'The Dawn Watch'

Book Review

The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World

Sudipta Datta

Understanding our world through the stories of Joseph Conrad

Us versus them; you are with us or against us; black or white — as communication across lines break down, is the inability to understand each other pushing us to the brink? Amid an existential crisis, comes this remarkable retelling of Joseph Conrad’s life and work and its resonance with the present dysfunctional world by Harvard University historian Maya Jasanoff.

In 1975, Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe gave a public lecture, An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The novella, he said, “projected the image of Africa as the ‘other world’, the antithesis of Europe, and therefore of civilisation...” Calling Conrad, a “bloody racist,” Achebe found the book “rife with degrading stereotypes of Africa and Africans.” Jasanoff mentions Achebe, as also Barack Obama’s retort when asked by a friend why he was reading “this racist tract.” It’s because, he said, “the book teaches me things... About White people... A particular way of looking at the world.”

Jasanoff says she values Conrad’s perspective for the same reason — “not just despite its blind spots but because of them” — and what it tells about civilisation and savagery, imperialism, genocide, insanity and about human nature itself. She explores how in 1889, a Polish sailor, Konrad Korzeniowski, made a trip to the Congo.

He was supposed to stay three years, but quit after just one trip up and down the river between Kinshasa and Kisangani. “He saw in Congo a European regime of appalling greed, violence and hypocrisy,” and in 1899 after settling in England and anglicising his name, he recollected his experience in a novella called Heart of Darkness.

Jasanoff, in the writer’s footsteps, arrived in Congo wanting to see “whatever I could of what Conrad had seen.” The Democratic Republic of Congo is in turmoil, the people caught in an ongoing civil war. As she read in her guidebook, “this is a huge area of dark corners, both geographically and mentally... where man has fought continuously against his own demons and the elements of nature at large,” still a heart of darkness.

Refusing to travel only in the mind, Jasanoff also undertook a journey across the Indian Ocean — like Conrad — from Hong Kong to England on board a French cargo ship. Before Conrad sat down to write, he was a mariner for 20 years, sailing to the Caribbean, southeast Asia, Australia and Africa, inspiring many of his stories, of which Jasanoff mines four, The Secret Agent (about a terrorist plot to blow up London), Lord Jim (the disruptive sweep of technology), Nostromo (financial greed) and Heart of Darkness.

A global citizen way before the term globalisation was made popular in the 1980s, Jasanoff retraces Conrad’s characters who talk about how to behave in a world where “old rule-books are becoming obsolete, but nobody’s yet written new ones.”

The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World; Maya Jasanoff, HarperCollins India, Rs. 799.

From: ‘The Hindu,’ Sunday, 05 November 2017