Is Chinua Achebe to Joseph Conrad as Ike Turner is to Sam Phillips?

The idea that Joseph Conrad, one of the canonical writers of Western literature, and properly so, is / might be a racist is not so shocking now in 2011 as it was back in 1975, when Chinua Achebe delivered a lecture entitled “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” Many were shocked that Achebe would make such an argument, and about a narrative that was so obviously an indictment of European imperialism in the Congo. Many critics responded with vigorous and sophisticated defenses of Conrad and of Heart of Darkness. In consequence Achebe’s essay and the response to it are now central to the scholarly literature about this text and this author.

Then and Now

At that time I was a graduate student in the English Department at SUNY at Buffalo. However, I’m slightly embarrassed to say, I have no recollection of the firestorm. If I’d had a specific interest in late 19th century British fiction I would, no doubt, have been aware of Achebe’s address and its repercussions. But that wasn’t where my interest lay, so I wasn’t attending to those currents. Had I been doing so I might well have taken offense at Achebe’s essay. As it is, I’ve only read the essay in the last week and I cannot find anything shocking about it.

What made Achebe’s argument so shocking (in 1975) is simply that we — what we? — want our culture heroes to be flawless. As a canonical literary figure Joseph Conrad is a culture hero, at least to the public that pays attention to literary culture. Racism is bad. It therefore follows that Joseph Conrad cannot be racist.

I would like to think that we, at least some WE, have become more sophisticated in such matters and are prepared to recognize that artistic greatness sometimes comes with unpleasant traits, such as racism or sexism. The question of Conrad’s racism, or of racism in Heart of Darkness, which is not the same question, is complicated, and Achebe has picked his textual evidence carefully, as all critics do. One can certainly argue against him, as many critics have done.

But I do not, in this post, want to enter directly into those discussions. I’m not going to argue about racism in Conrad’s text. I’m doing something different.

Beyond Language

I’m presenting a fairly recent conversation between a black man and a white man on a topic that involves relations between blacks and whites and in which racism is a central issue. I’m offering this conversation as, shall we say, a parallel to the conversation between Achebe and Joseph Conrad or, since Conrad is long dead, his defenders against Achebe.

My question is a simple one: Can we get along with Achebe, and those who agree with him, as this white man and black man get along with one another?

The white man is Sam Phillips, the record producer who first recorded Elvis Presley. The black man is Ike Turner, one of many black rhythm and blues musicians whom Phillips had recorded before he recorded Presley.

The point of this exercise, no, this demonstration, is that language and its reasonings and arguments cannot, in principle, encompass everything. That life itself is greater than language goes without saying – or does it? What matters is how we conduct ourselves around and about, in the shadow of, language.

That’s All Right, Mama

A few years ago PBS broadcast a series of blues documentaries that Martin Scorsese had produced. One of them, The Road to Memphis, was produced by Richard Pearce and Robert Kenner. One segment of that episode features a conversation between Sam Phillips and Ike Turner.

The conversation takes place in Phillips’ old recording studio, the one where he recorded Elvis Presley, Ike himself, and many other musicians. The two men obviously know one another and are comfortable with one another.

They greet one another warmly and begin talking. They’re seated and facing one another, Turner at the piano bench and Phillips in a chair beside the piano.

I’ve transcribed part of their conversation, though the transcription is a crude one. And I’ve put up a few screen shots. But you need to see and hear it to get the full effect. What ultimately matters is what these two men DO. What they say is only part of that. It’s important, but it’s not all there is.

PHILLIPS: And somehow or another God blessed me with the ability to work day and night and hope that I’d be given enough time to stay in business . . . to prove that it absolutely would have to be that some white folks would have to start some things — not trying to copy or anything [muddled] do it with some feeling. I knew that Southern white people like Elvis Presley, ain’t no black person been poorer than him.

TURNER: All this stuff was black style . . .

PHILLIPS: Sure..

TURNER: Yeah, yeah, and so

PHILLIPS: There was a lot of Southern

TURNER: No, no, but just then you said that they didn’t copy the black style. They dead on it. And even today they dead on it.

PHILLIPS: What I mean now, the copying, what I meant was trying to imitate. They took the feel because they were exposed to so many of the same things, not to the extent that black people were. But, oh, they didn’t copy. What they did was, they borrowed heavily from . . .

TURNER: Yes, they sure did . . .

PHILLIPS: Now, wait a minute now . . .

[Turner laughs and grabs Phillips, then lets go and leans back.]

PHILLIPS: No, hell, that ain’t right

TURNER: What you mean

PHILLIPS: Is that not a compliment?

TURNER: No no hey!

PHILLIPS: That’s what it took to make what you all were doing absolutely accepted.

TURNER: I understand. But all the other black people that was recordin’, they couldn’t get their records on the white radio stations. You could, you did. Yeah.

PHILLIPS: Do ya love me, or

TURNER: Yes, you know I love you

PHILLIPS: you fallin’ out of love with me

TURNER: Look, ain’t goin’ never change

PHILLIPS: That’s right. [Looks toward the camera.] Look at Ike, makin’ fun of me. Do you believe that?

Ike gets up, chuckles, says “I have to go pee” and leans over Phillips and kisses him on the head and walks off camera while Phillips remains seated and somewhat discomfited. When Ike’s off camera Phillips starts singing an Elvis Presley tune: “Well that’s all right mama, that’s all right with me. That’s all right mama, anything you do. That’s all right.” Phillips is now standing up and Turner is back on camera standing next to him and pointing at him: “That’s the first time I ever heard him sing in my life.”

I rather doubt that these two men could have arrived at a mutually satisfactory statement of how matters stand in the very complicated business of black music in white America. But they can and do interact beyond the boundaries of language. That is all we can ask. We can do no more.

But we must DO that.

* * * * *

Earlier posts in this series:

• Heart of Darkness, Narration and Temporal Displacement
• Interlude: Slocum’s Pilot and Sensory Deprivation
• Closure, Attachment, and Abstract Objects in Heart of Darkness
• Ontology at the Heart of Darkness
• The Heart of Heart of Darkness
• Heart of Darkness 6: Some Informal Notes about the Nexus
• HD7: Digital Humanities Sandbox Goes to the Congo