Decolonising the Conrad Canon. By Alice M. Kelly

Abstract

Alice M. Kelly begins her monograph, Decolonising the Conrad Canon, with the bold and plausible claim that there can be no ‘decolonial Conrad’ (p. 1) – no possible way of redeeming the author from the charges of anti-black racism levelled against Heart of Darkness (1899) by Chinua Achebe in 1977. Yet there was a colonized Conrad, born in exile in Ukraine in 1857 after his father had been caught scheming to free a Russian-controlled Poland from its cruel invaders, who had closed the universities, frozen the constitution, suspended parliament, and stonewalled all pleas for social reform. Conrad’s first memory, according to his friend Ford Madox Ford, was of a prison yard in May in falling snow, where Russian warders on horseback fed their captives red herring and refused them water. He was four years old. At five, living in exile with parents whom the Russians had lacked sufficient evidence to execute, he penned his first-known written words, in Polish, to his grandmother, thanking her for feeding his father bread in his cell. Conrad’s critics have historically made much of the folly of his father’s nationalistic hopes, in a bid to distance the author from all suspicion of revolutionary fire, yet in light of contemporary Ukrainian invincibility against Russian troops and indeed of the entire discourse of postcolonial criticism, it is hard to begrudge Apollo Konrad his right to rage.