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John Conrad .. A writer who demonstrated the crimes of colonialism, domination and slavery at a time when other writers lived on the glorification of power and power under the slogan of civilization and raising the level of occupied countries and peoples. The colonial powers committed the most heinous war crimes and conquest, but did not stop after that happened to them under their control, so I mastered torture and enslavement until not long ago .. and it was all as if it was not; he did not mention the legacy that was written in the hands of the colonists; was that because they did not see what they did Their powers other than them or because they turned a blind eye in fear. Nevertheless, there is always someone who walks against the current and precedes his era ... John Conrad was this person and historian Maya Jasanov showed this in his autobiography entitled "Dawn hour".
The text of the report
Dawn hour. Maya Jasanov. Penguin Publishing, 2017. p. 400.
In the late nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth century, there was no longer much more reshaping the world than European imperialism that redefined the world map and enriched Europe and killed millions of Africans and Asians. For example, in 1870, about eighty percent of sub-Saharan Africa was under the control of indigenous kings, tribal chiefs, or other rulers. Within thirty-five years, almost all of the continent - with the exception of a few isolated areas - was made up of European colonies or protectorates. France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain and the United Kingdom seized pieces of this “great African cake,” as King Leopold II of Belgium put it, taking a huge piece for himself.
At the same time, its Asian neighbor fell into the grip of multiple powers, and the British tightened their grip on the Indian subcontinent, the French over Indochina, and the Dutch for what they today call Indonesia. Japan, Russia and half of the European countries, even the enlarged Austro-Hungarian Empire, won either enclaves "pockets" or concessions and concessions in China. Meanwhile, the United States fought a ruthless war in the Philippines, killing hundreds of thousands of Filipinos to establish an American colony.
A picture of the Philippine-American War
It is surprising how such events rarely appeared in the work of European writers of that era, as if almost no major American novelist of the nineteenth century had dealt with slavery or no major German writer in the twentieth century wrote about the Holocaust. It is not that the Europeans were unaware of this, as hundreds of thousands of them lived or worked in the colonies, and the fruits of the empire appeared everywhere: in the luxurious palaces and huge monuments that were built with colonial fortunes, in street names such as Madagascar Street in Bordeaux and the Khartoum Road in London , And in shops full of foreign ornaments and spices. In 1897, more than a million visitors came to watch a world fair in the suburbs of Brussels that housed 267 Congolese men, women and children - from Congo - living in huts and rowing their boats around a small lake; and there were similar human exhibitions at fairs and markets in the United States.
However, the writers were silent about the truth and did not write it to a large extent. Mark Twain was an outspoken critic of imperialist cruelty in the Philippines and Africa, but only in some short prose pieces in the last decade of his life. George Orwell was deeply disappointed in his work as a police officer in Burma under British rule in his time for years, but he did not start writing upon his return from there; he began writing only in 1927; then his first novel, "The Days of Burma", appeared in 1934 If century writers touched on imperialism, it was a habit to celebrate and glorify them only, as did John Buchan and Rudyard Kipling in the United Kingdom and their ilk in France and Germany.
Dutch writer Joseph Konrad was a clear exception to his peers of that era. In his novel Nostromo, the American mining millionaire pioneer Holroyd says: "We will run businesses in the world whether or not the world loves it." His novel The Heart of Darkness, published in 1899, is his insightful portrayal of these works. No one reading this book can conceive of the colonists in Africa again as they liked to portray themselves: with generosity and without any selfishness spreading Christianity and commercial benefits. In another passage, Marlowe says: "It is like robbing thieves to store money, there is no ethics in it and no noble goal behind it."
At the time, the Congo was a private "personal" colony of the Belgian king Leopold II, who ruled within a ruthless regime exploiting large numbers of Congolese as forced laborers to collect ivory, wild rubber and food for the king's soldiers, in addition to firewood that was used as fuel for steam ships that filled rivers and more than That much. But the novelist did not mean that Belgium alone stole the fortunes of the colonial countries, which he represented as the character of Mr. Kurtz, the sinister figure of the greedy ivory hunter in the novel: "All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz".
Conrad lived in a world wider than the world of the greatest writers of his time such as Marcel Proust or James Joyce, and this is what distinguishes the novel " Dawn Watch" , the new book that was planned by the historian Maya Jasanov of Harvard University with all honesty and eloquence. Josef Theodor Konrad Korzynowski was born to Polish parents, he left his home at the age of sixteen to sail around the world and rode merchant ships for two decades, then settled in the United Kingdom and became a writer. Jasanov wrote that although Conrad: "He would not have known the word 'globalization' ... but he embodied it on his journey from the provinces of the Russian Empire across the high seas to the British provinces." Although some racial stereotypes exist in portraying Africans and - to a lesser degree - Asians, Conrad acknowledged the existence of a multi-ethnic world; as Jasanov noted that half of what he wrote made Southeast Asia a location. There was no other writer of his time to deal sharply with relations and clashes between Europeans and the non-European world.
Conrad's engagement with imperialism, political rebels, and sea life while he was replacing the sail in steam - the steam engine as the foundation of the industrial revolution - made it proportional to the dimensions of the world related to our present time. As Jasanov mentioned in her book: "The heirs of technology-replaceable sailors in Conrad's novels are [in our times] in industries that have been disrupted by digitization." "The anarchist counterparts - the anti-government mentioned in his accounts - can be found in Internet chat rooms or terrorist cells. The material interests that he has focused in the United States today are emanating from China." Konrad did not put the theory of globalization - even under another name - but it took Jasanov to see that Konrad's writings extended and included all over the world in an era when writers often worked on geography and a limited theater; take for example "Wessex" which is a name given by Thomas Hardy is on a part of England where most of his novels revolve. There are still very few seasoned novelists who one can say about it today.
Jasanov visited many places where Konrad lived, and drew her with fictional eyes
Away from home
For decades, critics and biographers have been preoccupied with the life of Conrad, most of whom lived in far corners of the world, and a network of Conrad's notes containing quirks of his weaving created a new challenge for these critics and writers. The "Hour of Dawn" book is not as comprehensive of Conrad's entire biography as in other books, such as "The Life of Joseph Conrad" written by Zdzislao Nagder published in 2007. Indeed, "The Dawn Hour" is not a complete biography as much as it contemplates a life The novelist and many of his major works, but a great pleasure to read as Jasanov rushed to understand the world that shaped and refined the skills and look of the writer you love. To get close to his marine experience, Jasanov traveled on a container ship - used to transport goods - from Hong Kong to England; on a 134-foot sailing ship from Ireland to Brittany; and by a thousand-mile river boat at the bottom of the Congo River. However, she only mentions these trips only modestly, as she does not use them to take pride in her project but to conjure up Conrad's life on the water.
Jasanov visited many places where Conrad lived, and painted it with a fictional eye: “Marseille, the city of olive oil, orange trees, sweet wine, spice bags, mouth open to the Mediterranean and the eye looking at the Atlantic skyline, the city of the Crusaders, the revolutionaries, and the Monte Cristo ". "I have a nose like a mountain slope and a beard that stretches like the butter of the waterfall on his chest," she skipped with her skilled pen, describing the people who shaped the world where Conrad lived like King Leopold II, who described her words: She painted with her descriptive skills a painting that reflects what one of the writers said about the work of the written word: "It makes you listen, it makes you feel ... and above all it makes you see."
Exploring the world of Conrad - especially the changes in ocean trade that occurred throughout his life - drove Jasanov down some great subway routes. The shift from sail to steam engine meant fewer jobs: there were no longer all these sails to equip and fold, as ships were larger and could carry much larger shipments; thus the job market was very difficult, and it seems that Conrad has spent a lot of time searching for a berth To serve in it. On one occasion, he managed to join a British ship sailing long distances to work as a first or second colleague, and found that more than forty percent of the crew were foreigners like him as wages were less than the wages of many British workers on land, but they are generous to someone from Asia or Eastern Europe. Jasanov found that the same thing is happening today with the Filipino crew working on the container ship that it traveled on.
She notes that even during the long aurora - the long journey - of a sailing ship, the cost of coal means that transport by sailing ships is still financially competitive if the travel is over 3,500 miles, which was one of the reasons that prompted Conrad to work in Often aboard these ships, which was fortunate for his readers later.
Victims of the Empire
Conrad described his encounter with the world outside Europe as more powerful nowhere than he appeared in his novel The Heart of Darkness, which is perhaps the most read - in English - as the most widely read short novel. The strength of the book stems from being quoted from the six months Conrad spent in the Congo in 1890. He joined the crew as captain of the ship whom he imagined as an adventure, but when he trained for the position, he was horrified by the greed and brutality he had seen, so he fell ill with dysentery and malaria, and cut back The duration of his stay to return to Europe. In Conrad's memoirs of the first weeks of his stay on the ship, a large amount of its details can be found in the "Heart of Darkness" where she described slave workers shackled in chains, and rotting corpses of those forced to work to death.
What gave him this rare ability to see arrogance and theft in the heart of imperialism? How can he see King Leopold's mission - which has been widely promoted as supportive of civilization - as a slave-based work? Much of this is due to the fact that he himself as a Polish knows the meaning of living in an occupied land. During the nineteenth century, the territory of “Today Poland” was divided between three neighboring empires, Austria-Hungary, Prussia and Russia. The other thing is that the Conrad family lived in the most repressive region. When he was three, the Cossacks attacked the churches to break up the memorial service for a Polish national hero. Moreover, in the first few years of his life, tens of millions of peasants in the Russian Empire were treated as slave workers: slaves.
Konrad's father Apollo Korzynowski
Konrad's father Apollo Korzynowski was a Polish national poet and opposed to slavery, although he and his wife were nobles in the country who sometimes owned slaves. Because of his national activities, Korzinjuski was thrown into the Warsaw Prison, then the Kaiser police drove him like an herd into exile in northern Russia, and his wife and four-year-old son went with him. The freezing climate contributed to the tuberculosis that killed Conrad's mother when he was seven years old. His father died just a few years later as his funeral - in Krakow occupied by Austria at the time - turned into a massive demonstration of Polish nationalism. It is not surprising that this boy who grew up among the ex-veterans, their talk of slavery, and the news of relatives who were killed in the uprisings created a conscious person from him not to trust the imperial invaders who claimed to have the right to rule other peoples.
In the time of Conrad, there were few loud anti-imperialists in Europe, and most of them tended to the left politically. Ironically, Conrad - regardless of his policy - was very conservative and did not favor any of the trade unions. Despite his disgust with Russian and Belgian imperialism, the British imperialism was amazing to him. His novel The Heart of Darkness was very welcome among British "Congolese reformists" who incited against the system of forced labor of King Leopold. On the other hand, Conrad was wary of considering himself part of their movement although one of her prominent personalities was the Irish Roger Cassiment, whose relationship with him briefly cemented when they shared a home in the Congo. Unlike many British intellectuals, Conrad did not adopt socialist idealism even though those close to him adopted it. Two of his novels were distinguished by his personal awareness of politics; the first was the "secret agent" that touched on anarchist anarchists in London, and the second was the "Under Western Eyes" that spoke of the Russian revolutionaries in Saint Petersburg and Geneva. Both narratives were filled with authoritarian, bribed, and hopelessly naive figures, and police informants were also numerous among both groups of anarchists and revolutionaries.
Somehow, Konrad's strict vision served his writings well; although his novel "Under Western Eyes" had been published six years before the Russian Revolution, he had almost predicted its fate. At some point, the novel narrator says: “In a real revolution the best personalities do not take the front rows. A violent revolution lies in the hands of narrow-minded fanatics ... As for the noble, humane, sincere, and intelligent personality ... a movement may be created - but it does not pay attention to the former They are not the leaders of the revolution, they are its victims. "
Conrad had a keen eye in which he saw the various forms of injustice in the world
It was quite true in Russia, but this novel is clumsy with its woody dialogue - to express lies lying in praise and flattery for maneuver and seduction, or with a more expressive word: "political hypocrisy" - and its flat characters, this novel would have been much better if Conrad had Show more sympathy for these "sincere, noble, human" personalities, regardless of how much they lie and mislead. Later novels feature a broader vision that gives more depth to dealing with the Soviet tragedy, such as the novel "Doctor Gyvago" by novelist Boris Pasternak and "Life and Fate" by novelist Vasily Grossman.
Conrad had an insightful eye in which he saw the various forms of injustice in the world, but what gave him a skeptical view of anyone aspiring to change? Jasanov suggests that this came from "the failure of his father's political goals", but there is evidence to suggest otherwise. In his memoirs, which he published under the name "Personal Record", he talks about his father as a "patriot" and not a revolutionary. Korzinowski's political goals were achieved during his son's life, when the Poles finally won their homeland and liberated them from colonial powers. This goal is considered more moderate and less evil than Konrad's dreams appearing in the "undercover agent" and "under western eyes" embodied in the vision of anarchist anarchists aiming to destroy all governments and the Bolsheviks - one of the dictatorial regimes of the proletariat - the working class. Conrad invited to the Polish nation and honored his father's memory on a visit to the Kurzinskiowski tomb decades after his death, where the novelist surprised his family by kneeling in prayer.
It was clear that the exclusion of Konrad by all the radicals and reformers was due to other reasons. In his late teens, when he was living in Marseille, he lost all his money by investing in managing contraband - possibly guns - to Spain. He received a loan from a friend and tried to recover his losses in the casinos as he lost what he borrowed. He suffered from severe depression as he shot his chest in an attempt to commit suicide, but the bullet did not hit his heart, leaving me feeling humiliated.
| Tadeusz Bobroski (Social Media) |
His uncle Tadeusz Poproski had been the trustee of Conrad since his father's death, so he rushed to Marseille to save him from trouble. In a long series of letters and in his personal interviews over the years, Poproski vehemently rejected Conrad's impractical and romantic ambitions and urged him to do something reasonable, such as returning to Krakow and integrating into business. Fortunately, his uncle did not.
Konrad also suffered major embarrassment later, which Jasanov only briefly recalled. In the 1890s, he invested in work and lost almost all of his savings, in addition to his modest inheritance in a gold mine in South Africa. Ironically, the rush to rush to gold in South Africa was a shortcut to making money, and Konrad wrote about similar industries in his novel "Nostromo" where he talked about silver trade and "heart of darkness" where he talked about ivory trade. Most embarrassing of all, he incurred these heavy losses when he was about to marry and start a family. It is surprising that one of the plots in his best novels "Lord Jim" is about a man trying to coexist with an early disgrace. His reservations about his political views may have stemmed from his recklessness in his youth and his desire to prove himself sobriety and take responsibility in the eyes of his maternal uncle Bobroski, whom he considered his father.
On the other hand, Conrad has gone beyond quirks and torments of his private life in his best works. We discuss the image of the deepest relations between the North and the South in the world, and pictures of the effect of eroding craving for wealth more strongly than any other writer in his time, and perhaps also in our time.
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Translation: Alaa Abu Rumaila
This report is translated from: Foreign Affairs and does not necessarily reflect the location of Maidan.