"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. I am talking about a story in which the very humanity of black people is called into question."
So speaks Chinua Achebe about Heart of Darkness. Achebe makes disturbing points about Conrad's personal attitudes calling him "talented and tormented," hinting at the issue of Conrad's repressed sexual orientation -- a matter that haunts, I think, nearly all Conrad's writing.
Yet the force of Achebe's critique is an analysis of the text, an analysis which might be seen as one of the springs of Achebe's own writing. To my mind the most powerful statement in the essay is
Which only leads one to surmise that Western psychoanalyist must regard the kind of racism displayed by Conrad as absolutely normal despite the profoundly important work done by Frantz Fanon in the psychiatric hospitals of French Algeria.
What do we learn from this? What is the place of Heart of Darkness, this most revered of novels? Of European/American writing about Africa? What about Conrad's critique of Belgian colonialism? When is it time to turn to African writers themselves?
1 comment:
When writing Conrad is going to be drawing on what he knows and at the time the thoughts of Africans were not very flattering so that will leak into his writing whether he wants it to or not. Totally erasing racism from someone is a difficult task, especially if it was learned for years.
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