Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

James Reich – Mistah Kurtz – 2016. The strangest novel you can imagine, trying to complete the beginning and the end of Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness. It has to be in phase with the horror of the original novel and it is, but it no longer is a testimony about what colonialism was in Africa at the end of the 19^th century. It is a modern reconstruction of what colonialism could have been in such dark, very dark times when the worst ever crime, a global crime with many facets, each one uglier than all the others, against humanity from genocidal Europe – soon to be joined by America – engaged in this colonial adventure. Africa was nothing but a treasure chest for the Europeans and Americans provided the human ants that crawled all over it were eliminated after having been exploited to death.

First, the main agents of this brutal colonization of Africa, here the Belgian Congo, are all systematically shown as monstrous delinquents from birth with parents just as bad as bad can be, just stopping short of killing their children. Shame on them: they enabled these monsters to survive and thrive! I guess they found more pleasure in torturing them, making them suffer, turning them into misfits, and misfits they are. Kurtz is the first of them all but far from being the only one. These misfits look for some kind of valorizing caper or adventure or mission on this earth to compensate for their failings and they find it in the service of the “Company” that provides them with a uniform, a worldwide organization that accompanies them to the very heart of the wilderness with only one mission: to kill – ah! the bleeding pleasure in this word, the bleeding heart in this bliss! – as many elephants they can to just extract their two tusks and send them back to Europe to become the fashionable jewels the rich there will be wearing when going to the opera, or midnight mass for Christmas.

No one can imagine the horror they discover.

In Gibraltar where they stop on their way to Kinshasa, the main character discovers “… the broken black men. Each of the niggers wore a noose around his throat that connected him to the slave before him and after him. Their shoulders were raw from whipping, and the reddening peninsula of Gibraltar now swelled blood all around me. The men grimaced, their white teeth large in their sunken faces, eyes barely open to the scene about them… The Arab pushed the leading man between the shoulders, choking him as he jerked away from the man shackled and roped behind him. There were nine of them, all painfully, adjusting their steps.” (page 79)

And it goes on with more remarks and descriptions: “What was it I witnessed in the bondage of all this negritude – resignation, patience, or absolute abjection?” (page 96) and again: “I saw a gang of Niggers leaning on shovels at the lip of a small crater. There must have been six or seven of them conscripted there, chained together in iron collars that drew rings of blood from their throats when they walked or worked out of rhythm. As I took them in, another emerged from the broad shadow of a palm. This one was not enchained but wore with European formality the uniform of the Company. It was in his hand that I first witnessed the chicotte – a six-foot whip wound from hippopotamus hide – in use. The diggers had not seen, nor heard him approaching their flank, and he lashed their ribs and shoulder with a savage disinterest, as though he were directing stubborn beasts. The whip splitting their skins became merely another of the dissonant percussions of the station. The diggers mouthed their agonies silently… I understood that it was a grave… These crater graves were meant for more than one man… Partly obscured with dirt was a wicked tangle of corpses… Their eyes fixed, dilated, the shocked sclera turned to a dull ivory. Some of them appeared to have fallen into an exhausted sleep, while others were mutilated into nightmarish deportment. Wrists without hands, projected from the pile. Palates without lower jaws gaped against the mud sliding into the pit. Either they had been executed  or they had been blown up to smithereens by the dynamite detonating through the forest…” (page 99-100)

 

Kurtz was deranged by his infancy, childhood, and teenage but after that he no longer was deranged. He became completely berserk. It is beyond any kind of understanding that Kurtz could be only considered as a rotten apple in the basket along with many other white apples that were not rotten and would come back from Africa to produce a new generation of children and adults. Kurtz is living his PTcolonialSS through by becoming a being beyond repair, beyond reprieve, beyond salvation and he is taken away by the Company and all the crimes he committed will be buried in his file since he provided the company with so much more ivory than anyone else in the world, even if in his ranting and raving he imagined himself as a God or as an elephant. For him, there is only death at the end of his road but 100% of these colonists (minus one individual out of so many) will go back to England and Europe, insane but respected in their heroic dedication to the enrichment of the West.

Imagine the descendants of all these white colonists or all other white slave masters, how they inherited such trauma of white supremacy that they cannot even imagine – still today – sitting next to a black person in a restaurant, a bus, a train carriage, a plane, or even a church, etc. Then you can start understanding how difficult it has to be for them to accept the present turning point in our life, in our world, when white or western supremacy are both at the same time coming down the historic flush of a pandemic. Before theorizing, let’s just look at what the reality was and still is. In many ways, we, Europeans, and Americans can’t breathe when we have to swallow such unredeemable heritage.

Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU

# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 11:33 AM