An Ongoing Sorrow

     Ever since I can remember, I have always avoided the subject of racism. Talking about it often made me feel uncomfortable in ways that I find myself unable to clearly define or explain. However, I will make an effort to by presenting one silly example. Often, when I'm watching a movie, I tend to skip ahead when I can make an obvious prediction of the ending from the plot, one that will hurt my favorite character or simply hurt me when the characteristics of the actors change, characteristics that made me like them! Of course through that example, my point is not well taken when it comes to racism for its victims were no actors from a movie, it only explains how I shut myself from the outcome of a situation that seem unpleasant (which is awfully wrong and definitely something that I'm trying to change about myself).
     Racism unlike any movie is ongoing,which makes me strongly despise it abd because I cannot seem to find ways to get rid of it, it makes me feel useless. The sufferings and death of numerous Africans caused by racism makes the topic so sensitive that I become distant every time the subject comes around. It is not because I am carefree of that matter, on the contrary, the fact that it still exists and still costs others' lives is sorrowful and often implants a fear I cannot seem to shake off.
A couple days ago, my classmates and I finished reading Heart of Darkness, a novella by Joseph Conrad; and in all honesty, I did not fully grasp a great understanding of Conrad's work. Many times, in different passages I have wondered if his assertions of the Congo River or the native Africans were true. After all, Conrad was not African, meaning his views and understandings of the Africans and their rituals are biased for his background differs from theirs. Although the question was raised about Conrad's work being racist, it never truly came in mind as I read his novella, until I read Chinua Achebe's essay which addressed Heart of Darkness and Conrad’s use of diction and adjectival insistence.
     Throughout Conrad's entire novella, he constantly describes the natives as savages or kinships and as Conrad's protagonist watched them dying, he viewed them as “nothing earthly...but black shadows of disease and starvation.” It is understandable that Conrad's physical journey differed from his usual kind of environment, so of course his overly repeated impression of the natives came rather blunt and racist then truthful.
     Chinua Achebe's belief that European critics often misunderstand African Literature and culture, through Conrad's Heart of Darkness, his belief is proven right. For if Conrad knew and understood the African culture and rituals, he would not have written a novella in which vulgar prejudices insult “a section of mankind which suffered untold agonies” and even though after his death (Conrad's), that section of humankind still faces those prejudices in many different ways in numerous places around the world.