Some thoughts

In his article, “Picasso, Africa, and the Schemata of Difference,” Gikandi argues that we need to rethink “the aesthetic of modernism” (457); in Picasso’s case, we need to rethink the ambivalent relationship between the artist and his African ‘objects’: on the one hand, these ‘objects’ provided the aesthetic influence(s) needed for Picasso to escape the conventions in Western art (those that emphasized order and symmetry). Yet on the other hand, while using these ‘objects’, Picasso denies the significances that they played in “the shaping of modernism” (457). So while these African ‘objects’ provided the framework that maintain modernism’s aesthetics, they are stigmatized as different, and thus disavowed from the very art that they were essential in shaping.

This “anxiety of influence” (458) within the sphere of modern art that Gikandi discusses, uncannily reminds me of the colonial anxieties that Levine talks about in her article. In both cases, anxiety is fuelled by difference: in Gikandi’s case, there is a binary opposition between the “modern and the savage...defined by a dialectic of love and loathing, identity and difference” (458, italics mine), while in Levine’s case, the binary opposition is established between the colonizer and colonized (107). In this respect, modernism is deeply complicit with colonialism because among other reasons, both were motivated primarily by the ideological impulse of “imperial supremacy” (Levine 103), which catalyzed hierarchical oppositions between the colonizers and the natives, with the term that occupies the more privileged position in the binary associated with the former. Just as the colonized were doomed as “lacking intelligence, social organization, and…civilization” (Levine 106), so too were the Africans in modern art commodified as objects, never to be fully appreciated as whole subjects.

When we turn to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (HOD), we see that the same anxiety is reproduced, exemplified strongly in the shock and horror of the White men who “remained open-mouthed a whole minute, then dashed into the little cabin, to rush out incontinently and stand darting scared glances, with Winchesters at ‘ready’ in their hands” (49). Similar to the colonial and modern anxiety that Levine and Gikandi talk about in their articles, Conrad’s text registers the anxiety of the Self towards the Other. Again, it is the difference between the White men and the natives that is a cause for anxiety. We see the replicas of the same binary reproduced: major characters have names and speak in the text while the natives, existing mainly as flat and minor characters, are unidentified individually (they are only known as “six black men” (18), “the black fellows of our crew” (49) and “black shadows of disease and starvation” (20)) and are largely voiceless. In terms of narration, the narrative perspective is told from a white man’s point of view (Marlow). While Marlow has “a voice…and for good or evil [his] is the speech that cannot be silenced” (44), the natives seem to be doomed not to utterance but to silence; the implication of this is that we never get to hear the views of the ‘colonized’. The issue of difference returns continually to haunt the text. Marlow learns that despite the ideals of rationality, restraint and civilization that the White men were supposed to exemplify, it is the natives that possessed more self-restraint, more “inborn strength to fight hunger” (51). In contrast, the White men believed that “[a]nything – anything [could] be done in this country” (40).

Even as modernist artists felt it essential to question conventional and traditional modes of representation, like Conrad did in using multiple modes of narration (Marlow’s narration as opposed to the frame narration) in a similar manner to the multiple perspectives and collages embedded in Picasso’s Cubism, and even if such artists “questioned colonial practices” (Gikandi 476), such as Conrad did through Marlow and Picasso did through his use of African ‘objects’, they still “reproduce[d] the colonialist model” (Gikandi 476). Both Conrad and Picasso replicated the colonial model through establishing binaries in their texts/paintings that served to maintain the distance between the White men and native men.

Romona Loh