June 2004

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Interrogating "The Horror"
by Janet M. Powers

Just recently, a publisher’s brochure advertising a new critical edition of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness arrived in my college mailbox. I was amused at the realization that this work is still being taught, for it was one that I read with my first-year English comp classes when I first began teaching at Gettysburg in 1963. For those of you that missed reading it somewhere along the way, let me explain that it is the quintessential novel of colonialism. Joseph Conrad was a Polish sailor who became a great English novelist, moving beyond his own culture to take on the language of another. In Heart of Darkness, he explores the margins of African culture and hints at great horror. The story that he tells is one of pity for a remarkable man, an ivory trader who steps over the line separating cultures and, so to speak, “goes native.” “He would disappear for weeks; forget himself amongst these people–forget himself–you know” (50). In the eyes of his colonialist colleagues, Kurtz suffers from lack of restraint. He is also described as a hollow man, an idea which surfaces later in T.S. Eliot’s poem, “The Hollow Men,” used to describe the post-World War I generation.

Although the rituals in which Kurtz participates are not described, we are given to understand that they are pagan rites involving certain unspeakable activities which bring about sickness and eventually death. At the moment he breathes his last, he is heard crying out, “the horror.” Heart of Darkness thus becomes a reference not only to the interior of the so-called “dark continent” but also a metaphor for the heart of the individual who forsakes the so-called “civilized” values of the European traders.

It’s intriguing to think of teaching Heart of Darkness now, as Americans embark on neo-colonial trading ventures and fight guerilla wars of occupation in Afghanistan and Iraq. Certainly the media tries hard to substitute certain mysteries of the Islamic world for the darkness attributed more than a century ago to Africa. Even Western feminists were co-opted into the embarrassing campaign of rescuing Afghani women from the Taliban and were chagrined to realize later that many women in Afghanistan are truly more comfortable wearing a veil. Hot on the trail of a brutal dictator and his fearsome weapons of mass destruction, we attacked one of the most literate and well-educated Arab populations in the Middle East. As if to prove that they were somehow less civilized than they actually are, we also permitted the looting of one of the world great archaeological museums, allowed irreplaceable manuscripts to burn in the National Library, and dropped bombs on a university. While scholars around the globe were grieving over these losses, the US began disassembling a complex culture in which Sunnis and Shi'ahs, Kurds and Baathists, moderates and hard‑liners are now ranged against each other and against their occupiers with increasingly troubling intensity.

My friends, I can only tell you–what many already know–that our country has made a terrible mistake. I’m going to ask you to resist putting a political label on that statement, but rather to try for a moment to look at US actions from the vantage point of people outside this country. Making a pre‑emptive strike on a sovereign nation sets a terrible precedent for our enemies as well as for those who emulate us. Whether we acted out of ignorance or out of greed, we have lost the trust and respect that we once enjoyed in the eyes of the world. Like good buddies, many countries tried to warn us before we started the war on Iraq. Already distressed by the bombing of Afghanistan, people around the world turned out by the millions to protest our war. But arrogance, it seems, is inseparable from power, and we didn’t listen to our friends. Indeed, we called them disloyal, not recognizing that they were trying to do us a service. So instead, priding ourselves on a small coalition of nations that cannot afford to say no to American economic aid, we went ahead and launched the war that the Neo-Conservatives had long intended. And now we are paying a heavy price. I have a son-in-law in the military, so I do not speak lightly of that cost.

From my own work with UNESCO in the Middle East, I am well aware that in the eyes of the Arab world, we have now compounded our sins. Whether exaggerated or not, Al-Qaeda’s earlier concerns had to do with US bases in Saudi Arabia, too close to the holy shrine of Mecca. Muslims everywhere also blame the US for funding and permitting Israel’s deathly stranglehold on the Palestinians. It is our money that buys the F-16's and the Apache helicopters, builds a separation wall, and is ultimately responsible for the deaths of several thousand innocent civilians. But in the Muslim view, we have now done the unspeakable by seizing control of one of the great traditional Arab centers of power and culture. We are now masters in someone else’s house. Certainly Iraqis suffered under Saddam Hussein’s despotism, but now they are suffering even more under a broken infrastructure, political infighting and trigger-happy occupation forces. At this point, nothing the US can do will redeem this horror in the mind of the Arab world and virtually everyone else. Nothing.

Most of us have been educated to believe that democracy is a superior political system, which handles transitions of power fairly and without bloodshed. We have also been taught that democracy and capitalism go hand-in-hand, that one simply implies the other. And finally, we have assumed that it is our “civilizing mission” to bring this remarkable combination of democracy cum capitalism to the rest of the world. I wonder whether it is time to take a hard look at these assumptions. These, however, are not political questions that I am asking. Rather, they are philosophical ones. I have always understood that philosophy teaches us how to live and how to die. So what I am questioning is how we should live. Again, I urge you to avoid putting a political label on what I am about to say. During the last four years, my faith in democracy has been severely undermined. I now know, that like many other political systems, democracy is no stronger than the moral vision of its leaders. And if its leaders engage in electoral fraud, misuse executive privilege, abuse the separation of church and state, and muddy the lines between the branches of government, then our democracy is on shaky ground. To have to acknowledge such vulnerability is truly devastating!

I have spent much of my teaching career trying to persuade students to look at other cultures from a grass-roots perspective–a sometimes difficult task when the media insists on portraying Arabs as “the Other” and our leaders can’t seem to sort out Islamic extremists from an atheist dictator. I don’t know what Kurtz meant by “the horror,” but I suspect that at the moment of death Marlow’s friend may have realized his own complicity in savaging another culture. Similarly, if the US is to survive as a nation, we have to begin to interrogate “the horror” in all its dimensions. We have to ask what terrible deeds the US has done in the name of democracy and whether we are harming those we purport to help. We have to ask whether democracy is right or even possible for other cultures and imagine what other forms it might take. And finally we have to ask what capitalism’s incessantly expanding markets are doing to the environment and the humans of this beautiful big blue planet that we share with so many others. We have much to learn from the world community. Let me leave you with an important thought from Wade Davis, who is both an anthropologist and ethnobotanist: “The world in which you were born is just one model of reality. Other cultures are not failed attempts at being you; they are unique manifestations of the human spirit.” For your life’s task, let me suggest that you personally dedicate yourself to the task of trying to understand the world from the vantage point of those other uniquely worthy cultures.

(Jan Powers, a 1995 winner of the ICPJ’s Peacemaker Award, recently retired as Associate Professor of Women’s Studies and Interdisciplinary Studies from Gettysburg College, where she had taught since 1963. She was given the Distinguished Teaching Award at the College’s 2004 graduation ceremony. This article is excerpted from a speech delivered at the Annual Banquet of the Gettysburg College chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, April 16, 2004.)

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