book “Heart of darkness ”
The book “Heart of darkness ” is written by Joseph Conrad, and the story is about a sailor who had a boat which used to transport ivories using a steamboat across Congo River. The author, in the year 1899, had the experience of being a merchant sailor across Congo, and he experienced horrors portrayed by Belgian rule, which was meant to exploit the Africans (Conrad, 130).
According to Chinua Achebe, Conrad presented Africa as “the other world ’’ who were in the antithesis of Europeans together with Civilization. A place for man’s intelligence as well as refinement as lastly, criticized by triumphant bestiality. Conrad went through racism, and he has experienced criticism, he reports this simple since it’s a reasonable way for the whites to mistreat African, and this goes unrecognized. Many critics defended Conrad from the condemnations that Achebe had towards him. They continued to say that the book and writers were relevant depending on the time, and both of them should not be judged at any point following the morality of modern racialism.
According to history the culture of both Britain, as well as Europe, were full of racism, people in the past were racists and the discriminated African, which is different in the current society since discrimination has reduced. In the past white’s people had racial biasness towards Africans this was seen by the people who lived there an example of Conrad. If everyone things doing evil is an apparent cause, then everyone will take it as usual when it is committed, and it will go unnoticed. The author of the book is presented as a protagonist he presents the sufferings he underwent together with other Africans when they were in the Whiteman’s land, he gives this as history, and he criticizes the same. He sarcastically presents the suffering without fully showing the pain he had in his heart because of the exploitation they had gone as a result of colonialization. People passed through horror, and it was possible because the Whiteman did not directly exploit Africa since they could work against it. The Africans were used indirectly when as they thought they were getting the profit, but in the real sense, they were victims of political racist together with nationalist narratives. The book starts with a positive narration that seemed superb, and it had objectification nonetheless. It presents male characters of African as part of the beautiful useless landscape that was being despoiled. “They shouted, sang their bodies streamed with perspiration they had faces like grotesque mask these chaps, but they had a bone, muscles a wild vitality intense energy of movement that was as natural and true as the surf along their coast. They wanted no excuse for being there ’’ (Lim, 140). Don't use plagiarised sources.Get your custom essay just from $11/page
The African men presented a superficial sympathetic, and the same was seen in Congo by Marlow, describes it has faced “like grotesque masks ” The author continues to say, “They were dying slowly, it was apparent. They were not enemies, and they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now, nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom ….The black bones reclined at full length with one shoulder against the tree, and slowly the eyelids rose, and the sunken eyes looked up at me, enormous and vacant, a kind of blind, white flicker in the depths of the orbs, which died out slowly. The man seemed youth, almost a boy, but you know with them it’s hard to tell ’’.
The author describes the situation as “unhappy savage ” since the African were treated like animals, just like a person could treat dogs. Marlow writes how he helped a dying man by giving him a biscuit meaning the Africans were starving of hunger like dogs in the Europeans streets. He compares his generosity like the way he could have feed any dog in the streets of the Europeans. He has shown acts of kindness towards the young man who could have died of hunger. This clearly shows that the Europeans mistreated the Africans, including denying them food and making them work for them as slaves, and with all these, they discriminated against them.
The author narrates the injustice that could be seen in the eyes and the mistreatment the Africans faced at the face of the Whiteman, but he could do nothing to save them from the mistreatments. The author says even the crewmembers who were natives and were offering services in their journey to Congo had nothing to feed on. African were operating under fate and no one minded about their welfare they were more or less than animals in the eyes of Whiteman ” In a few days the Eldorado Expedition went into the patient wilderness, that closed upon it as the sea closes over a diver. Long afterward, the news came that all the donkeys were dead. I know nothing as to the fate of the less valuable animals. They no doubt, like the rest of us, found what they deserve. I did not inquire” (Hipparkar, 280).
Marlow takes African as a piece of land that is missed and doesn’t have anyone to take good care of it, or the master has neglected it. He had noticed that African suffered as a large group, as an individual since they were mistreated, and he saw, and this was beyond his sympathy.
Marlow describes the way the African’s were murdered as one could narrate the way the road kills an opossum. “Was looking after the upkeep of the road, he declared. Can’t say I saw any road or any maintenance, unless the body of the middle-aged Negro, with a bullet-hole in the forehead, upon which I stumbled three miles farther on may be considered as a permanent improvement. Marlow describes the situation of the African crew “yes, I looked at them as you would on any human being, with a curiosity of their impulses, motives, capacities, weakness, when brought to the test of an inexorable physical necessity ’’(Williams,37 ). The Europeans are presented to be arrogant, corrupt, and entitled, they are little skilled men, and they have little wisdom, and Helmsman calls them the ” most unstable kind of fool” since he was a black man. When Helmsman dies, he is not given a proper burial, and Marlow says, “I missed my late Helmsman awfully, I missed him even while his body was still lying in the pilot-house. Perhaps you will it passing strange this regret for a savage who was no more account than a grain of sand in a black Sahara.
Work cited
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness (Fourth International Student Edition)(Norton Critical Editions). WW Norton & Company, 2016 123-143.
Lim, Tae Yun. “Racial Otherness and Fin-de-siècle Fears: Reading Stoker’s Dracula and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” 새한영어영문학 60.4 (2018): 143-161.
Joseph, Conrad. Heart of Darkness. Strelbytskyy Multimedia, 2017.
Hipparkar, Anand U. “Images of the Other: Race, Gender, and the Imperial Relationship in the Heart of Darkness.” Our Heritage 68.32 (2020): 244-251.
Williams, James Reay. “Post/Colonial Linguistics: Language Effects and Empire in the Heart of Darkness and Nostromo.” Multilingualism and the Twentieth-Century Novel. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2019. 33-72.