Bigtime North American writer Russell Banks has written a political novel, The Darling (2004), set in Samuel Doe’s and Charles Taylor’s apocalyptic Liberia, and dedicated to a certain C.T.

One has to wonder, though it’s beside the point (or is it not?), who exactly this C.T. might be?

Teeth sharp, jaws agape, eyes narrowed to glints, Mr. Banks turns a blistering gaze on Liberia, joining the ranks of those Chinua Achebe describes as obsessed perpetrators of “the desire—one might indeed say the need—in Western psychology to set Africa up as a foil to Europe, as a place of negations at once remote and vaguely familiar, in comparison with which Europe's own state of spiritual grace will be manifest” (2). In The Darling, Banks mirrors Joseph Conrad and a host of other “blinded writers” whose narratives cast Africa as “the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization, a place where man's vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant bestiality” (Achebe 3). As literary representations of the human ideal in binary opposition to the “Other,” such works form a linear metaphorical continuum.

Primitivist and diabolical representations of Africa and Africans in literature written by western writers is nothing new. Since the sixteenth century, literature has been a persuasive mode of transmission for racist thought. Africans themselves under slavery, colonization, and neo-colonization have drunk their fill of self-hatred from the bitter fountain. As Achebe puts it, Africans are the “victims of racist slander who for centuries have had to live with the inhumanity it makes them heir to” (20). The language and iconography of empire and power remains as distinctive a brand on the African psyche today as was the *brank, the lynch rope, the bullwhip, the chains, the branding iron, and the other instruments of torture used on black flesh.

In Banks' book we are confronted with questions of alienation, animal rights, interracial marriage, political history, political radicalism, and political power. Bank’s exploration of one woman’s sojourn in Liberia covers real life political figures. Charles Taylor, Samuel Doe, Prince Johnson, undercover foreign agents and “ghostly,” “shadowy” ancillary Liberian characters stalk or slither through these pages. Charles Taylor is portrayed as a savvy modern-day revolutionary hero with high-level CIA connections, and Samuel Doe appears as an infantile—though murderous— white-worshipping buffoon. The main character, protagonist/narrator Hannah Musgrave, is a middle-class white American woman on the run from US law. Angst-ridden, fringe member of the Weather Underground anarchist movement of 60s fame, Hannah has engaged in juvenile but violent acts of domestic terrorism against her own government on American soil. Africa then, would seem to be a logical place of escape for this quasi-revolutionary, naively unaware that the reach of America’s eye and arm extends even into that “jungle” that existed in the “blackest part of [her] mind” (3).

Banks gives us Melvillian whiteness incarnate in a female character for whom we can feel no empathy or love. Hannah Musgrave is the anti-shero. And yet in the hands of this author, we feel something akin to horror for what he’s made of Hannah. She is a calculating, pimping user with no moral or ethical compass. A wannabe rebel without creative inspiration, driven by cynicism and existential emptiness; sexually cold but promiscuous, insensitive, self-absorbed, overly critical, racist, and emotionally dead. That she marries a Liberian politician whom she does not love, Woodrow Sundiata, Deputy Minister of Public Health, after sleeping with his kinsman and driver, Satterthwaite, and later professes to be "pleased" when her husband is arrested (222), situates her quite neatly in the handy heartless, carnal, manipulative female ‘gold digger’ category: “What, exactly then, did I see in him, other than a benefactor and protector? (105) . . . I actually thought Woodrow sexually unusual, let’s say, and wondered almost constantly what he would be like in bed” (110).

Perverse imagery and a parallel language of racist terminology shape the novel. The symbolic words black, gloom, dark, gray, silence, ghostly, shadowy, permeate the novel in mood and tone - a droning chant. Told in flashbacks intertwining Hannah’s past and present, the contrasts between sections heightens the sense of Africa as cruel, bestial “Other.” Almost all of the Liberian characters speak a flat, reductionist Liberian Pidgin English: “Damn good t’ing dis bitch finally outa here, ’cause some day her gonna get mad at de ’ol man an’ tell ’im what we done once way back den an’ mek de ‘ol man fire me or wuss” (241), and, "That boy's getting to be one uppity nigger" (140), and, "Them men are terrible peoples!" (367). This is language derived more from racist eighteenth century American novels and minstrel shows than from any people anywhere who have taken an imposed language, refashioned it with their mother tongue(s), infused it with irony, pathos, cultural soulfulness, wit, and made it their own.

It is the omniscient authorial voice that amplifies the text, a voice at once familiar and fantastical; a voice with no affinity for the people, place or language it condemns. Undergirding the whole of this book is Banks' preoccupation with "saving chimpanzees from . . . outright extermination," as he states in the book's acknowledgement page. Through Hannah, and in between his soliloquies on the human characteristics of apes, Banks strolls unclothed like the naked Emperor through a minefield of racist and sexist tropes and motifs, indicting everything outside the paradigm of white male control and formation. Indulging his own externalized terrors of blackness and racial differences, Banks reveals more about himself than he does about the "bizarre" Liberian world he sees and has come to police:

I could see plainly enough their detonating faces, huge and black and wet with rain (198) . . . I glanced at my shoulder and saw a black hand with long, slender fingers lying there, and I leapt away from it (98) . . . His eyebrows rose into his forehead, then lowered, and his round face darkened from brown to nearly black. I half expected smoke to blow from his nostrils and ears, his eyes to glow as red as coals (228) . . . A slim, middle-aged Lebanese man from Monrovia, a man with yellow eyes who licked his lips a lot and smiled like a lizard (10) . . . The old, all-too-familiar, Liberian paranoia came over me. It’s in the air you breathe here. It’s like a virus (13) . . . I understood almost no Liberian English (177) . . . The moist weight, even at night, of the tropical air against my body, its nearly tangible density, as if . . . a large animal were holding me down (16) . . . To a poor Liberian, an animal that can’t be eaten and can’t be put to work or serve as trade goods is a liability and deserves only to punished for it (34) . . . Woodrow's father's skin was charcoal gray (131) . . . the old woman, Woodrow's mother, was very dark (131-32) . . . I lay on my back and looked up at the silhouette of a black featureless head blocking out the sun (45) . . . The woman was very dark, almost plum colored, and with glistening hair that was braided and coiled like a nest of black snakes. (130)

The book opens with Hannah on a farm she has bought in America after escaping the war in Liberia. Significantly, Hannah finds Charles Taylor to be incredibly compelling, charming, absolutely darling:

Charles had a rock star’s charisma and presence and generated a sexual force field (221) . . . I liked Charles and for a long time had been sexually attracted to him. His large, open face and intelligent eyes, his easy smile, his immense physical energy (293) . . . He stood and put his arms around me and kissed me on both cheeks. I liked his smell. It may have been the first time in my life that a man had smelled right to me. No, not the first time. My father always smelled right to me. No other man. Until Charles. And none since. (298) . . . I had thought of following Charles to Libya and imagined myself in fatigues and a black beret and a M-16, a latter-day Patty Hearst . . A guerilla fighter, a liberator . . . And when Charles’ war of liberation was won, I would have a role in the revolutionary government . . . I was forty years old and had had nowhere forward I could go and no permanent place to stay. All I could do was go back. Back to Africa. (312)

In the bucolic setting of her farm in New York’s Adirondack Mountains, thinking about again returning to Liberia to search for the sons she’d abandoned, Hannah suddenly becomes afraid of her own dogs: “they scared me. I saw the primeval wildness in them . . . the ferocity of their canine needs . . . single-minded predators . . . In their silence and indistinct, shape-changing fluidity, they frightened me” (6). Needless to say, Hannah's dogs are "black-and-white Border collies" (30). Later that same day, “when I decided to return to Liberia” (24), as Hannah and her help are killing her farm-raised, free-range chickens to sell, the dogs begin “barking wildly, almost joyfully” at the scent of blood (26). Banks descends into a meticulous description of Hannah beheading the "hysterical" chickens on a "wooden chopping block"—“they seem suddenly to possess all the familiar mammalian emotions—fear and sadness and love of life” (25)—the blood and gore, on to the “naked, headless bodies of the chickens . . . one on top of the other . . . a pink squared mound of flesh” (26). The symbolic use of the colors, pink, white, black, blood red, the juxtaposition and linking of the sub-human and fiendish to Liberians and the Liberian world, with the sole exception of Charles Taylor, is an allegorical device repeated throughout the novel.

Another example offers an iconographic fetish the white imagination has enshrined in literature, cartoons, and Tarzan movies: “coming down the half-destroyed road from Nimba to Monrovia, enduring the prolonged heat under the canvas tarp as if I were inside a covered, black, cast-iron pot . . .” (19). The “black, cast-iron pot” immediately evokes the bone-through-the-nose implanted image of red-eyed, ‘wild’ Africans screeching unintelligibly and dancing around a pot surrounded by the flames of a blazing fire, in which a white man is boiled alive for consumption. Achebe confronts this abiding thematic configuration of vaunted white male canonicity: "Africa as setting and backdrop which eliminates the African as human factor. Africa as a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity, into which the wandering European enters at his peril" (12).

When Hannah is being taken to Fuama to meet her future husband's family: “the expressions on the native people's faces remained unchanged, placid and incurious—as impenetrable as the jungle (123) . . . I felt like a traveler from another planet ” (128). Is it necessary to say the people of a land are "native"? Earlier in the novel, Banks bestows more humanity on the chickens Hannah is slaughtering for sale than he is able to bring himself to do with the people of Fuama. The only being Hannah connects with on that journey to the village is a red-haired she-goat (125). This time at least, Banks feels the imperative to explain: “The bamboo wall that separated me from Woodrow’s family was cultural and linguistic” (339). But Hannah has no problem communicating though— telepathically, perhaps —with a she-goat. This author asks the reader to accept this implausible psychic leap, as if human beings of disparate cultures separated by language have not always communicated through shared emotions, gestures, facial expressions, laughter, smiles, and a healthy curiosity; as if whole languages, such as Pidgins and Creoles, have not developed out of similar cross-cultural interactions. By denying his Liberian characters authentic speech, their national identity, diversity, and all human complexity, Russell Banks has created a work that reveals a ghastly, even wounding, perspective.

Contradictions, historical distortions, crude and fraudulent descriptions, insulting characterizations and caricatures abound in this novel. The Rice Riot crowd is described as “a headless beast” (197). And after poor Woodrow is beheaded by Doe's soldiers, Hannah throws herself at the CIA agent, Sam, who rebuffs her sexual advances and says, "The truth is, sometimes after I've been out here in this goddam heart of darkness I get horny for white people, that's all" (373). Mr. Banks is certainly keeping it real, making no bones about linking his Liberia to Conrad's Congo. Banks’ explanation for President's Tolbert's gruesome death: “Tolbert had lost the support of the Americans . . . The Americans had begun to distrust the president’s engorged ego and greed and his increasing recklessness” (203). Here, the remarkable power dynamic positioning America as the ruler of Liberia's fate warrants no further explication. The master/slave power relationship is understood.

The book’s title provokes the question: Whose darling is Hannah? Or, who does Hannah deem darling? Charles Taylor alone? We find our answer partly in the family of African creatures most humanized in western films and literature: chimpanzees, Hannah’s “dreamers,” as she calls them, captured in the wild, cruelly ensnared in the wide net of supply and demand to be sold to European and American pharmaceutical companies for scientific torture for production for mega profits. Hannah outright confesses to caring more about the chimpanzees under her care than she does about her bi-racial sons or her Liberian husband:

On a deep—perhaps the most basic— level, my chimpanzees were drawing me back. Not my husband’s memory, not my sons (19) . . . I couldn’t at the same time keep from seeing my baby as an alien, a member of a different non-human species (167) . . . For when it came down to it, the chimps had become my closest friends in Liberia, my only confidants, the creatures to whom I entrusted my secrets, and whose secrets I kept and carried (193) . . . In all my relations with both my sons . . . there was a disjunct, a powerful buried conflict that made it possible for me to abandon [them] with such remarkable and awful ease (235) . . . my sons were more Woodrow's than mine, more African than American, more black than white. I looked after them . . . but did it in a general distant way, and left the details to others. (332)

Hannah can only relate to her husband, sons, and the Liberian world through the sexual objectification of the black male body and racial differences. It's instructive to understand that this woman believes she actually hears one of the chimps in her care speak to her. She cannot understand "Liberian English" but she can hear the thoughts and language of "Anthropopithicus" (21): "And Doc spoke. I heard him speak to me! His voice was low and dark, his accent and intonation West African. He called me by name, Hannah-oh, Hannah-oh . . ." (45). Achebe calls into question the parasitical propensity of white writers who use these discursive strategies: "Can nobody see the preposterous and perverse arrogance in thus reducing Africa to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind? But that is not even the point. The real question is the dehumanization of Africa and Africans which this age-long attitude has fostered and continues to foster in the world" (12).

Banks spares no one and nothing, not even poor peasants, villagers, Monrovia housegirls, or Liberian topography: “The mud had a cold, metallic stink to it” (128). Robbery is “the next Liberian thing” to do (42). After years in Liberia, Hannah has no human Liberian friends, “merely acquaintances” (242) among a people elsewhere described as open-hearted, hospitable, warm-natured, kind, appreciative, moral, and trustworthy, with a clever and sparkling philosophical sense of humor. Projecting his race conscious American disease, Banks tells us through Hannah:

And despite my shortcomings, because of what I was rather than who I am, there was now a certain glamour to Woodrow and an almost enviable modernity. Suddenly Woodrow possessed visible evidence that he was a city man, a worthy member of the Liberian elite, clearly a man fit for the president's inner circle. If he had married a Liberian woman instead, even a descendant of the old African-American ruling class, he would have remained the same little, slightly boring, American-educated bureaucrat, the clever, but not too clever, missionary-boy from the bush. (By now I saw how he looked at others and was beginning to look to me, as well.) With me as his wife, however, Woodrow was exotic, a little sexy, and possibly dangerous, as if his newly consecrated American connection gave him power and information that were unavailable to other Liberians, even among the elite. Women flirted with Woodrow now, showed him their bare brown shoulders, large bosoms and butts, their big, bright teeth. Men sidled up to him and spoke confidentially to him of deals and possibilities and newly conceived alliances, then reported back to their brethren: Hey, my brother, you see? Even the Belgian representative of the World Bank has given the man the use of his private, very lovely, very expensive beach house for a honeymoon cottage. He's now a man to keep track of. Woodrow Sundiata sleeps on fine Belgian cotton sheets tonight. The sub-minister sleeps with a white American woman tonight and every night. And she will connect him to the big American and European world out there beyond Liberia where, mysteriously, people get quickly rich and end up with power over other people’s lives and livelihoods. Woodrow Sundiata, my brothers, has become a man to deal with. (164-65)

How much liberty is a western writer allowed in recycling the rhetorical prose of empire to use blackness, Africaninty, for his purposes, with such an arrogant, prejudiced, imperialistic gaze? In his essay deconstructing Conrad’s Heart of Darkness about the Congo, from which I’ve previously quoted, Achebe puts this preoccupation into context:

When a writer while pretending to record scenes, incidents and their impact is in reality engaged in inducing hypnotic stupor in his readers through a bombardment of emotive words and other forms of trickery, much more has to be at stake than stylistic felicity. Generally normal readers are well armed to detect and resist such under-hand activity. But Conrad [insert Banks] chose his subject well - one which was guaranteed not to put him in conflict with the psychological predisposition of his readers or raise the need for him to contend with their resistance. He chose the role of purveyor of comforting myths. (5)

Toni Morrison analyzes the fixation and ideation in her critical study, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination:

Africanism is the vehicle by which the American self knows itself as not enslaved, but free: not repulsive, but desirable; not helpless, but licensed and powerful; not history-less, but historical; not damned, but innocent; not a blind accident of evolution, but a progressive fulfillment of destiny (53) . . . the metaphorical and metaphysical uses of race occupy definitive places in American literature, in the ‘national’ character, and ought to be a major concern of the literary scholarship that tries to know it. (63)

The insistent, enduring, sometimes unself-conscious depiction of Africans as barbaric, pathological, one-dimensional, sub-human savages or buffoons is one that has battered our collective psyches throughout our lifetimes, intensified by the sensationalized reportage on Liberia by westerners during these past twenty-five uninterrupted years of bloody strife. Russell Banks’ The Darling deploys another metaphoric representation of this unimaginative pattern, which Morrison describes as a “sinister, frequently lazy, almost always predictable employment of racially informed and determined chains" (x-xi). Achebe urges us to dissect “this phenomenon dispassionately” (4). I confess that ‘dispassion’ for me, a Liberian woman in exile and emotional pain over my people’s sufferings, and the plight of my homeland under aggressive white supremacist/neo-colonialist assault, is hard to achieve.

Under the sniffing nostrils of western newspaper reporters and social and political scientists covering Liberia, from whom Banks seems to have derived most of his black scoundrels and villains all the way down to the very last “comforting myth” and stereotype, there is the 21st century holocaust of an unreported sexual slave trade of African children sold to pedophiles, pornographers and sadists to all points of the non-African world. Now that the sexual slave trade has overtaken drugs and weapons to become the number one profit driven obscenity of our times (has the triangular slave trade ever really ended?), these personalities, “in their silence and indistinct, shape-changing fluidity,” are among the “single-minded predators” in Liberia, way more terrifying than The Bush Thing (Sankawulo), given “the ferocity of their canine needs” (Banks 6). But Banks impossibly does not, and actually cannot see them.

Russell Banks has essentially written an American novel, and not a book about Liberia. In the Americas specifically, Mr. Banks’ home of residence and birth, as evident throughout most of the Majority World (the so-called Third World), the racist gaze has been so invasive, hurtful and psychologically destructive, black peoples have almost wholly internalized its negation of blackness. The western world’s racial structure and language resulting from white supremacist domination has shaped an intra-racial stratification among non-white peoples formulated on skin tone and color consciousness. This dominant/imposed European standard of beauty privileges people of color whose pigmentation, hair texture and facial features most closely resembles whiteness. Dark skin is vilified or demonized oppositionally in quality and degree. The darker the skin, the more evil the characteristics imputed. This is the teat Russell Banks has sucked on his entire life.

The internalization of this racist construction leads black Americans to call each other degrading names such as jigaboo, tar baby, rughead, jungle bunny, coon, nigger, skillet black, spear and myriad other insulting, racialized names along the hierarchal color spectrum. It is the mental illness arising out of the holocaust of the slave experience, when a person of African descent puts down another person of African descent for being closer to the root of the source of our collective African heritage. There is something sick—a psychic trauma— mental and emotional, when we see this pattern repeated throughout the black world. We all know about Liberia and the country/congau divide. And what is the common factor? From colored to Negro to Black to Afro to African American, the quest has been to claim a self-defined identity, and neutralize the gaze.

Literary and cultural theorist bell hooks contends, "It is only as [black people] collectively change the way we look at ourselves and the world that we can change how we are seen. In this process, we seek to create a world where everyone can look at blackness, and black people, with new eyes" (67). Our own coherency, however, has rarely seemed to inspire any measurable transformation of archetypal racist thought, evidenced by the fact that Banks’ novel was just published last year. As Morrison posits, “equally valuable is a serious intellectual effort to see what racial ideology does to the mind, imagination, and behavior of masters (12) . . . The fabrication of an Africanist persona is reflexive; an extraordinary mediation on the self; a powerful exploration of the fears and desires that reside in the writerly consciousness. It is an astonishing revelation of longing, of terror, of perplexity, of shame . . . It requires hard work not to see this (17).

And we have learned something about Mr. Banks. We do see Hannah mediate a tenuous peace with her mother, whom she loathes, from the 'otherworld' of Liberia: “I’d come to Liberia . . . Which, I knew, would take me even farther away from my wars, my parents, my pasts, than I had managed so far” (105). But Africa, embodying all she is not, all she is incapable of embracing, including her own children, all she is unable or unwilling to surmount in her racialized American outlook or comprehend about the “Other,” this Africa heals her severed connections: “since I arrived in Africa, the literal physical distance between me and my parents had grown so great . . . I think that’s what made me suddenly want so badly to communicate with them” (143).

Addressing the “sexist, racist and authoritarian nature of much supposedly progressive” North American fiction, the writer Ursula K. Le Guin asserts:

If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare them to be wholly different from yourself—as men have done to women, and class has done to class, and nation has done to nation—you may hate it, or deify it; but in either case you have denied its spiritual equality, and its human reality. You have made it into a thing, to which the only possible relationship is a power relationship. And thus you have fatally impoverished your own reality. You have, in fact, alienated yourself. (673)

Indeed, by the end of this suffocating novel, the pervasive sense of humanity diminished cloaks the author himself. The excoriating language wields a lacerating whip which, nevertheless, recoils to entrap its crafter. Liberia’s political realities demand we rigorously deconstruct those canonical narratives which feed the racist beast of self-hatred. It is these texts, like Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the focus of Achebe’s ire, which remain central to the curricula in classrooms across Africa. Morrison plunges deep into this torturous psychological terrain in her ode to James Baldwin at his funeral, “Life in His Language.” Her claims carry the realism and moral authority of an insider’s pain, healing, and penetrative sensibility:

You gave me a language to dwell in, a gift so perfect it seems my own invention. I have been thinking your written and spoken thoughts for so long I believed they were mine . . . No one possessed or inhabited language for me the way you did. You made American English honest—genuinely international. You exposed its secrets and reshaped it until it was truly modern dialogic, representative, humane. You stripped it of ease and false comfort and fake innocence and evasion and hypocrisy. And in place of deviousness was clarity. In place of soft plump lies was a lean, targeted power. In place of intellectual disingenuousness and what you called "exasperating egocentricity," you gave us undecorated truths. You replaced lumbering platitudes with an upright elegance. You went into that forbidden territory and decolonized it, “robbed it of the jewel of its naiveté," and un-gated it for black people so we could enter it, occupy it, restructure it in order to accommodate our complicated passion—not our vanities but our intricate, difficult, demanding beauty, our tragic, insistent knowledge, our lived reality, our sleek classical imagination—all the while refusing “to be defined by a language that has never been able to recognize [us].” In your hands language was handsome again. In your hands we saw how it was meant to be: neither bloodless nor bloody, and yet alive. It infuriated some people. (Legacy 76).

It is this colonial experience, “to be defined by a language that has never been able to recognize [us],” as Baldwin wrote, Morrison points out, and Achebe deplores, which politicizes Banks’ book. Banks carves another mutilating signature across Liberia’s scarred, blood-stained face, writing dystopian fiction about a people and a place whose authentic history cannot be narrated out of the colonialist gaze.

Achebe, Chinua. "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of         Darkness." Hopes and Impediments. New York: Doubleday,         1989.

Baldwin, James. “Sonny’s Blues.” Going to Meet the Man. New York:         Dell, 1988, pp. 121.

Banks, Russell. The Darling. New York: Harper Collins, 2004.

hooks, bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston:
        South End Press, 1992.

Le Guin, Ursula K. “American SF and the Other.” Patterns Across the         Disciplines. New York: McMillan, 1988.

Morrison, Toni. “Life in His Language.” James Baldwin: The Legacy.         Ed. Quincy Trope. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989.

---. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination.
        Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.

Sankawulo, Wilton, Sr., The Weeping Girl of Digei         http://liberiaseabreeze.com/sankawulo.html