[In the following essay, Trench-Bonett counters the charge that Conrad is a racist by examining the way the author utilizes names and silence in Heart of Darkness.]

Chinua Achebe makes some grave charges against Joseph Conrad in his well-known analysis of Heart of Darkness. Conrad, he says, is a “thoroughgoing racist” who ignores the cultural achievements of Africans and represents them not as people, but as “limbs and rolling eyes,” refusing even to confer language upon them. The writer has “a problem with niggers,” and uses “emotive” language and “trickery” to dehumanize his African characters and present a view of Africa as “a place of triumphant bestiality” which functions as a “foil” for an enlightened Europe.¹ Achebe's essay deserves serious consideration, not only because racism and the denigration of Africans (and those of African descent) are real and continuing problems, but because he is a writer of skill and sensitivity himself, whose novels are of great value in presenting the people of that continent. However, neither of these facts mean that Achebe's criticism of Conrad is necessarily fair. In this essay, I propose to look in detail at two aspects of Heart of Darkness that Achebe denigrates. The first is the way that Conrad names people of color—what he actually calls Africans in his novella. The second is the question of silence. Are the Africans denied speech in Heart of Darkness, as Achebe claims? If so, is it because of racism or does their silence mean something else? Through a brief look at these two topics, I hope to be able to consider that question of what Conrad felt about Africans as “other”; and whether the views that he expresses are still worth consideration by readers of today.

Let us discuss first the question of “naming.” The Africans in Heart of Darkness are called many things in the course of the narrative. Among these are included racial epithets. Achebe, quite naturally, objects particularly to the use of the word “nigger,” which he says Conrad loves and uses “inordinately.”² The word is actually used nine times. It is not a word that I myself, as a person of color, enjoy hearing or reading, and I can understand that even one use of it might be considered ‘inordinate,’ but it is instructive to not simply count, but to look at the contexts in which the offensive word is used. It is first used in the story within in a story about the death of Fresleven, which comes at the very beginning of Marlow's actual narrative. The Fresleven story is very significant. It is a microcosm of the entire text. All of the themes of Kurtz's story are here, in abbreviated form, and Marlow is warned, in this story, of what to expect if he goes to Africa (although he does not understand and does not heed the warning). What happens in this story? Fresleven, the white man in Africa, attacks the chief of an African village in a quarrel about two black hens. Marlow, who is telling this story to the not very culturally sensitive audience of Englishmen by the side of the Thames, at first refers to the chief by his title, a word of respect. But once the village leader is beaten (or as Marlow puts it, “whacked”) he becomes “the old nigger.”³ His dignity is stripped from him both by the beating, and by the epithet. He is the only one who is referred to by this epithet in the Fresleven story. Although they are also blacks, the chief's son who defends his father is called a “man,” and the other village members called “people,” “men, women and children,” and “the population” (HD [Heart of Darkness] 7). So the first “nigger” that we meet in Heart of Darkness is a victim, and the insult is inseparable from his victimization. What about the others? Is this an exceptional case, or is there a pattern to be found, in the use of this word?

I think that there is a pattern. With a few exceptions, which will be discussed in a moment, the “niggers” in Heart of Darkness are all people that we meet while they are suffering from abuse. The most striking case, of course, is the man who is beaten because the grass shed has burned down (HD 20). After the beating, this man is called a “nigger” every time he is mentioned over the next few pages, his moaning making a continuous, unpleasant background noise, so that we are not allowed to forget what has been done to him. Conrad clearly means for us to consider him a victim of injustice. “They said he had caused the fire in some way,” he has Marlow tell us, and by this point in the text what “they” (the whites) say is open to a lot of doubt. Then there are all the “niggers” who bring goods to the trading post. “Strings” of them arrive bringing ivory, and later some come bringing trash instead of the much needed rivets (15, 27). Their journeys have obviously been arduous, since they are described as having “splay feet” and being “footsore” and “sulky,” but what are they getting in return? In one case, nothing, and in the other “manufactured goods, rubbishy cottons, beads and brass wire” (HD 15), or in other words, nothing again. In short, they are victims of exploitation, being forced to trade what is of value for what is of no value at all, in a very graphic example of the systems that are put into place for the benefit of the conquerors, in colonialism. This exploitation, like the undeserved beatings, is acceptable if you inflict it on “niggers” (or “bitches” or “kikes” or “Polacks”—choose your own epithet). It is not acceptable if you inflict it on other human beings like yourself. The abusive language thus is an integral part of the abusive situation. Should Conrad be faulted for using this language to reflect this important point? Ideally, one doesn't abuse others either with words or deeds. But it is all too easy to concentrate on using “correct” language, while ignoring the fact that the underlying situation has not changed—to congratulate ourselves for being “liberal” because we would never use certain words while failing to do anything to correct the injustice that they represent. In Nadine Gordimer's July's People (to give one example of this), the heroine, Maureen Smales is shocked by her servant July's use of the word “boy” to refer to himself. She would never use this word. But she certainly treats July like a “boy,” while rationalizing this treatment.⁴

Gordimer has placed Maureen into a situation where the usual racial roles are reversed—where she, a white woman, has to live like a “nigger.” Clearly, this is something she never imagined was possible. In spite of her professed liberalism, in her mind African blacks do not really belong to the same species as herself. Conrad's complacent audience—male, upper-class British readers of Blackwood's Magazine at the turn of the last century—clearly did not find it conceivable that they could ever be in the position of “niggers,” either.⁵ Conrad who, it is worth repeating, was not British himself (a fact that Achebe seems to have forgotten), reminded these readers, at the beginning of Marlow's narrative proper that the British had been in the position of the Africans at one time, referring to history that educated men of that period all knew, the history of the Roman colonization of Britain.⁶ This history, put at the beginning of Heart of Darkness, informs the whole text in many important ways, and certainly is important to remember when considering the next uses of the word ‘nigger’ in Conrad's book. The first of these is the imagined reversal of the Congo situation, when the “mysterious niggers” with their unfamiliar weapons come to the area “between Deal and Gravesend” (HD 16). Deal is, significantly, the place where Julius Caesar is supposed to have landed for the first Roman attack on Britain; Gravesend, as we are told on the first page of the novel, is visible from the narrator's vantage point on the Thames as Marlow tells his tale. Thus the invasion of the imagined “niggers” takes the route of the actual Romans, and the British “yokels” react just as the Congolese have reacted to the arrival of the whites, that is, by flight.⁷ Marlow (and Conrad) are revolutionary here in suggesting that this evacuation is the normal, human reaction to what happened in the Congo—something the English would do if they were put in the same place. During this period, after all, blacks were routinely stereotyped as “lazy,” “inferior,” and “stupid” for avoiding forced labor, or for not doing it well. The use of the word “nigger” in this place reflects on the Europeans in Africa (who are the ones who are actually behaving in the manner he describes), and the use of the word “mysterious” also reflects on them.

The final use of the word “nigger” in Heart of Darkness occurs towards the end of the book. It comes at the point where Marlow, finally with Kurtz, describes what happened to him in the presence of this terrible and terrifying “secret sharer.” He says: “I had, even, like the niggers, to invoke him—himself—his [i.e., Kurtz's] exalted and incredible degradation” (HD 61). The use of the words “invoke” and “exalted” strongly imply the worship of a deity, especially after the remarks that the Russian, the last narrator to describe Kurtz before Marlow actually meets him, has made about the Africans “adoring” Kurtz like a god (HD 51; see also 53). The image of the “nigger” or other native who, upon seeing the clear and obvious superiority of the white explorer/adventurer, falls down and worships him has been one of the archetypes of Western history/literature ever since Montezuma fatally mistook Cortes for Quetzalcoatl. This image clearly appeals to something in the European psyche. It is a racist image, however, and whether it has actually ever taken place since that first tragic incident is open to a lot of doubt. There is certainly no record of any white-man-worship taking place in the Congo while Conrad was there—and yet the fact of Kurtz' godhead in the eyes of the Africans is central to this book. The obscene adoration of Kurtz is what Marlow finds at the very Heart of Darkness, at the climax of the action. Conrad felt this theme was so important that when he had to describe his novella in brief, he described Heart of Darkness, tellingly, as “a … story of a journalist who becomes manager of a station in the interior and makes himself worshipped by a tribe of savages.”⁸

Put like that, the theme of the book certainly sounds like a simple retelling of the old myth, which Achebe (or anyone else with African blood in their veins) might rightly resent. But when we read about how Kurtz “makes himself worshipped” (note the careful choice of words), the episode becomes much more complex. First, there is the question of how the worship is presented to the reader. Presentation is always very important in understanding what Conrad meant. It is important to note that Conrad first hears about the worship from the Russian, as stated above. Who is this “Russian” exactly and what is his significance? He has no name—he is just described by his nationality—a nationality that was hateful to the Polish Conrad.⁹ The fact that he is a Russian should make him suspect at once, but over and above that, he is described as a figure like a “harlequin”—in short, a clown. Clearly he is not a reliable narrator (in this text filled with unreliable narrators, including, by his own admission, Marlow himself), and the reader realizes the extent to which his point of view cannot be trusted during the scene where he justifies, to Marlow, Kurtz's habit of decorating his garden with impaled human heads. Marlow is so appalled by this justification that he refuses to listen to the Russian's speech about what a great man Kurtz is—the speech that begins with the description of how the African chiefs “crawl” in the white man's presence (HD 53). But Marlow has not yet met Kurtz at this point. When he does, his own wish to “invoke” Kurtz makes the Englishman realize that he is not so different from the blacks, (and the Russian)—that it might be possible for him to worship this man, and trying to distance himself, Marlow uses the racial slur in the phrase quoted above.

Conrad has already made it clear that this is not a simple issue of inferior blacks worshipping superior whites, though, first by the fact of the Russian's adoration, and now by the fact of Marlow's unwilling, but very powerful, attraction to Kurtz. Marlow, after all, is neither a “nigger” or a “harlequin” but a figure that we have come, at least to a certain extent, to like and trust, and perhaps (if we were in the original circle of intended British readers) even to identify with. There is more going on in the text here than is obvious from a first, careless reading—including a great deal of symbolism that we moderns can easily miss, since we lack the classical education and the grounding in Judeo-Christian tradition that Conrad and his first readers had. Zdzisław Najder was the first to point out, in his preface to The Congo Diary, that Conrad's descriptions of the worship of Kurtz, and of his end, very closely follow the information in classical biographies about the cult and the death of Alexander the Great.¹⁰ Alexander demanded that his troops and subjects worship him as a god while he was still a living man. He first demanded this of the conquered Persians, but then ordered his fellow Greeks to do so, too, although this was contrary to Greek custom. Like Kurtz, he caused the deaths of those who opposed him.¹¹ Also like Kurtz, the conqueror of the world died of a fever and Conrad clearly was familiar with Arrian's account of Alexander's last hours. In the Anabasis, the ancient author retells the rumor that Alexander crawled out of his deathbed and headed, on all fours, towards the Euphrates River, hoping that if he drowned himself his followers would believe that his disappearance was an apotheosis. Kurtz's flight on his hands and knees in the final pages of Heart of Darkness closely parallels this. It is interesting, also, that Marlow, following him, sees the man who aspired to divinity as he crawls (the Englishman, you will remember, only heard about the chiefs' abasement). Even more interesting, however, is the fact that the comparison between the two-bit manager of a nineteenth-century ivory station in Africa and the “great” conqueror does not raise Kurtz in our estimation, but rather, makes us question Alexander. This comparison also brings the book around in a circle to the beginning sections in which the Roman colonization of Britain was compared to the European presence in the Congo.

“Hubris” is the word that comes to mind when one reads about how Alexander began to claim that Zeus, not Philip, begot him, and hubris is certainly an important part of the theme of Heart of Darkness. But Conrad tends to use Christian, rather than Greek imagery, to deal with the subject of Kurtz and his pride. In the Fresleven story, when he first raises the issue of a white man being “a supernatural being” in African eyes, the phrase used is deliberately ambiguous—we are obviously meant to remember that supernatural beings are not necessarily gods. The association of the whites in Africa with devils becomes clearer and clearer as we delve more deeply into the text. The Belgian Congo, on one level, is certainly meant to be hell, as Lillian Feder and Robert O. Evans have pointed out,¹² and Kurtz, like Dante's Lucifer, is found at the very center of the darkness. Kurtz resembles the Lucifer of the Bible, who fell through pride (though even after his fall he remained fatally attractive), and this pride, the pride that demands worship and feeds off the abuse of others, leads not just to the fall, but eventually to the Apocalypse. Conrad's message to the European colonizers in this book is thus very, very strong.

“Nigger,” then, is a word used in Heart of Darkness at certain specific points of the narrative for certain specific reasons.¹³ It is not the most frequently used word in the text that describes the African blacks.¹⁴ Conrad uses other words at other times, ranging from “enemy,” “savage,” and “cannibal” to such neutral terms as the ethnic description “Zanzibari” and the politically correct racial designation of the time, “Negro.” It is interesting (and I think profitable) to study the use that he makes of each word. Not all of them are used to describe the Africans exclusively. “Savage,” for instance, is first applied in the novella to Europeans, not Africans—specifically to the English, as part of the Roman theme (HD 4). “Cannibals” is a term applied only to some of the Africans, not all, and it is notable that none of the so called “cannibals” in the book are ever seen to actually eat human flesh—the famous passage describing them actually shows how they restrain themselves from eating, in spite of their hunger, after their hippo meat has been tossed aboard (HD 37). Conrad's use of the words “enemy” and “rebel” to describe the Africans seem to me to be particularly important in this text, though. Marlow is doubtful about this designation from the first time that it is used: “There was a camp of natives—he called them enemies!” (HD 11; my italics). It soon becomes clear that he, like Coetzee's magistrate,¹⁵ sees a dichotomy between this label and what he actually observes about the Africans' behavior (HD 13, 54). By the time he reaches Kurtz's home and sees the impaled heads, the divergence between the language of colonialism and the facts of what is happening is absolutely clear.¹⁶ At this point, the word “enemy” is full of bitter irony. Marlow's statement that the heads don't shock him (HD 52) is an important one. We should not be shocked at what can happen once the labeling process has been allowed to take place, the author is saying. Label innocent people “enemies” and a row of severed heads is the inevitable result.

This passage gains added resonance when one realizes that Conrad was himself from a people who had been labeled “enemies” and “rebels” after the final partition of his country Poland, in 1795. The Poles, rising up several times during the nineteenth century, to protest this act (which literally wiped their country off the map) were treated in an appalling manner that many of us, with our Western Europe-centered educations, are unaware of. But we need to know at least some of this to properly understand Conrad. He was a child of this oppression—his earliest memory was of “being in a prison yard on the road to Russian exile” with his parents.¹⁷ He had to watch then as his father, the “rebel,” was given salt herring to eat and nothing to drink by the Cossacks who were his guards; and later he had to watch the slow death of both parents, from prison-induced tuberculosis (Myers 14-15, 25).¹⁸ As the child of “political convicts,” he had to leave Poland when he came of age or face being conscripted into the Russian army for twenty-five years (Myers 29), and later in life he would stress to his British friends that he sprang from “an oppressed race where oppression was not a matter of history but a crushing fact in the daily life of all individuals made still more bitter by declared hatred and contempt” (Myers 29). He was never able to forget these terrible formative experiences and what he saw in Africa seems to have affected him to the extent it did (the physical illness, the psychological trauma; Myers 108) because it was reminiscent of what had happened to him and his country. In this regard, he was like his friend Roger Casement, who saw analogies between the Belgians in the Congo and the British in his native Ireland,¹⁹ though he did not develop Casement's political activism. Instead, he wrote literature. But in this literature, it is impossible for him to see oppression as something that is always linked with race. In another attempt to describe the Congo, he changed the scene to Greenland, in the Arctic regions,²⁰ and even in Heart of Darkness, where he describes what happened in the Congo with such literal exactness that historians have been able to trace many of the incidents, he carefully sets his tale in the Roman British context, making the careful reader aware that although race is the excuse for the Congo, oppression is something that can happen to anyone.

If Conrad's Polish background influences how he reacts to the naming of the “other,” it certainly also affects how he presents language in his novella. He was born in 1857 and so was seven years old when the “Russification” measures of 1864 restricted the use of the Polish language, forcing Poles to use Russian.²¹ Therefore, as a child, Conrad was legally forbidden to speak his own language in his own native land.²² Later in life, of course, he was an exile and spoke first French and then English, living out his life among those who could not understand his native tongue. This is an immensely difficult thing to have to do. Strangers in strange countries generally seek out others who speak their language and form communities where they are able to speak to each other. Conrad did not have this option. He wrote English so beautifully that one imagines that he spoke it beautifully as well. It is something of a shock to read the evidence of his close friends that “his pronunciation was so faulty that he was difficult to understand” and that he was often “at a loss for phrases” when he spoke (Myers 129). His Polish accent actually got stronger as he grew older, and when he was ill (a frequent occurrence), he would forget, in his delirium, all other languages besides his first one (Myers 129). He fell ill in this way on his honeymoon. His English wife did not understand his Polish “ranting” and wrote later that she was frightened by it. Conrad used this true-life experience as grist for his fictional mill in “Amy Foster,” which has been called his “most personal” short story (Myers 141). This story portrays an Eastern European named Yanko Goorall who is shipwrecked in England. Cut off from the English because he does not speak their language, he arouses “suspicion and dislike” in them (Myers 141). Like Conrad, Yanko marries an English wife, but although she is kind to him at first, she reacts as Jessie Conrad did when he reverts to the use of his own language during a fever. That is, with “terror … unreasonable terror, of that man she couldn't understand.”²³ Unlike Jessie, Amy (the wife) abandons her husband during his fever and lets him die alone, of thirst.

Conrad clearly understood, in a visceral way, how language can make you “other,” and he mistrusted it under the best of circumstances. To his friend Cunninghame Graham, he wrote (at around the same time he was composing Heart of Darkness) that “half the words we use have no meaning whatever, and of the other half each man understands each word after the fashion of his own folly and conceit.”²⁴ The text of the novella certainly expresses this mistrust of spoken communication between human beings. It is clear that no one in the book understands anyone else. Marlow's audience by the side of the Thames has no idea what he is really talking about (this is made clear by their remarks throughout the text), and his story is one that begins with misunderstanding, as he is warned about Africa when in Belgium and doesn't understand the warning, and ends with his deliberate lie to the Intended (who clearly would not be able to understand what the truth is). The most duplicitous characters in the novella are the most articulate, especially, it must be noted, Kurtz himself. In this context, can the muteness of the African characters really be seen as a sign of their inferiority, as Achebe suggests?

Conrad may have “refused to confer language on them,” but this is not a suggestion that they are in a pre-language state of development. That they can talk, even though the Europeans can't (or don't wish to) understand their languages, is made clear through the character of Kurtz' mistress, who is vocal indeed. Marlow and the Russian don't understand what she is saying, so the reader is, frustratingly, never given a translation, but surely that penultimate scene in which she harangues the crowd (a crowd that repeats what she is saying) is one of the most striking in the book (HD 62). This woman is an ambiguous character, of course, associated with Kurtz in his corruption, and she is, we suspect, using language as the Europeans who speak all do, in an attempt to harm. The Russian describes how she attempted to convince Kurtz to hurt him, and she is clearly inciting the crowd in some way during the time while Kurtz meets his end. Less ambiguous African characters suffer in silence in this book. Language, which confuses when it does not deceive, is absent as we are shown how they suffer and how they die, like the marionettes in the puppet shows that Conrad told Cunninghame Graham that he so preferred to actors in plays. Actors, of course, must speak dialogue, which Conrad so mistrusted. In the case of marionettes, however, he could ignore “the text mouthed somewhere out of sight by invisible men” and watch the puppets in “their rigid violence when they fall upon each other to embrace or to fight.”²⁵ The Africans in Heart of Darkness can be trusted precisely because we never really hear them. Truth, in Conrad's works, is never what we are told by the characters. It is always what we actually see. The author, of course, expressed this famously in the preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus”—an important text for anyone who is interested in Conrad's views on black people.

It is surprising that The “Narcissus” is never mentioned in Achebe's attack. James Wait, the title character, is certainly a contrast to the blacks in Heart of Darkness in many ways, especially when it comes to speaking. A West Indian from St. Kitts (a society where blacks and whites had had contact for centuries before the period of colonization of the Congo), Wait is impressively articulate. He has a beautiful speaking voice (like Kurtz), and in contrast to the whites on the “Narcissus,” who speak with accents, use dialect, or don't speak at all, he uses perfect English at all times. He is an ambiguous figure, though. He uses speech to confuse and manipulate the rest of the crew, including the unnamed narrator (who clearly does not understand the human being that the prejudiced sailors always refer to as the “nigger,” in spite of Wait's protests against this term or the conflicting emotions that Jimmy arouses in him.²⁶ Is Wait a liar, a malingerer? How much is he in league with the evil (and very vocal) Donkin? It's difficult to tell. The reader feels pity for Wait, and anger too, and may also feel some empathy. Conrad was clearly more than empathetic. I believe, in fact, that in the same way that Gustave Flaubert “was” Emma Bovary, Joseph Conrad was James Wait. Alone for most of his adult life, among people who could never see him as anything but a “foreigner,” people who believed this minor difference to be of the greatest importance, Conrad shared Wait's key traits of hypochondria and of dramatic complaints that were meant to be attention-getting. This fact is very well documented. To give just one example of this behavior on his part, he cut short his courtship with Jessie, on the grounds that he was “a dying man,” and during their honeymoon in Brittany, had the first of those crises of health that plagued their marriage, crises that have been described as “both organic and imagined” (Myers 66, 102). Constantly complaining that he was on the brink of death, Conrad lived to age sixty-six, trying the patience of those around him, those who loved him and had affection for him, in the same way that Wait does. The portrait of Wait, describing the reactions of others, certainly showed that the writer was self-aware. He was not tall and strong in appearance, like Wait, and he did not have Wait's facility with the spoken word, but surely he was aware that his gift for writing was similar in its effects. But whether one agrees that Conrad was himself “the nigger” or not, it cannot be denied that James Wait is a complex and interesting character. He is not a racial stereotype. This fact makes it unlikely that the Africans in Heart of Darkness are meant as stereotypes, either, and the reasons why they are silent, and why they are shadowy figures, must certainly be sought elsewhere.

At the time when Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness, the peoples of the Congo could not speak for themselves, about their terrible situation, and reach the larger world. Although there had been many black writers, some of them writers of genius, by the end of the nineteenth century, they were largely part of the Diaspora. But writers have now emerged in Africa itself who write in European languages and thus can express their experiences to the world outside of their particular African nation. In spite of some legitimate concern about what is then lost in “translation,” first by the act of writing itself, in a traditionally oral culture, and next, by the fact of using a conqueror's language,²⁷ there is a lot that is gained. I agree with Achebe about the importance of Africans writing about Africa—he has, himself, had brilliant achievements in this area. But does that mean that a writer like Conrad now has nothing valuable to say to us? He does not say things as an African would, or even as a liberal European would in 1999. Should we therefore label him a “racist” and throw him into history's dustbin with the other dead, white males? In my opinion, we will lose a great deal if we do. Heart of Darkness is a masterful work that does not dehumanize the native peoples of the Congo, but shows the ways in which they were dehumanized during the terrible period of King Leopold's reign there and passes judgment upon the evil (the “darkness”) of the human heart. The subtlety and sureness with which Conrad does this and the continuing relevance of the subject (what is Kosovo but another Congo?) make Heart of Darkness worth our continued consideration.

Notes

1. Chinua Achebe, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness,” in Andrew M. Roberts, ed., Joseph Conrad. New York: Longman, 1998, 113, 117, 120.

2. Achebe, 111, 112, 115, 118.

3. Heart of Darkness. New York: Dover Thrift Edition, 1990, 6 (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as HD).

4. New York: Penguin, 1981, 69-70.

5. Benita Parry, Conrad and Imperialism. London: MacMillan, 1983,1. Parry is quoted in Robert Hampson's introduction to the Penguin edition of Heart of Darkness (1995), xxxii. She points out that the Blackwood's audience was “still secure in the conviction that they were members of an invincible imperial power and a superior race.”

6. These men would certainly have read Julius Caesar's On the Gallic Wars and Tacitus' Life of Cornelius Agricola. Both remained standard texts in school well into the twentieth century. Conrad uses the section in The Gallic Wars in which Caesar describes his invasion of Britain, as well as Tacitus' entire text throughout Heart of Darkness, which may be read on one level as a Roman-style “biography” of Kurtz. Tacitus is ambivalent about Roman imperialism, in spite of his wish to praise his father-in-law, and this shows in his text, but Conrad goes much further in his indictment of imperialism (ancient and modern); Kurtz is a nightmare distortion of Agricola, his initial superiority making his ruin that much worse. Karen Gillum has been helpful to me in pointing out this Roman connection to Conrad's text.

7. This flight, by the way, is the reason that Marlow (and Conrad) do not describe African culture and art in the Congo in the way that Achebe thinks they should. Neither of them has seen any culture or art. There are only the deserted villages, and the uprooted native people in forced labor camps.

8. Letter to Henry-Durand Davry, quoted in Heart of Darkness, Robert Kimbrough, ed., New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1988, 209.

9. As Czesław Milosz points out, the very name “Conrad,” which Joseph Korzeniowski chose out of all his names to be his last name in English, “symbolizes the anti-Russian fighter and resister” to all Poles. See Czesław Milosz, “Joseph Conrad in Polish Eyes,” in The Art of Joseph Conrad: A Critical Symposium, R.W. Stallman, ed. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1960, 36. Conrad's hatred of Russians was also clearly expressed in Under Western Eyes (1911), and he wrote to Cunninghame Graham that he would not attend radical meetings because there would be Russians there.

10. Zdzisław Najder, “Introduction to The Congo Diary and The UpRiver Book,” in Heart of Darkness, Robert Kimbrough ed., New York: Norton, 1988, 158.

11. Arrian, Anabasis Alexandri, IV. 9-12, describes how Alexander wished to be deified. VII.25-27 describes his death, with the story about his reputed attempt to drown himself in section 27. Further information about Alexander's desire to seen as a God, and Greek opposition to this, can be found in Dinarchus, in Demosthenes 94 and Hyperides 5. col. 31. I am indebted for these references to Karen Gillum.

12. See Lillian Feder, “Marlow's Descent into Hell,” and Robert O. Evans, “Conrad's Underworld,” in The Art of Joseph Conrad: A Critical Symposium, 162-170, 171-178.

13. There is an additional “nigger” passage, where someone is referred to as a “fool nigger” for shooting into the bush in fear (41). Note that this “nigger” is imitating what the whites habitually do, according to Marlow.

14. Interestingly, in his “Congo Diary,” Conrad never once refers to Africans as “niggers.” He uses specific names of ethnic groups, such as “Backongo.” Heart of Darkness, ed. Robert Kimbrough. New York: Norton, 1988, 159-166.

15. J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians. New York: Penguin, 1980.

16. The African writer Ngugi Wa Thiong'o (James Ngugi) has called these skulls stuck on poles “the most powerful indictment of colonialism,” saying that “no African writer … has created so ironic, apt and powerful an image.” As quoted in C.P. Sarvan, “Racism and the Heart of Darkness.” In Heart of Darkness. New York: Norton, 1988, 280-285.

17. Jeffrey Myers, Joseph Conrad. New York: Scribner's, 1991, 14-15. Hereafter cited in the text as Myers.

18. It is important to note that Conrad's parents were not the only relatives of his who died in the anti-Russian struggle. He lost his grandfather and two uncles as a result of the 1863 uprising—all except one of his male relatives. Though his parents died in prison, the grandfather and one uncle died violently, as did many Poles during this bloody time. The family property was confiscated. See Myers, 19-20.

19. Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998, 267-268.

20. In The Inheritors. See Myers, 96, for a description.

21. “Poland,” Encarta 97 Encyclopedia (Microsoft).

22. Conrad's father, Apollo Korzeniowski, ignored this decree and taught Conrad in Polish. Later the writer would claim that he knew no Russian (Myers.255), though it seems that he actually did.

23. “Amy Foster,” New York: Penguin, 1986, 255.

24. Joseph Conrad, Letters to Cunninghame Graham, ed. C.T. Watts, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969, 65.

25. Letters to Cunninghame Graham 50.

26. Wait always refers to himself as “a colored gentleman.” See, for example, The Nigger of the Narcissus, Typhoon and Other Stories. Penquin, 1986, 125.

27. See Robert Fraser, West African Poetry: A Critical History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, for a thoughtful discussion of orality vs. the written word in contemporary African literature. Especially useful are Chapter One and Chapter Twelve.