Heart of Darkness (Racism)
This report is on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. It is a story about how a mariner on his mission from London, England through the Mediterranean Sea and into Africa and what he encounters once he gets there. The story is about a guy named Marlow. My point in this paper is to describe how Conrad describes Africa as a dark place. My point is to try to prove whether or not this is racism or if this is just ignorance. There are many thoughts and discussion out there about this novel and this topic. This is just one of them. I also read Chinua Achebe's, An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and I also have some thoughts that are similar to Achebe's but are my own. This is one of the first passages where Conrad is describing African people: A slight clinking behind me made me turn my head. Six black men advanced in a file, toiling up the path. Black rags where wound round their loins, and the short ends behind waggled to and fro like tails. Each had an iron collar on his neck and all were connected together with a chain whose bights swung between them, rhythmically clinking, they were criminals and the outraged law had come to them. They passed me with deathlike indifference of unhappy savages.
In this passage he just refers to the African people that he was looking at, as shapes. They were not even considered people in his eyes. In this passage Conrad is describing the black man as nothing more than a monster. He says that "the earth seemed unearthly", meaning that this site that he is seeing is not of the earth and that the black man is not supposed to be free to run about and shout and make expressions at the white man. He goes on to say "Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough, but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you-you so remote from the night of first ages-could comprehend." The worse thing about this whole scene to him was that since the black man is a man, that somehow they are human like himself and there is some kind of kinship, a relationship if you will, to the African people. book, as black savages, ni**ers, brutes, and "them", displaying ignorance toward the African history and racism towards the African people. He also wrote, "Black figures strolled out listlessly... the beaten ni**er groaned somewhere". This is just plain ignorance on his part as a European writer. The fact of the
Some common words found in the essay are:
Ugly Yes, Heart Darkness, Maybe Laws, Sea Africa, Catcher Rye, african people, , Conrad's Heart, conrad's heart darkness, passage conrad, laws broke, conrad describing, racism ignorance, heart darkness, earth unearthly, conrad's heart,
Approximate Word count = 867
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)
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