I had the opportunity of living for some time in Conrad’s fictional places, namely Democratic Republic of Congo (Congo) and Malaysia’s eastern province Sarawak’s adjoining country in Borneo Island, Brunei Darussalam. In Congo, I worked as a peace keeper and in Brunei, as a diplomat. Though Brunei hid in Conrad’s novel Lord Jim as a surreptitious land, it was, in fact, the centre of British influence in Malay Archipelago.  

I found it strange that neither in Congo nor in Brunei, there was one, even a most learned man, had read The Heart of Darkness or Lord Jim. Joseph Conrad was an unfamiliar name despite their academic background in literature. Such obsolescence of a great writer from places whose stories had subliminally meditative force in his imagination is moored in deliberate fading from national histories.    

Conrad was of Polish origin and learned English not till he was in his early twenties. He became a British citizen at the age of thirty which speaks something of his character as a man. But more significant than his being a writer was the fact that he was a sailor by choice. Seamanship and writing he learned with the dedication and labors of a passionate fanatic. He created a style in English fiction, inimitable and fascinating, that blended with his ardent weakness for both. His non-English sensibility in prose makes him appealing to readers who are baffled by the turbulent forces of nature and tragic setting of human fatality.

Conrad’s Congo was an intensely dark area where the light of civilization was yet to ingress. Its darkness was gruesome hiding behind the mask of an ineluctable ignorance which exuded a magnetic spell of supernatural tension. The shadowy frontiers of night were much more sensitive and agile than the prudence of daylight innocence whose sweat was wasted in the diamond pits of Congolese mud biding its ownership to European heraldry. The treasures of Africa in the post-colonial era has belonged to Europe by the right of conquistadors. The European obligation has conferred upon itself the possession of a vast trove whose morals are encoded in the speech-acts of evangelical persuasion. Europe’s role as Master has never been lost on its historical slave; Africa has always been at the merciful disposition of a strange French or an English or a Belgian claiming his being to be a part of African sovereignty.

Congo always gave me a feeling of Conradian prose. Joseph Conrad had the uncanny ability to transform prose into instant impression of a living nature. His words, sentences, impressions, imagery and symbols penetrated into the deep unforgiving forests of a barbaric world where only a European dared to enter. This passionate appeal to human senses made Conrad more at home with non-European setting than with that of his own continent. There was a sort of abnegation and disavowal of what he experienced and observed without having to be a renegade. The idea of being at one with what appears to be distant and mutant makes man a spiritual being. Conrad’s Africa is unique in the sense of having suffered inexorably without having to complain or even rectify its sins.

Conrad’s Congo was more than a hundred years older than when I visited Congo. Bangladesh peacekeeping contingent was the first UN peacekeepers in Bunia located at the extreme eastern corner of a vast country 16 times the size of Bangladesh. Bunia was the capital of Ituri province. Congo’s natural beauty must have eluded Conrad because he never mentioned about the bewitching charm of Congolese mountains whose rising slopes often sheltered behind the green tapestry of tall trees blushing against the endless ocean of clear, blue sky. I often wondered how it was possible for an innocuous subliminal nature to be doused by the flames of hatred and murder. Congolese are divided into tribes, and they are destined to be borne into a life of ineluctable tragedy. 

I still feel that those who claim Conrad to be a racist are misjudging him. What I saw just two decades back was a refined and smooth version of civilized behavior compared to Conrad’s eyewitness at the turn of the 19th century, when he stalked the hinterland of Congo by river. Often as peacekeepers we had to trade peace between rival groups, and what I found most intriguing was the intenseness with which they hated each other bordering upon the rational insistence of an irrational phenomenon. Being the first air force commander of the Bangladesh unit, I flew extensively over its territory, often terrified at what I saw beneath. Miles after miles, we failed to see the light on earth covered with compressed and impenetrable range of interminable forests. There was no place for emergency landing. Flying in Congo was akin to taking ride through Hades.  One could convincingly argue Congo to be the end point of history in geographical sense whose pages were flustered with searing death. Murdering someone was an ordinary way of life the sacrificial altar of which was dedicated to animalistic pleasure. I had seen with my own eyes hacking, lynching, chopping and dismembering of human bodies with an archaic coolness and pleasure that only a barbaric ecstasy can partake of. Transfiguring a civilized man into a state of agony writhing over the meaning of existence would take one back into the folds of the origins of morality. Conrad’s sense of morality was too acute and sharp to be defeated by the vagaries of nature. The placidity of Africa’s natural beauty was complemented by its darker side of anthropomorphic insanity.

Conrad saw Africa as an insane continent. I had the same feeling when I visited Congo. The blackness of African hue was inexorably intertwined with the blackness of its character. Marlowe and Kurtz were exceptions amidst the proliferation of a radiating absurdity. The European mission to civilize Africa was nipped in the bud because of the in-built weakness within the structure of international society. During my peacekeeping job, I realized that Europe made its biggest mistake by trying to Europeanize Africa. Conrad’s immacutely dressed Europeans were only able to engender loathing amongst naked Congolese who saw clothes as an outfit to cover up chicanery and deceit. Africans are as notorious and ruthless as they are truthful. 

The Heart of Darkness is fresh in my mind not as a story but as a fact superimposed upon an imagery of life and a particular people. I could only think of Conrad as racist if he had not seen vices in Europeans. That was not to be. He was a peregrinator. For him, the choice between civilized and un-civilized was a sham, and so leaves his stories with embittered sadness something of which I felt upon return from Congo.   

My second overseas assignment was even more refreshing of my literary retrospection. Brunei Darussalam with the surname suggesting “the abode of peace” presents a sharp contrast to Congo, not spiritually but sensually. While Congo exuded a dark green patch of transparent beauty, Brunei glowed with the crystalline brightness of luminous sunshine. Brunei lacked the big lakes or flowing rivers of Congo but Conrad was always witty enough to get on the water. Brunei River was the perfect ally of Congo River, and both shared their companionship with Marlowe. But the story of Lord Jim was even more complicated. The hero of the story Jim, was called Tuan, the native version of the English word “Lord”. Conrad had this inclination of elevating an Englishman to the pedestal of a superman. To him, English was the race upon whom was rested the duties of ruling the uncivilized. Jim was the replica of James Brookes, the White Rajah of Borneo who founded the British rule in Malayan peninsula. His fascination for the then crown prince, and later his assassination through a local plot in which some English were involved, was based upon the life of James Brookes and his times in Borneo. The only exception is that the real James Brookes returned home and died in England, while the make-believe Jim handed himself over to the Sultan for having failed to protect the life of his son, the crown prince. Conrad could, in no way, let an Englishman fall below the moral standards of a gentleman.

I was given an impression that in Borneo, the custom of head-hunting was still practiced in the deep of forests where indigenous people lived. The vast tract of jungles truncated by small openings where habitation has grown into kind of civilized dwellings makes one wonder at the trading prospects of Borneo at the time of Conrad’s passage into Malay Archipelago. Conrad’s depiction of Borneo’s scenic beauty matches with my own experience of the land’s exquisite sceneries. Conrad might have considered Borneo equally deserving of a “civilizing” treatment. My own assessment was not without such reservation. More than one and a half centuries of travel through time, it seemed, has not made much of difference in the social moorings of a people despite the changes in geo-politics in the post-colonial world.      

Brunei being a part of the Borneo archipelago still possesses her incredible beauty blessed by the nature. The placidity of the land is suffused in a state of calmness, peace and tranquility of domestic life. Brunei rejoices in a state of monarchy given to the provision of welfare of its citizens. Politics is barred in Brunei. The only redemption for her people lies in a hope and trust of piety to the monarch sanctified by the principle of necessity. In that regard, Brunei seems to be the true descendant of British tradition. The monarch and the crown prince are the epitome of Bruneian history. Without monarchical tradition, Bruneian social and political history ceases to exist. In that sense, Brunei would continue to preserve the milieu that provides her an exceptional place of societal culture in modern setting. 

Conrad is a great mysterious figure. He has been criticized for being too English but none can deny the power of his description of human condition through the intelligence of unifying the dark beauty of nature superimposing its force upon human character. If human behavior follows natural laws of submission, then man and his environment become entwined in mysterious relationship. The departure of the British from Borneo has left its indelible imprint of colonial majesty. There are buildings, architectural grandeur and the remembrance of British soldiers that glorify Conrad’s passion for the continuation of English civilization. This contact between the colonial master and his subjects was what Conrad might have cherished most earnestly in his mission as a writer. There is no doubt that in the struggle to find a place for himself as a writer of English literature, Conrad’s best place for residence was in the East. To him, the East is a theme to be taken to the conscience of the West. Being non-English, he did this job much more competently than any native-born English writer. This can only come from a person whose love and affection for the East and her people was immaculate, genuine and unadulterated. His two most extraordinary novels —— Lord Jim and The Heart of Darkness —- are a witness to that.