Incomprehensible heart of darkness

Once upon a time, England was a dark, primeval place and the desire to escape this past was so strong, that perhaps one reason why England took on the role of the colonizer was to suppress this memory, to suppress the unconscious savage within the self. Could this be happening to the reader as well? That we fear the identification, the common ancestry and recognition of “kinship” with the African? In Conrad’s words, “the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly.”

So Conrad relegates the African into a world of “black and incomprehensible frenzy”. Words like “incomprehensible”, “unspeakable”, inscrutable” are repeatedly used to describe the African – which posit Africa as a locus of primitivism, separate from civilization, separate from the world we know today. This negates the fact that African groups have their own order and belief, and denies the value of what cannot be expressed by the English language (“violent babble”, “words that resembled no sounds of human language”).

It’s interesting, as mentioned last week in lecture, how we as readers tend to identify ourselves with the colonizer and the African as the Other. As such, Conrad's racism is too easily forgiven. In a way, we are so desensitized and so comfortable with racism that manifestations of racism simply brush us by. What Achebe was trying to do then was to alert readers of the implicit racism in everyone, and that the stereotypical assumptions we have of Africa, our own image of Africa, is further reinforced by books like Heart of Darkness. Aside from whether Conrad was racist, the main question is whether such a book "which celebrates this dehumanization, which depersonalizes a portion of the human race…be called a great work of art?”

(290 words)