In this article, Chinua Achebe reflects on the racism in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and its context in western culture. He explained how people were surprised to hear that there were African histories and literature. He was not very surprised, but dismayed, and a little disappointed in all actuality. He resents that Heart of Darkness is world-renowned as a classic piece of literature when indeed it is so racist in writing. He points out some of Conrad’s personal racisms and anti-Semitic nature, which had not been discussed in other biographies and psychoanalyst’s studies. He also discusses how he did not appreciate Africa as the antithesis of European civility or as the plain backdrop for the story where Kurtz lost his mind. These are some points that I found interesting. Achebe’s comparison to the one-sided travel logs of the time, dating back to Marco Polo, and Conrad’s novella was eye opening for me because I never took Conrad’s book as a literal travel log or as a true picture of Africa, but apparently people did. The article opened my eyes to how much I did not notice reading the novella because I was not looking at it through that lens. Achebe pointed out that many people are taken in by Conrad’s insidious phrasing and artful manipulation of the language when they first read the novella, but when Achebe took the time to dissect the pages’ contents, he was able to identify the pure racism enclosed. He also noticed that Conrad tried to distance himself from the very writing in the book by using a narrator who was retelling Marlow’s story, thus making Conrad two steps removed from the contents. This may show that Conrad was aware of some of the misgivings the book entailed because he did not take full responsibility for the contents by separating himself as such. Overall, I enjoyed the article, and I could tell that Achebe wrote this after thorough research and with much passion and dedication to his statements.
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