In his analysis of Congo, Sundaram is more in the mould of Naipaul than Joseph Conrad, says Utpal Kumar
Stringer: A Reporter's Journey
in the Congo
Anjan Sundaram
Penguin, Rs399
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness has come alive more than 100 years since its publication. Very few literary works have amused, animated and at the same time troubled minds as much. litterateurs VS Naipaul and Graham Greene were blown off their feet by it, as was filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola. And now comes Anjan Sundaram, a 29-year-old mathematics graduate from Yale who leaves the “beautiful world” of America and sets out to explore the dark underbelly of Congo — just like Conrad did way back in the 1890s.
Conrad had come to Congo expecting to see the exotic Africa of his dreams; instead, he found what he later described as “the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience”. Sundaram had no such idyllic assumptions. He knew what was there in store for him. “Part of my desire was to see a crisis. I had lived in man’s genius for so long, I wanted to know our destructive capacities. I wanted to see how people responded to crisis, what people could become.”
Congo, for Sundaram, was a place where “death is widespread... children born here have the bleakest of futures. It is the most diseased, the most corrupt and the least habitable”. The book is about people surviving doggedly amid gun-wielding thugs running riot, Congolese girls desperate to get out of the country by marrying a foreigner, and mosquitoes ever-threatening to spread mayhem through malaria. And, like Conrad, he blames neo-colonialism for the tragedy. “The world, continually seeking modernity, still consumes the country. A Belgian king committed genocide during the automobile revolution to pillage Congo for rubber — the world needed tyres then. Mid-century, the Belgian state initiated a war over Congo’s copper, to wire the world for electricity. Congo’s recent conflicts were heightened by the world’s growing demand for tin, to make the conductors used in almost every electronic circuit... The world now needs cell phones, and Congo contains 60 per cent of known reserves of an essential metal called tantalum... Each progress in the world produces some new suffering.”
But as we flip through the book, we realise that the author is more ‘Naipaulian’ in nature, rather than ‘Conradian’. His picturesque — one can call it ‘mathematical’ — description of the Congolese toilet “overflowed with a sonorous gurgle and a sucking noise, like the sound an elephant might make at a waterhole”, wherein he “spat into the darkness, listening for the plop of liquid on liquid”, appears as engaging and disconcerting as Naipaul’s description of Indians defecating in the open. Similarity doesn’t stop there. Sundaram could experience in “miserable places... the most exuberant joie. It seemed to me both extraordinary and implausible, and at first I imagined it to be cosmetic cover-up, a mask worn to hide the suffering, or to help overcome it. That may have partly been true. But I also felt that the Congolese in their delirium truly forgot the misery, that they spoke in verse and caricatured their misfortune in genuine comic spirit and not for farce; it was their way of taking distance, I thought, of suspending the destruction of time. To a degree that exceeded any people I had known I found the Congolese able to isolate the present, and be satisfied. Theirs was a sort of amnesiac solace”. Naipaul, in his Area of Darkness, based on his experiences in India soon after the 1962 war, too found something similar: The same amnesiac solace amid agonising filth and disorder!
Yet, Sundaram falls short of the Naipaulian standard. In fact, he is the victim of what the Nobel laureate famously calls the “Indian way of looking but not seeing”. Though he tells us about the Congolese expertise in amnesiac solace, their ability to seek comfort amid innumerable crises, in a book full of first-person accounts, the author himself remains a mystery man. We know nothing about him except, to an extent, his Yale background and that he grew up in Dubai. And even here, unlike Naipaul who clearly tells us how the Caribbean shaped him intellectually, we don’t know much about how Dubai — and to an extent Yale — influenced Sundaram, helping him see Congo the way he did.
These are, however, minor shortcomings and can be ignored for the overall brilliance of the book and its consistently beautiful prose. The very fact that we are comparing Sundaram with Naipaul shows what he has achieved with
his very first book. Stringer is one of the better works of recent times — sensitive, enlightening as well as engaging. Conrad couldn’t have asked for a better tribute more than 100 years after his journey to the ‘Heart of Darkness’.