Bear with me. This is long. And quite different from my other posts. But, it's an example of the kind of thinking Oxford has inspired within me, and therefore I considered it relevant to this blog.
Penultimate Oxford essay: regarding Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, which is a verbose and horridly, though quite subtly, prejudiced recollection of a British man's journey into the depths of Africa in the 19th century. I am to evaluate this short novel with the help of Chinua Achebe's article "An Image of Africa," found in volume 18 of "The Massachusetts Review," 1977.
Numerous thoughts: brought about by not only this article and the book itself, but also by several conversations held with a close friend of mine over the past few days, all in conjunction with my own considerations. I have been thinking about my future as a writer. I want to travel to various countries, namely impoverished or oft overlooked countries, and write about them in such a manner as to bring them to the forefront of Western consciousness, challenging common conceptions, and calling their present state into serious question. I've struggled with this ambition of mine for several weeks, mostly as a result of my post-colonial global literature tutorial. I questioned my right, not to mention my ability, to speak for a country, a people, a culture that I would see through the very lens I wish to challenge. My friend reassured me that, besides the fact that I will not necessarily be speaking for them but instead transmitting my own experiences and perceptions, that it is possible to at least partially rid myself of the biases and lenses that have been socially engrained within me. I will expound on this in a later post.
Anyway, let me get to what I'm getting at. This whole inner debate has also raised questions of how incredibly frustrating it is that post-colonial nations have such a difficult task ahead in finding and using the voice that has so long been smothered and meanwhile altered by colonialism. On top of this, people like Joseph Conrad have gone into these countries and subsequently written the aforementioned prejudiced books like Heart of Darkness, which are then accepted as reality not only by the inhabitants of the author's country and the readers in the developed world but also, eventually, by the people of that country themselves, as there will likely exist a paucity of their history told through their own eyes due to attempts at assimilation into Western culture by the colonists. What an absurd concept.
The event that occurred as I began my essay: I have been writing about numerous authors for the past two months, half British, half of varied nationality. I typed in the name "Joseph Conrad," as I have typed the names Ernest Hemingway, Charlotte Bronte, Mary Shelley ... and nothing happened. I typed in the name "Chinua Achebe," as I have typed in the names Salman Rushdie, Lu Hsun, Gabriel Garcia Marquez ... and the little red dots indicating a spelling error appeared on the screen.
It speaks volumes to me that authors like Ernest Hemingway and Charlotte Bronte are "significant" enough to have their last names automatically added to Microsoft Word's dictionary, but authors like Chinua Achebe and Salman Rushdie, who have done incredible work in speaking for those who cannot yet speak for themselves, challenging Western views and Western control, and standing against the floods that rushed forth in post-colonial times, are not "worthy" enough or "famous" enough to have been added to Microsoft's dictionary. Bullshit.
Needless to say, I moved my mouse over the red-underlined words. I right-clicked. I selected "Add to Dictionary."
They are significant enough for me. They, too, should be household names. So why aren't they?
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