Journey without Maps

Starting with this book I am going to pursue a different format on this blog. Instead of providing an extended synopsis of the book with commentary, I shall write about only those elements of the book that I found especially interesting.

Journey without Maps is a travel narrative that chronicles Greene’s journey with his cousin through Liberia in early 1936. Greene chose Liberia because it was one of the two independent, non-colonized countries in Africa (the other being Ethiopia which Italy was in the process of occupying when this book was published). Greene and his cousin took a ship from Liverpool to Freetown, capital of the English colony of Sierra Leone. They then entered northern Liberia from southeastern Sierra Leone and worked their way southeast across the northern reaches of the country before turning south and toward the sea, ending in Grand Bassa County on the Atlantic. This journey required hiring menservants and carriers to transport supplies that would be needed for the journey along the tracks that cut through the forests and savannas. This merry troupe stayed in villages, each of which provided a hut or two and food, if the village had it, in exchange for a ‘dash’ or tip. Greene and his cousin were constantly battling fever and rats at night. This was Greene’s first trip out of Europe.

A major and minor theme play throughout the book: spiritual yearning and colonialism. I’ll discuss the minor theme first. Liberia provided a vibrant contrast to a colonial nation. Several towns near the coast had been settled by American Blacks in the mid and late 19^th century and American support for the venture had protected the country from being carved and swallowed by European powers during the Scramble for Africa. Although Liberia was politically independent, the American company Firestone injected a powerful dose of economic colonialism near the coast, where they operated rubber plantations. In the interior where Greene was traveling, however, villages largely governed themselves.

Greene does not hide his disdain for colonialism and the destruction he saw it work upon African societies. The colonial project robbed African peoples of their own identity, forcing them to participate in an imitation of European society. Respectability was a European monopoly. For a native person, to be respectable meant trying to be English (or French). Yet, the Europeans laughed at Africans playing at being European, although they required it. Greene says with bitterness that the Africans who found success in Sierra Leone were those who learned to laugh at themselves, seeing themselves with European eyes. Native beliefs and meaning-making were shunted to the side, not contradicted, simply dismissed with a wave of the hand. For the European mind, traditional African beliefs were just another jumble of superstition and pre-modern idiocy, pointless in the age of coal and science. Native people in the colonies found themselves trapped: having lost traditional ways of meaning-making and made fun of for following European ways.

Thirty-two year old Greene, an increasingly successful writer, was weary with the world and thought European civilization was approaching a spiritual dead-end. This being the mid-1930s, with Fascism taking center stage across the Continent and war in the air, Europe was a dreary place. A generation before, some people with spiritual boredom had seen the onset of the First World War as a grand adventure that would quicken the blood. Yet the boredom had survived the War to End War. Fascism arose based on its ability to make people feel part of something big. Leni Riefenstahl films capture this dynamic. The Depression didn’t cheer up the 1930s either. People who had felt part of a middle class, able to imagine a better future with hard work and a little luck, now toiled at odd jobs, in strange living situations, with no way forward, insects stuck in molasses. And they didn’t have Netflix and video games to keep them numb.

In tune with his time, Greene had spent the past decade writing about unsatisfied people failing at living well. There are many ways to fail. Some failures are more culpable than others, some more pleasurable. Greene’s writing dwells on the contrast between ideal and action and between morals not lived up to and the absence of any morals at all. Greene was exploring what the possibility for goodness is in the messy intercourse of our selves and the world. It is with this wounded spirituality that Greene journeyed to Liberia.

At several villages he and his cousin visit, they witness a dance by a ‘devil’ whose presence in the village is announced by drums and the hushed expectation of the whole village. Greene’s hired guides regard the devils with reverence and fear. Through his guides, Greene learns about the bush schools, in which all youths spend some period of time. One day, a man comes and seizes a youth and takes him into an enclosed and, until then, secret part of the forest. There, the youth learns some of the secrets of the village’s belief system and the proper ways to behave as an adult. They may find out that the man in the mask is the village blacksmith (often the case), but they also know that when he wears the mask, he is much more. It is a commonplace that some devils can poison enemies of the village and others, particularly female devils, can make lightning.

These beliefs clearly make an impression upon Greene, as his interested and serious discussion of them indicates. The strength of belief among the villagers and his guides and carriers is something that he can admire, even if the content of the beliefs cannot answer Greene’s spiritual needs.  

But Greene does have a conversion experience towards the end of the journey, a few days out from the coast. His spiritual insight was not due to local devils, the beliefs of his crew or any appreciation of the landscape or African society, rather it was due to lying sleepless with fever, low on medicine and whisky, feeling at the end of his rope. As he says, “I had made an interesting discovery during the night which interested me. I had discovered in myself a passionate interest in living. I had always assumed before, as a matter of course, that death was desirable.”

Greene self-consciously compares his experience with those of other Europeans who wrote about Africa, especially Conrad. The common thread between Greene and these writers and, to be trite, the moral of the story is that traveling through societies alien to one’s own allows the traveler to make a comparison of cultures. In this comparison, the commonalities between people in the two cultures stand for the merely human: that part of our humanity not determined by culture. For the European weary of their history, feeling their culture as a burden and at an impasse, a journey through, say, the interior of Liberia provided a reminder that their life had a value more fundamental than that which European culture ascribed to it.