Achebe and His Image of Conrad

While talking to a fellow year 4 , Sonia about the Achebe article and how I felt about it, the similar topic of whether Kipling was a racist in his representation of the colonised in his novels came up as well. Sonia pointed out the Edward Said essay on Kim in her Penquin edition (which i don't have)and how he posited that Kipling should not be overtly ridiculed by today's post-colonial academia as a racist as he was writing (to paraphrase)"within the colonial sphere of his time". I had previously expressed my opinion to Sonia that Achebe was rather over-reacting towards Conrad's representation of the Other,

I am talking about a book which parades in the most vulgar fashion prejudices and insults from which a section of mankind has suffered untold agonies and atrocities in the past and continues to do so in many ways and many places today.

pg 11 for example,

and had failed to recognise the context in which Conrad was writing, as a product of his time "All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz [Conrad]" (71). Rather, I would posit the use of "reading against the grain" or deconstructive reading to "reclaim" the text in recognising the erroneous representation of the Other and “righting wrong”, but stopping short of criticising the author per say.

Another bone I have to pick was concerning Achebe's argument about Conrad's anxiety in the "lurking hint of kinship" in the novel. I would have to disagree. For brevity's sake, I will focus on the Congo/Thames representation. Rather than an antithesis, I felt that it was rather to draw a parallel of the Thames to the Congo, a reminder of Britain's past as the colonised rather than coloniser. A return to the "darkness" of its past, appealing to colonial anxiety rather than Conrad's.

(300 words excluding asides and citations)