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Among the Ibo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten.1
THE SUBALTERN CANNOT SPEAK," GAYATRI SPIVAK FAMOUSLY DECLARED in her seminal essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?"2 In Joseph Conrad's 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 Hie African as more or less mute may be a recognition that colonization rendered the subaltern voiceless rather than a true silencing. Conrad isolates Africans as subaltern in what Spivak has called "a space of difference,"3 but 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 physiological 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 complicity of the intellectual "in the persistent constitution of Other as the Selfs 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 Darkness" can barely bring himself to acknowledge the common humanity of the Africans he encounters. They are not so much the Selfs shadow as only tenuously 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 fheir 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...