Extended Reviews of Two Robert E. Howard Stories
Here are extended reviews of two of the Robert E. Howard stories I recently read for the S&S Saga project. They go into a little more depth about REH's negative and positive uses of race and how I received them.
Shadows in Zamboula, Robert E. Howard, 1935
In this story, Conan kills a bunch of black people. We know they’re black because Howard mentions it a whole bunch of times in 30 or so pages. The black people are cannibals, with their “kinky hair” shaped to look like demonic horns as they stalk their prey in the night-time shadows of a desert village. One of their potential victims proclaims that they were “lying in wait beneath a dark arch - black men, like great, hulking apes!” And a bit later she calls them “Negroes.” Wait. What? Isn’t this a fantasy world? Was Howard projecting?
Oof.
I know it was different times, but that doesn’t mean I can’t point out issues like this. This is not a bad story, but not a great one either; it was hard for me to really enjoy because of just how often Howard had to tell me that these evil cannibals were, in fact, black. If he had only mentioned the color of their skin once or twice, I might have been able to ignore it. But the fact that they were black was used more often as a defining quality than THE FACT THAT THEY WERE CANNIBALS!
Look...cannibals I can handle. But black cannibals? No thank you! That’s where I draw the line!
Every time I would start to have fun with the action, every time I would start to have fun hanging out with Conan, admiring his barbarian fortitude and no-nonsense call to arms (and this happened more than a few times!), Howard would make sure to remind me that Conan was, indeed, killing black people. His victims don’t just get decapitated. Their black heads flew through the air! They don’t just play the drums. Their black hands played the drums.
It was all a little tiresome.
I don’t think Howard was some kind of extra cruel racist (he was just the kind of normal racist) living vicariously through Conan’s actions here. I don’t think he wasn’t fantasizing about actually killing black people. I get it. He was using a trope, a convention of the other, and describing a certain race of people who inhabited Conan’s world. I also think it’s OK to read and enjoy these stories today, so long as we can discuss these kinds of issues when they are presented. He just didn’t need to be so blunt and incessant about it. The enemies could have just been cannibals. He didn’t need to also remind us over and over again that they were...BLACK cannibals!
The Hills of the Dead, Robert E. Howard, 1930
Solomon Kane is a holy warrior who wanders the earth on a divine quest to vanquish evil!
Howard completely redeems himself after Shadows in Zamboula with this tale of his puritan warrior Solomon Kane. This is an amazing story filled with harrowing action, exotic locations, and a couple of interesting characters.
In The Hills of the Dead Kane finds himself somewhere in Africa dealing with a village of vampire-zombie things. In this adventure, Kane is joined by N'Longa, a witch doctor, and a black man. N'Longa is a really great character, and Kane’s relationship with him is one of mutual respect. In fact, N'Longa has to teach Kane the ways of the fetish man / voodoo / black magic type stuff, and Kane relies on N'Longa’s expertise; Kane, a white man in a position of power defers to the expertise of a black man. The two men work together to vanquish the evil of the vampire village. The two men even become blood brothers, and form a strong bond with one another.
Through Kane’s eyes we can see that Howard was not a malicious racist, he just seemed to fall into problematic tropes and conventions too often when dealing with the fear of the other. Howard was quite capable of writing characters of color who weren’t simply vicious savages or primitive and primate-like.
I’ve read quite a bit of the Kane and Conan stories, and I vastly prefer Solomon Kane. He’s just a more interesting character and his stories feel more substantial.