Journey Back by Graham Greene

The motive of a journey deserves a little attention. It is not the fully conscious mind which chooses West Africa in preference to Switzerland. The psychoanalyst who takes the images of a dream one by one- ‘You dreamed you were asleep in a forest. What is you first association to forest?’ – finds that some images have immediate associations, to others the patient can bring out nothing at all; his brain is like a cinema in which the warning ‘Fire’ has been cried; the exits are jammed with too many people trying to escape, and when I say that to me Africa has always seemed an important image, I suppose that is what I mean, that it has represented more than I could say. “You dreamed you were in Africa. Or what do you think when I say the word Africa, Africa?” and a crowd of words and images, witches and death, unhappiness and the Gare St.-Lazare, the huge smokey viaduct over a Paris slum, crowd together and block the way to full consciousness.  .  .  .

 

It is not any part of Africa which acts so strongly on this unconscious mind; certainly, no part where the white settler has been most successful in reproducing the conditions of his country, its morals and its popular art. A quality of darkness is needed, of the inexplicable. This Africa may take the form of an unexplained brutality, as when Conrad noted in his Congo diary: ‘Thursday, 3^rd July .  .  .  . Met an officer of the State inspecting. A few minutes afterwards saw at a camp place the dead body of a Blackongo. Shot? Horrid smell”; or a sense of despair, as when Celine writes: “Hidden away in all this flowing forest of twisted vegetation, a few decimated tribes of natives squatted among fleas and flies, crushed by taboos and eating nothing all the time but rotten tapioca.” The old man I saw beaten with a club outside the poky little prison at Tapee-Ta, the naked windows at Tailahun covered with yellow clay squatting in a hole, the wooden-toothed devil swaying his raffia skirts between the huts seem like images in a dream to standing for something of importance to myself.

Today our world seems particularly susceptible to brutality. There is a touch of nostalgia in the pleasure taken in gangster novels, in characters who have so agreeably simplified their emotions that they have begun living again at a level below the cerebral. We, like Wordsworth, are living after a war and after a revolution, and these half-castes fighting with bombs between the cliffs of skyscrapers seem more likely than we to be aware of Proteus rising from the sea. It is not, of course, that one wishes to stay forever at that level, but when one sees to what unhappiness, to what peril of extinction centuries of celebration has brought us, one sometimes has a curiosity to discover if one can from what we have come, to recall at which point we went astray.

 

                                                    1936     from Journey Without Maps