word that any of them said. In European cases there are words one believes and words one distrusts….But here one could make no assumption: one could draw no lines….It woke in some men a virulent hatred of black skin.[128]
Once
again, none of the black people are to be believed; it is as though they have
no moral code, no difference between right and wrong as in civilized Europe.
African women are further shown to be corrupt when they are portrayed merely as
sex objects for the white men. One of the very first views of the town includes
some boys acting as pimps: “Captain want jig jig, my sister pretty girl
school-teacher, captain want jig jig.”[129]
Immediately, the reader sees young boys, hawking their human wares, providing
entertainment for the white officer who watches them from above. This is the
only business the reader sees run by Africans – the most disreputable,
dishonorable, and shameful enterprise in the town. But, as Wilson thinks to
himself later, “Some time or another if one lived in a place one must try the
local product.”[130]
The African women who work at the brothel are dehumanized, reduced to “the
local product.” Women not associated with the brothel are also seen only in
terms of their sexuality. “Naked to the waist a young girl passed gleaming
through the rain and Wilson watched her out of sight with melancholy lust.”[131]
Another officer named Halifax comments to Scobie after their wives leave for
South Africa: “I wouldn’t mind a nice little black girl to look after me now
I’m alone.”[132] The
African women are mere playthings for the men, not women for whom they might
develop feelings. The few women who are not judged in terms of their abilities
to provide sexual satisfaction for the men are referred to insultingly as
“mammies,” with “their heads tied up in bright cloths…[and] their shapeless
cotton gowns.”[133]
These women are faceless, sexless, viewed only in terms of their non-Western clothing.
Like other African characters, who “drift through the novel, are rarely named,
[and] are given brief descriptions,”[134]
they serve no purpose except to remind the reader that the story is set in
Africa.
The
few African characters who do serve a purpose are generally employed as “boys.”
They are, in effect, the household servants for the white people. Harris gives
his estimation of the “boys” to Wilson on his first day on the coast. “A man’s
boy’s always all right. He’s a real nigger.”[135]
For Harris, a “real nigger” is someone who knows his place, who does not aspire
to be “clerks in the store, city council, magistrates, lawyers.”[136]
They are subservient to their masters; their few lines of dialogue in the novel
are “Yes, massa” and “Yes, sah.” They are often nameless, called by their
masters simply “boy” or “small boy” if there is a need to distinguish between
two of them. Somehow, they all seem to be related. “They appear throughout the
novel as the members of a huge family, all brothers or half-brothers,
establishing a secret liaison between their British masters.”[137]
It is this supposed liaison that makes Scobie distrust Ali late in the story
after he discovers Ali talking to Wilson’s boy, who is also Ali’s half-brother.
Yusef’s boy is also Wilson’s boy’s half-brother.[138]
The close relation of all these boys to each other gives the appearance that
either all the boys come from only one huge family or that some African man
goes around impregnating various women. At any rate, the Africans are presented
as having many, many children. And not just boys. As Scobie’s wife says,
“They’ve all got sisters, haven’t they?”[139]
Since most African people in the novel have no visible source of income besides
prostitution, having such large families would be socially irresponsible.
Luckily the British and the Syrians are there to employ the boys of the
families, though compensation is minimal.
Scobie
himself has two boys, Ali and the small boy, whose name is never known. In
fact, the small boy is almost never mentioned, and when he is, it is only in
reference to his duties: “Scobie watched the small boy as he cleared away the
evening meal, watched him come in and go out, watched the bare feet flap the
floor.”[140] The small
boy is described only in terms of his work. There is no personality to speak
of, no emotions, no face. Just the feet flapping the floor. Ali, on the other
hand, is Scobie’s constant companion. He has been with Scobie for fifteen
years, longer than Scobie has been married, meaning Ali would be a man and not
a boy. When his wife asks him if he loves anyone besides himself, Scobie
answers, “No, I just love myself, that’s all. And Ali. I forgot Ali. Of course
I love him too.”[141]
One of the reader’s first glimpses of Ali is when he bandages a small cut on
Scobie’s hand.[142]
In another scene, during a long journey, Ali provides tea and biscuits each
time Scobie wakes up.[143]
On the same trip, Scobie is ill with a fever. Ali makes sure there were no
visitors and no noise in the area; he takes care of Scobie yet again.[144]
The view of Ali that emerges is of Ali as caretaker, Ali as nurse, Ali as
escort. But the reader sees nothing of Ali outside of his domestic service.
“Scobie’s ‘boy’ Ali does receive a good deal of attention but he is given no
personality. Although Scobie says that he loves him, it is the love of a master
for his faithful dog.”[145]
Indeed, Ali behaves more like a robot than a human; since he is always awake on
the journey when Scobie wakes, it seems he never sleeps; though the reader sees
Scobie and other characters become ill, Ali never gets sick; though other men
are tempted by women, he appears to live a chaste life.
The
only human failing that Ali might have is untrustworthiness. After he hears
Scobie and Helen make their loving pronouncements, he becomes a marked man. Of
course, it is not his fault he overheard the conversation; he had been sent to
deliver a message to Scobie. Ali is only doing his job. Still, though Scobie is
the wrongdoer, he cannot bring himself to trust Ali though Ali tries to assure
Scobie of his loyalty. “I’m your boy,” he tells Scobie.[146]
Still, this does not stop Scobie from doubting Ali. As Scobie says, “I’ve lost
the trick of trust.”[147]
With his trust in Ali wavering, Scobie finds himself resorting to the racism
and prejudice that he had tried to avoid: “And he thought again, Can Ali really
be trusted? And all the stale coast wisdom of the traders and the remittance
men told him, ‘Never trust a black. They’ll let you down in the end. Had my boy
fifteen years…’”[148]
After Scobie discovers Ali talking with Wilson’s boy, his trust is almost
completely gone: “he felt distrust of his boy moving again like fever with the
bloodstream.”[149] Scobie
never fully confronts Ali nor gives him a chance to prove or protest his
innocence. Because he is the master, the white man, the police chief, he has
control over Ali’s destiny. In his mind, Scobie has judged Ali guilty, and he
goes to Yusef to help him take care of the “problem” that is Ali.
Yusef
promises Scobie to “find out for you whether you can trust him.”[150]
His method is simple; he will have Ali killed so that whatever secrets he might
know will die with him. Yusef takes a token from Scobie, a broken rosary, and
sends his boy to summon Ali. Scobie thankfully agrees to let Yusef handle him.
He quickly finds out what Yusef has in store for Ali:
From somewhere among the jumble of huts and warehouses, a cry came: pain and fear: it swam up like a drowning animal for air, and fell again into the darkness of the room….The body lay coiled and unimportant like a broken watchspring under a pile of petrol drums: it looked as though it had been shovelled there to wait for morning and the scavenger birds.[151]
In
the language describing Ali’s death, Ali is likened to both a drowned animal
and a watchspring, two inhuman things that do not arouse the same sympathy as a
dying man. The body itself is “unimportant” and lies there as though
“shovelled.” Ali’s death has no dignity in it, none of the grace granted to the
other corpses in the novel, none of the stark reminder of human mortality. It
is “unimportant.” Scobie rushes to Ali’s body, but his first inclination is to
find his rosary, the piece of evidence against him. Looking at the body, Scobie
likens the two images: he describes the body as “very small and dark and a long
way away – like a broken piece of the rosary he looked for: a couple of black
beads and the image of God coiled at the end of it.”[152]
Finally, he feels a sense of guilt, but it is not for the murder of Ali. “Oh
God, he thought, I’ve killed you: you’ve served me all these years and I’ve
killed you at the end of them. God lay there under the petrol drums.”[153]
Even with his involvement with Ali’s death, even though he knows Ali would be
alive if he had trusted him, if he had not committed his own sins, Scobie does
not mourn for Ali. Instead, he mourns for the loss of his faith; he sees Ali’s
death only in terms of his own life, his own religion. That a man has been
killed because of him, a man who had been loyal and faithful to him for fifteen
years, a man whose guilt was presumed and sentence declared without a chance
for him to defend himself – does not affect Scobie then. It is not until later
that he says “it was the sense of guilt that made it so important….Otherwise
one didn’t grieve for a death.”[154]
Ali’s death should have been most important to Scobie; he had lost an able
servant and a constant companion. But the death matters only in terms of
Scobie’s guilt. Though for once an African figures prominently in the story, he
is only a foil for Scobie’s central story. The guilt that Scobie feels for
Ali’s death does not figure prominently in his decision to commit suicide.
Rather, he states that he wants to protect the two women he loves. Scobie, in
fact, does not mention Ali again until the moment of death is near. Scobie
takes an overdose of sleeping pills and in confusion thinks there is going to
be a storm. He calls out for his loyal servant to help him close the windows.[155]
Ali, of course, is dead, and Scobie himself dies moments later. Even in this
most dramatic scene in the novel, Ali’s named is invoked not in a belated
apology or an admission of guilt or a cry of regret but in a command, an order.
Ali, the reader is reminded, was still a servant in Scobie’s mind; his death
had been forgotten.
The Heart of the Matter is a book set in Africa, but it is primarily concerned with the white colonists who happen to live in Africa. The Africans who have inhabited the area for centuries are pushed to the background as merely small pieces of an exotic landscape. The description of the Africans is both biased and harmful: every African seems to be a shyster; every African is an opportunist. They are mysteriously inter-related, shamelessly sex objects, and ultimately untrustworthy. In Greene’s Africa, the white man loves, hates, has torrid affairs and is driven to suicide; the black man cares only for extra shillings. This book may well have been set in London, as Orwell suggested, but Greene chose to set it in Africa. In some ways, Greene is more at fault for perpetrating stereotypes than Bellow because he had been there, he had had some experience with the continent, limited though it was. Greene took his experience with Africans and rendered them colorless and corrupt; in Greene’s Africa, only the white man can have his humanity.
There
is no honor in ridiculing or omitting an entire group of people – a group that
exists in real time, in real life – based on their race. It is called racism,
and racism has led to some of the ugliest wars and most destructive oppression
in the world. A writer’s purpose may not be to educate per se, but it should
never be to knowingly, willingly miseducate. Readers who are already uninformed
or misinformed can take the racist author’s work and use the poisonous
lampooning of a race to bolster their own bigotry. In that scenario, the author
is in part responsible for propagating hatred – for the rise of fascism and Jim
Crow laws and segregation and discrimination. Racist authors provide fuel for
atrocities. The blood is on their hands.
Credibility,
even in a medium called “fiction,” is often just as necessary as the suspension
of disbelief to make the reader become engaged in the work. The reader can
expect an author to accurately portray his characters and his setting. If the
author does, it is to his or her credit; if not, then one of two things may
happen. The reader may realize the author is disparaging a group of people and
can judge the author’s work accordingly. But the reader may not realize the
error. It is when the reader does not realize that the author is not the
authority, that the author’s version is not true-to-life, that the author’s
version is hopelessly antiquated and simplistic and prejudiced – it is then
that the real trouble begins.
In
both Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain
King and Graham Greene’s The Heart of
the Matter, the reader is presented with two nameless pieces of Africa.
Since the respective cities or countries are never specified, they are often
presented as representations of the entire continent. In these representations,
the reader finds herself confronted primarily with white faces, first with the
gargantuan Henderson, and then with the British colonial administration. The
reader finds black faces that either prance around like animals or cavort with
lions or cower behind their masters. The reader finds a place where education
for black Africans is virtually nonexistent and superstitions reign supreme. In
short, the reader finds the versions of Africa as presented to them by these
writers.
Indeed,
the question of how Africa should be presented is a difficult one to answer.
Granted, many atrocities have taken place there. Granted, superstition exists.
Granted, some Africans are not educated. But there is a subtle line between
accurate representation and slight mockery. All of these things could be said
just as easily about America. But there are plenty of glorious moments in
American history that are not atrocities, plenty of reasonable and scientific
thought to combat the superstition, and an educated class as well as the
uneducated. And all of these things could be just as easily said about Africa.
In
fact, these things are said about Africa, in books written by African writers,
in poems by African poets, in plays by African playwrights, in criticism by African
critics. African novelists abound, and with them comes a perception of Africa
that is rich in culture and cognizant of history. As African writer Chinua
Achebe wrote, “I would be quite satisfied if my novels did no more than teach
my readers that their past – with all its imperfections – was not one long
night of savagery from which the first Europeans acting on God’s behalf
delivered them.”[156]
Unfortunately works like Achebe’s are often not taught in schools until the
high school or college level, after years of misinformation and mendacity. Even
then, they are more than likely bundled together in a selective course of
African Literature or offered with a course on World Literature. The chance
that they will be widely read by readers who know the least about Africa, who
have been exposed only to caricatures of the continent, is slim. And the circle
of ignorance will continue.
People are not born racist or sexist or bigoted. They are born uninformed. Somewhere, somehow, images filter in, words begin to make sense, and pictures begin to form. The word “Africa” becomes associated with a certain area on the globe, the home of chimps and lions, or the land of massacres and famines. Rarely is the picture one-dimensional; at some point, ideas concerning the people who live there begin to develop; we think we know something of their beliefs, their religions, their customs. If we do not have someone to guide us, someone to give us an accurate description, we may fall prey to the myths perpetuated by generations before us. We may believe there is no technology in Africa, that all Africans swing from tree to tree to get around. We may believe they fight amongst themselves because they are like children, always wanting the last word and never wanting to share. We may believe that all Africans worship their ancestors or the trees; if “our” God is believed in, it is only thanks to the missionaries. It is so easy to be miseducated about Africa; even when we think we have learned a lot, we may know so little. And yet everything from movies to newspapers to books can reinforce erroneous ideas. Even books written by famous, award-winning authors.
The books themselves already exist. They cannot be unwritten, nor should they be. Quite apart from their treatment of Africa, they deal with important issues, sometimes brilliantly. Even in their treatment of Africa, they are useful. They provide a poignant warning, graphically detailed in the preceding paragraphs, to others hoping to capitalize on the ready romance of a distant and exotic land. To do so may only further the misconceptions that Americans already have. Perhaps it is too much to ask unknowledgeable writers to stop writing about Africa, or at least to stop setting their stories there. The continent already has a hold on the imagination. But imagination as such should not provide the basis for a novel set in Africa. Careful research and even a personal, open-minded journey to the continent should be undertaken before a word is written. Perhaps with more forethought, with more education and experience, there will be fewer writers daring to turn a living, existing place, already beleaguered by the works of Graham Greene and Saul Bellow and countless others, into another work of fiction.
Achebe, Chinua. Another Africa. New York: Doubleday, 1998. Excerpt from Salon. 16 November 1998. Online. Accessed 25 November 2001. http://www.salon.com/wlust/pass/1998/cov_15pass.html
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Hyland, Peter. Saul Bellow. New York: St. Martin’s
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McConnell,
Frank. “Saul Bellow and the Terms of Our Contract,” Four Postwar American Novelists. Chicago: University of Chicago
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Mesnet, Marie-Beatrice.
Graham Greene and the Heart of the Matter. Westport,
Conn: Greenwood Press, 1972.
Miller, Ruth. Saul Bellow: A Biography of the Imagination.
New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991.
Shelden,
Michael. Graham Greene: The Enemy Within.
New York: Random House, 1994.
Steinbeck, John.
Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Sweden, 1927. Online. Accessed 28 October 2001.
http://www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/1962/steinbeck-acceptance.html
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Jonathon. On Bellow’s Planet: Readings
from the Dark Side. London: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1985.
Wolfreys, Julian. Introducing Literary Theories.
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[1] Maslow, Abraham. Motivation and Personality. Online. Accessed 10 October 2001. http://www.utoledo.edu/~ddavis/maslow.htm
[2] Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Sweden, 1927. Online. Accessed 28 October 2001.
http://www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/1962/steinbeck-acceptance.html
[3] Quoted online at Rich Geib’s Universe. Author Rich Geib. Accessed 14 October 2001. http://www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/brotherhood/brotherhood.html
[4] Achebe, Chinua. Another Africa. New York: Doubleday, 1998. Excerpt from Salon. 16 November 1998. Online. Accessed 25 November 2001. http://www.salon.com/wlust/pass/1998/cov_15pass.html
[5] “Africa Today: The Lifting Darkness,” Reporter. 15 May 1951. Online. Accessed 21 October 2001. http://www.bartleby.com/63/98/3498.html
[6] Achebe, Chinua. “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” Heart of Darkness, An Authoritative Text, background and Sources Criticism. 3rd ed. Ed. Robert Kimbrough. London: W. W Norton and Co., 1988. 251-261.
[7] Duran, Leopoldo. Graham Greene: An Intimate Portrait by His Closest Friend and Confidant. San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1994.
[8] Cuddon, J.A. A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. 3rd ed. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991.
[9] Hawthorn, Jeremy. A Glossary of Contemporary Literary Theory. 2nd ed. London: Edward Arnold, 1994. 238-41.
[10] Hawthorn, 240.
[11] Wolfreys, Julian. Introducing Literary Theories. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001. 200-1.
[12] Wolfreys, 213.
[13] Hawthorn, 240.
[14] Miller, Ruth. Saul Bellow: A Biography of the Imagination. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991. 71.
[15] Atlas, James. Bellow: A Biography. New York: Random House, 2000. 260.
[16] Atlas, 271.
[17] Atlas, 260.
[18] Miller, 109
[19] Bellow, Saul. Henderson the Rain King. New York: Viking Press, 1958.17.
[20] Bellow, 18.
[21] Bellow, 22.
[22] Bellow, 42.
[23] Bellow, 63
[24] Bellow, 234.
[25] Bellow, 138.
[26] Bellow, 39.
[27] Bellow, 41.
[28] Bellow, 43.
[29] Markos, Donald. “Life Against Death in Henderson the Rain King,” The Critical Response to Saul Bellow. Ed. Gerhard Bach. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1995. 110.
[30] Bellow, 282.
[31] Bellow, 98.
[32] McConnell, Frank. “Saul Bellow and the Terms of Our Contract,” Four Postwar American Novelists. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977. 113.
[33] McConnell, 113.
[34] Bellow, 72.
[35] Bellow,
115.
[36] Bellow, 149.
[37] Bellow, 181.
[38] Hyland, Peter. Saul
Bellow. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. 52.
[39] Bellow, 157.
[40] Bellow, 157.
[41] Wilson, Jonathon. On Bellow’s Planet: Readings from the Dark Side. London: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1985. 125-6.
[42] Bellow, 230.
[43] Bellow, 271.
[44] Bellow, 160.
[45] Bellow, 186.
[46] Bellow, 275.
[47] Bellow, 195.
[48] Bellow, 192.
[49] Wilson, 119.
[50] Bellow, 133.
[51] Bellow, 136.
[52] Bellow, 149.
[53] Bellow, 273.
[54] Bellow, 143.
[55] Bellow, 51-2.
[56] Bellow, 148.
[57] Bellow, 65.
[58] Bellow, 131.
[59] Bellow, 200-1.
[60] Bellow, 176.
[61] Bellow, 170.
[62] Bellow, 286.
[63] Bellow, 254.
[64] Bellow, 175.
[65] Bellow, 4.
[66] Bellow, 45.
[67] Bellow, 163.
[68] Bellow, 302.
[69] Bellow, 73-4.
[70] Bellow, 150.
[71] Bellow, 153.
[72] Dutton, Robert. Saul Bellow: Revised Edition. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982. 97.
[73] Bellow, 278.
[74] Bellow, 242.
[75] Bellow, 312.
[76] Bellow, 315.
[77] Bellow, 107.
[78] Bellow, 171-2.
[79] Bellow, 192.
[80] Hicks, Granville. “The Search for Salvation,” The Critical Response to Saul Bellow.
Ed. Gerhard Bach. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1995. 101.
[81] Bellow, 323.
[82] Bellow, 137.
[83] Bellow, 322.
[84] Hughes, Daniel. “Reality and the Hero,” Saul Bellow and the Critics. Ed. Irving Malin. New York: New
York University Press, 1967. 38.
[85] Bellow, 68.
[86] Bellow, 186.
[87] Bellow, 324.
[88] Bellow, 311.
[89] Bellow, 316.
[90] Bellow, 321.
[91] Bellow, 118.
[92] Bellow, 119.
[93] Bellow, 118.
[94] Dutton, 100.
[95] Bellow, 271.
[96] Bellow, 155.
[97] Bellow, 277.
[98] Markos, 108-9.
[99] Bellow, 333.
[100] Shelden, Michael. Graham Greene: The Enemy Within. New York: Random House, 1994. 298.
[101] Greene, Barbara. “The Appeal of Unmapped Territories,” Graham Greene: Man of Paradox. Ed. A. F. Cassis. Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1994. 25.
[102] Shelden, 163.
[103] Shelden, 250.
[104] Atkins, John. Graham Greene. London: John Calder, 1957. 67.
[105] Greene, Graham. The Heart of the Matter. New York: Penguin, 1978. Orig. published 1948. 15.
[106] Greene, 226.
[107] Shelden, 294.
[108] Greene, 251.
[109] Greene, 220.
[110] Greene, 229.
[111] Greene, 250.
[112] Greene, 13.
[113] Greene, 147.
[114] Greene, 54.
[115] Greene, 58.
[116] Greene, 37.
[117] Greene, 31.
[118] Greene, 35-6.
[119] Greene, 151.
[120] Greene, 19.
[121] Greene, 25, 84, 229.
[122] Greene, 234.
[123] Greene, 85.
[124] Greene, 37.
[125] Mesnet, 29.
[126] Greene, 11.
[127] Greene, 20.
[128] Greene, 141.
[129] Greene, 11-2.
[130] Greene, 173.
[131] Greene, 169.
[132] Greene, 102.
[133] Greene, 169.
[134] Shelden, 294.
[135] Greene, 13.
[136] Greene, 13.
[137] Mesnet, 30.
[138] Greene, 169.
[139] Greene, 24-5.
[140] Greene, 252.
[141] Greene, 24.
[142] Greene, 40-1.
[143] Greene, 83.
[144] Greene, 89.
[145] Shelden, 294.
[146] Greene, 230.
[147] Greene, 234.
[148] Greene, 237.
[149] Greene, 236-7.
[150] Greene, 242.
[151] Greene, 246-7.
[152] Greene, 247.
[153] Greene, 247.
[154] Greene, 253.
[155] Greene, 265.
[156] Achebe, Chinua. Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays. New York: Doubleday, 1988. 30.