The Art of Conversation 2 How the ‘Subaltern’ Speaks in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

———— RASHNA B. SINGH

Among the Ibo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten.1

HE SUBALTERN CANNOT SPEAK,” GAYATRI SPIVAK FAMOUSLY DECLARED in her seminal essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?”2 In Joseph Conrad’s T novella Heart of Darkness, the African as subaltern becomes the historically muted subject, forced to speak through the body and denied logocentric expression. In this essay I argue that Conrad’s representation of the African as more or less mute may be a recognition that colonization ren- dered the subaltern voiceless rather than a true silencing. Conrad isolates Africans as subaltern in what Spivak has called “a space of difference,”3 but

1 Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (Greenwich CT: Fawcett, 1959): 10. Unless otherwise stated, further page references are in the main text. 2 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988), in Colonial Discourse and Post Colonial Theory, ed. Patrick Williams & Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia UP, 1994):104. 3 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Subaltern Talk: Interview With the Editors,” in The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ed. Donna Landry & Gerald MacLean (London: Routledge, 1996): 293. 36 R ASHNA B. S INGH  the space of difference becomes an ambiguous space in the novella. Chinua Achebe arrives at a similar recognition in his novel Things Fall Apart, where the normative space of Igbo society transitions into a space of difference. Achebe’s characters are silenced once the old order, and their place in it, no longer survives, once they have, in effect, become subaltern. The Igbo are presented as logical, rational, and entirely verbal, privileging the spoken word. It is only after the colonizing order is well established that they lose their power to speak discursively and transactionally and must resort to phy- siological expression. This essay will examine how Achebe uses speech in Things Fall Apart to interrogate the silences of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Spivak examines the production of “the Other of Europe” and the com- plicity of the intellectual “in the persistent constitution of Other as the Self’s shadow.”4 In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Marlow, as Chinua Achebe notes in his essay “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Dark- ness,” can barely bring himself to acknowledge the common humanity of the Africans he encounters. They are not so much the Self’s shadow as only tenu- ously connected to the Self by a thin thread of humanity. “Herein,” says Achebe, “lies the meaning of Heart of Darkness and the fascination it holds over the Western mind: ‘What thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity – like yours […] Ugly.’”5 In Heart of Darkness, Conrad creates an Other that is not the “irretrievably heterogeneous” colonized subaltern subject Spivak insists upon in a different context,6 but monolithic and undifferen- tiated: “unhappy savages,” “Black shapes,” “moribund shapes,” “black shad- ows,” “black bones,” “bundles of acute angles,” “phantom.”7 Only one is marked out by the scrap of white worsted tied round his black neck, a sort of travesty of the accountant’s starched collar. But where the accountant is af- forded speech, the man with white worsted round his neck is the classic muted subaltern, denied both speech and logocentric expression. The Africans that Marlow describes here are sick and starving, and it is only through their bodies that they can communicate or, indeed, protest their condition. Indeed,

4 Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 75. 5 Chinua Achebe, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness” (1975), in Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Paul B. Armstrong (Norton Critical Editions; New York: W.W. Norton, 2006): 339. 6 Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 79. 7 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1902; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973): 23– 25. Unless otherwise stated, further page references are in brackets in the main text.