Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

In his memoirs, Obama writes about the time when his friends confronted him when they saw him reading Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’.

I tossed the book into my backpack. “Actually, he’s right,” I said. “It is a racist book. The way Conrad sees it, Africa’s the cesspool of the world, black folks are savages, and any contact with them breeds infection.”

Regina blew on her coffee. “So why are you reading it?”

“Because it’s assigned.” I paused, not sure if I should go on. “And because—”

“Because . . .”

“And because the book teaches me things,” I said. “About white people, I mean. See, the book’s not really about Africa. Or black people. It’s about the man who wrote it. The European. The American. A particular way of looking at the world. If you can keep your distance, it’s all there, in what’s said and what’s left unsaid. So I read the book to help me understand just what it is that makes white people so afraid. Their demons. The way ideas get twisted around. It helps me understand how people learn to hate.”

During his presidency, in a highly publicized family visit to a small bookstore, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness was one of his picks from the store. While you and I may not be able to match up to Obama’s life, the least we could do would be to pick up and read ‘Heart of Darkness’. Earlier this year, I did just that and also read a couple of graphic adaptations of the book – by Peter Kuper and Anyango & Mairowitz respectively.

Re-reading HOD after more than a decade was interesting at so many levels. The novella is probably the most well-known indictment of Western imperialism in all of English literature. Marlowe’s journey deep into the snaking Congo made the world take notice of the atrocities that King Leopold II of Belgium was committing in the Congo. The craze for ivory and later rubber – two raw materials abundant in Congo made life hell for the natives. (The keys of every piano were made of ivory and John Dunlop’s discovery of the bicycle tyre led to a boom in demand for rubber)

Francis Ford Coppola’s magnum opus ‘Apocalypse Now’ was adapted from HOD. Instead of Marlowe searching for the elusive Kurtz, we have a US Captain tasked with the top-secret mission of eliminating a rogue Colonel (also called Kurtz). The assassin’s journey through the Mekong and the horrors of the Vietnam War up close make the two works distinct yet inseparable. Do watch it.

Conrad is one of my literary heroes. For someone who learned English as a second language after turning eighteen, what he managed to contribute to the language is simply mind-blowing. He lived in a world where the sail-powered maritime-world was being disrupted by steamboats. The risky nature of life onboard a steamboat opened up thousands of jobs and Poles like Conrad got sucked into the world of European mercantilism and imperialism.

Maya Jasanoff’s ‘The Dawn Watch’ is an excellent analysis of Conrad’s life and the world that he lived in. In it, she reminds us just how radical the crossing of the seas was for many:

Younger men than Conrad now crossed oceans and challenged the inequities of an entangled world. A Vietnamese ship’s steward called Ho Chi Minh worked between berths in Marseille and San Francisco, where he learned about the revolutionary potential of socialism. An Indian lawyer named Mohandas Gandhi holed up in his cabin on a sea voyage from London to South Africa and wrote a treatise about how India could become free from British rule. A Chinese doctor raised in Hawaii named Sun Yat-sen traveled to Europe, Japan, and Singapore, plotting how to overthrow China’s Manchu emperor. An Anglo-Irish diplomat who’d campaigned against labor abuses in Africa and the Amazon resigned his position to join the fight for Irish independence. That was Roger Casement.

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