The Power and the Glory

Graham Greene uses numerous colonial tropes in his descriptions of Mexico and its inhabitants. As an Englishman who traveled throughout southern Mexico in the 1930s, Greene clearly retained some of the prejudices of his time: This novel portrays the Mexican people as either cruel and authoritarian military men or nameless, faceless, subjugated villagers. To his credit, he humanizes the lieutenant—who treats the whisky priest with a surprising amount of respect—and avoids idealizing the expatriates, at least wholeheartedly. Nevertheless, the book reflects a kind of racial hierarchy, wherein the whisky priest speaks English, which distances him from his Mexican identity; the lieutenant is described as a dark-skinned “Indian”; and the mestizo, with his missing teeth and malarial stare, functions as a Judas-like character. Many consider the term mestizo itself—meaning someone of mixed Spanish and Indian ancestry—outdated. In addition, those of mixed heritage have often been cast as untrustworthy villains in colonial narratives. The setting itself gives rise to a host of stereotypes commonly used by those from the metropolitan centers to describe faraway places.

For example, in the opening scene, Mr. Tench confronts “the blazing Mexican sun and the bleaching dust” (7). The tropes of heat and dust are everywhere in colonial and postcolonial English literature (including a novel called Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala), as “heat” and “dust” are default terms often used to describe the foreign nature of a faraway land. The foreign place is uncomfortably hot and distressingly dusty, unlike England’s verdant green landscape and gentle rains. Additionally, the heat inevitably leads to torpor and laziness: “The trouble was,” Mr. Tench thinks, “nothing ever happened here” (46). The mestizo’s languid movements and sluggish malevolence are an outgrowth of the climate itself.

The landscape, too, is depicted as timeless, a place where “there were no clocks” (100) and, consequently, no sense of history. The only places where the bells once chimed the hour were the churches, imported from the European conquerors. Again, the novel ascribes this ahistorical attitude to the Indigenous peoples themselves: Greene’s book twice describes the “Indians” as coming from a distant past, “gnarled tiny creatures of the Stone Age” (175). Effectively, this relegates the Indigenous people to the backward swamps of prehistory. This is another common trope of colonial and postcolonial literature: Without the English observer to record events, Indigenous peoples live outside modernity.

In addition, expatriates populate the novel: Mr. Tench and the Fellows family hail from England, while the Lehrs are originally from Germany and came to Mexico via America. While Mr. Tench wallows in his forgetful ennui—the timelessness of the region having affected his memory—the Fellowses exist in a sea of uncertainty: “They were companions cut off from all the world: there was no meaning anywhere outside their own hearts: they were carried like children in a coach through the huge spaces without any knowledge of their destination” (39). In short, they’re exiles, infantilized by their lack of understanding and ultimately displaced by the violence around them. Significantly, the Fellowses are banana farmers, a class of expatriates who appropriated Indigenous land for profit.

In contrast, the Lehrs exhibit a firm, if misplaced, moral certainty about their status. While they’re expatriates living in a foreign land, they keep their homestead up to their exacting standards—and thus reveal their disdain for the native inhabitants. The water at their home is clean, but external sources can’t be trusted: They bathe each day in the stream, regardless of necessity. The implicit suggestion is that they’re “cleaner” than the Indigenous people. Additionally, they’re Protestants and dismiss the superstitious rituals of Catholicism. The whisky priest’s brief and idyllic stay at their homestead underscores the tacit and unfavorable comparison between European ways of life and Indigenous habits. Only here can the priest enjoy peace and security, freedom and respect, away from the heat and dust and violence of his native land.