Artist Catherine Anyango tells how her richly-detailed drawings
reflect the dense style of Joseph Conrad's savage colonial story
Sam Jones
Wednesday September 1 2010
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/aug/31/heart-of-darkness-graphic-novel
In the 108 years since it was published, Joseph Conrad's colonial
fable Heart of Darkness has infected TS Eliot, been excoriated for
racism by Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe [http://www.guardian.co.uk/
books/chinuaachebe" title="] and transplanted to Vietnam by Francis
Ford Coppola.
Now the book has been reinterpreted as a graphic novel [http://
www.selfmadehero.com/title.php?isbn=9781906838096" title="] in whose
monochrome pages Conrad's exploration of power, greed and madness
plays out as disturbingly as ever.
Catherine Anyango, whose drawings are peppered with David Zane
Mairowitz's adaptation of the text, had her doubts about tackling the
Polish-born novelist's most famous work.
Those reservations had more to do with the original medium than the
enduring controversy over Conrad's views or the familiarity of Heart
of Darkness.
"I wasn't sure initially if it was a good subject for a graphic novel
as the writing is so dense and the style of it is partly what attracts
me to the book," she said.
"As I knew we couldn't keep most of the text in, I tried to make the
drawings very rich in detail and texture so that immersive feeling you
get, especially when he describes the river and the jungle, was
carried across."
Anyango was determined not to allow the horror of the book's subject
matter to overwhelm her drawings. "I wanted to draw the reader in with
seductive imagery, and then show them that even in the most beautiful
of settings, terrible things can happen."
There was also Coppola's 1979 epic to contend with.
"I was too terrified to watch Apocalypse Now [http://www.imdb.com/
title/tt0078788/" title="]," the Kenyan-Swedish artist said. "Partly
because I didn't want to end up with any similar visuals and also I
had been warned that something nasty happens to a cow ? [but]
Apocalypse Now is huge and well, apocalyptic, but Heart of Darkness is
a much quieter story."
Anyango, who grew up in Kenya where she went to a British school,
wanted to steer a course that was as true as possible to the original
so that her version did not sink under the weight of too much
intellectual baggage.
"When I was dealing with the book, I was focused solely on the
particular events of the Congo, rather than colonialism in general,"
she said. "I wasn't trying to tell the history of colonialism either,
but to situate this particular narrative in a way that people might
ask: what on earth was the attitude of that time that these things
could happen?"
To reinforce the geographical and historical immediacy of Conrad's
tale, the graphic novel is interspersed with excerpts from The Congo
Diary - the journal Conrad kept of his 1890 voyage up the river.
Anyango's research also led her to the story of a man from a village
in the Upper Congo called Nsala. She came across a photograph of him
sat on a step contemplating the hand and foot of his daughter, which
had been cut off by guards sent to his village by the Anglo Belgian
India Rubber Company. The men, ordered to attack Nsala's village for
failing to provide the company with enough rubber, devoured his wife
and daughter, leaving only the child's hand and foot.
"I put him on one page, and similar portraits on others, so the
Congolese characters have resonance at least for me, even if they
remain stereotyped because of the existing narrative," she said.
In her efforts to ensure the authenticity of the uniforms she drew -
the protagonist, Marlow, is given a cap with a prominent Belgian lion
badge - Anyango was shocked to discover how markedly Belgian
perceptions of the occupation of Congo still vary.
For some, it is a shameful episode in the country's history, while
others still view it as a benign experience despite the evidence
uncovered by recent histories such as Adam Hochschild's 1998 book,
King Leopold's Ghost [http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/catalog/
titledetail.cfm?titleNumber=681101" title="], which laid bare the
barbarism inflicted on Congo.
The artist found that Belgium's colonial deeds "seem to have vanished
into history, with the [country's] education system not dwelling on
anything but positive aspects of the colonial rule".
That may not be not wholly surprising: at her school in Nairobi,
Anyango did not learn about Britain's colonies.
It is this creeping colonial amnesia - not to mention a catalogue of
recent and current events - which, she argues, give Heart of Darkness
both its relevance and its universality.
"It's about the idea of entitlement; [how] through the ages we enforce
our feelings of entitlement in whatever way that age will allow ? from
Leopold II owning the Congo as a private possession to the
corporations involved with blood diamonds. The effects of entitlement
have not so much gone out of fashion as out of sight."
Dr Keith Carabine, who teaches literature at the University of Kent
and chairs the Joseph Conrad Society [http://
www.josephconradsociety.org/" title="], agrees that Kurtz, the ivory
trader whose misplaced idealism has putrefied into savagery and
madness, has become an archetypal figure.
"Heart of Darkness is the most important book in the last 100-plus
years not because it's the best, but because it anticipated how 20th
century leaders with visions of bringing light and creating new models
for humans beings - Hitler, Lenin, Pol Pot, Mao - all ended up," he
said. "When disappointed by the response of the very groups they
wanted to save or help or transform, they, like Kurtz, wish to (and
actually do, of course) 'exterminate all the brutes!'"
Of the Edwardian novella's continuing relevance, Carabine is
unequivocal. "If Bush and Cheney and the neocons had read Heart of
Darkness and understood it, they would not have invaded Iraq under the
absurd utopian illusion that the Iraqis were gagging for democracy."
guardian.co.uk Copyright (c) Guardian News and Media Limited. 2010
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