Hello. I've been writing for a long time, but this is my first post on Hub Pages. I thought I'd reform and post one of my recent essays, so here it is. All references to Heart of Darkness use the pagination presented by the etext of the University of Virginia, while all those pertaining to Things Fall Apart are drawn from the 1994 printed edition. I hate to introduce myself to the community with such a touchy topic as racism, but here goes...

Although Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" does question the efficacy and morality of European imperialism in Africa, it still showcases many racist stances held by Europeans at the time. Particularly evident is the association of his darker skinned cousins with biblical symbols of the evil night.

Throughout "Heart of Darkness," Conrad uses images of darkness to represent sin and light to represent Christianity and enlightened civilization. This motif is introduced with a short history of England, which, Marlow reminds us, "has been one of the dark places of the earth" (HoD 67). After Roman conquest, "light has come out of [the Thames] ever since." He warns, however, that this light is like "a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds" and that "we live in the flicker . . . darkness was here yesterday" (HoD 68).

Indeed, Conrad thinks that Africa is a place of darkness, devoid of civilization and history, and that Africans, in a monstrous trance of tribal rage, are the incarnation of this nation of feral perdition. Marlow calls it "a prehistoric earth" (HoD 105), peopled with "the prehistoric man" (HoD 105), who only need to exchange "short, grunting phrases" (HoD 111) in order to settle a dispute. To him, Africa is "so hopeless and so dark, so impenetrable to human thought, so pitiless to human weakness" (HoD 130). It is a place of "dusty niggers" (HoD 83), dressed "severely" with "fierce nostrils . . . bloodshoot" eyes, and "sharp teeth" (HoD 111). They are characterized by "a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling back and incomprehensible frenzy" (HoD 105). They blend together into one fearsome creature, crawling out of man's benighted history to strike, tooth and nail against hope and justice and civilization. Their warcries "[pierce] the still air like a sharp arrow" announcing "streams of human beings - of naked human beings - with spears in their hands, with bows, with shields, with wild glances and savage movements" (HoD 135), in response to which Marlow is "secretly appalled, as sane men would be before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse" (HoD 105). He musingly recalls his childhood notion of Africa from his maps: "a blank space of delightful mystery . . . for a boy to dream gloriously over" (HoD 71), as though it is devoid even of its own topography and subject to his infantile imagination.

He sees their darkness everywhere he turns; whether In "the edge of a colossal jungle, so dark-green as to be almost black" (HoD 77), or as "a dark figure obscured the lighted doorway" (HoD 98), it is an "impenetrable" (HoD 120), "menacing" (HoD 150), "beastly, beastly dark" (HoD 148) that sucks him into "the gloomy circle of some Inferno" (HoD 81).

In his book "Things Fall Apart," Achebe presents a different idea of Africans. They have families, religion, honors and titles, music, economy, laws and a court system, complicated farming techniques, a tradition of wise sayings and the art of conversation; on top of this, they successfully practice an un-autocratic style of communal living that Western societies long for. They sound an awful lot like people to me.

Achebe agrees that sometimes the people of Umuofia are drawn together into a frenzy by the "intoxicating rhythm" (TFA 33) of the drums, but afterwards, "they [become] ordinary human beings again, talking and laughing among themselves and with others who [stand] near them" (TFA 34) much unlike monsters. This is not something that is foreign to Europe and Western society: Look at any sporting event and you will find an adrenaline-saturated community. It is understandable how Superbowl Sunday might appear like a war-rally to someone unaccustomed to that tradition, but Conrad shows no such sympathy.

Achebe presents some of the same images of shadow that Conrad uses to demonize his people. To him, however, they do not represent depravity and sin, but a general and natural fear of literal darkness and solitude. By showing Africans as also fearful of darkness, he deflects Conrad's accusation that they are darkness. At one point, Ekwefi's "eyes [are] useless," and she can't "see beyond her nose" (TFA 73), such blindness makes it "impossible to eat" because "one could not have known where one's mouth was" (TFA 67). Also, the night is feared because it hosts "evil spirits" and "dangerous animals become even more sinister and uncanny in the dark" (TFA 7). Most importantly, in the dark one can not recognize his friends.

On Ekwefi's stealthy journey in pursuit of Chielo, she "screw[s] her eyes up in an effort to see her daughter and the priestess, but whenever she [sees] their shape it immediately dissolve[s] like a melting lump of darkness" (TFA 74). As the darkness fills with the moon's dim light, her imagination is incited to paranoia. She sees the world

"peopled with vague, fantastic figures that dissolved under her steady gaze and then formed again into new shapes. At one stage Ekwefi was so afraid that she nearly called out to Chielo for companionship and human sympathy. What she had seen was the shape of a man climbing a palm tree, his head pointing to the earth and his legs skywards. But at that very moment Chielo's voice rose again in her possessed chanting, and Ekwefi recoiled, because there was no humanity there. It was not the same Chielo who sat with her in the market and sometimes bought bean-cakes for Ezinma, whom she called her daughter." (TFA 75)

What she sees is an illusion - a trick of the light. It is clear that there is no distorted man and, most importantly, it is clear that Chielo really is the same friend from the marketplace. Here, Achebe is not meaning to say that Ekwefi is gullible or easily scared; he means to say that in dark isolation, fear overcomes one's understanding of truth and humanity.

This same fear incites people to violence. When Ekwefi steps on a twig, snapping it, Chielo turns and screams "there is somebody walking behind me! . . . Whether you are spirit or man, may Agbala shave your head with a blunt razor! May he twist your neck until you see your heels!" (TFA 74).

It is fitting that Achebe's characters only see dark figures when they are alone at night, because Marlow is alone throughout the book, and seems to often be narrating during the night. He is not met with faces, but with carnal masks of his own superstitious design. Indeed, the people Marlow sees are not people, they are "atrocious phantom[s]" (HoD 135), "dark human shapes" (HoD 136), "swift shadows" (HoD 137), or, often, "figures" (HoD 93), which "mostly black and naked, move about like ants" (HoD 79). They sound like animals, monsters, ghosts and demons. This passage highlights his characterization of them:

"Near the same tree two more bundles of acute angles sat with their legs drawn up. One, with his chin propped on his knees, stared at nothing, in an intolerable and appalling manner: his brother phantom rested its forehead, as if overcome with a great weariness; and all about others were scattered in every pose of contorted collapse, as in some picture of a massacre or a pestilence. While I stood horror- struck, one of these creatures rose to his hands and knees, and went off on all-fours towards the river to drink. He lapped out of his hand, then sat up in the sunlight, crossing his shins in front of him, and after a time let his woolly head fall on his breastbone" (HoD 82-83).

If these terrible dragons, conjured by seclusion and eclipse, haunt Conrad's nightmares, Achebe seems to suggest that all Marlow needs is a night light and a teddy bear.

I do not mean to say that everyone can just get along at the snap of a finger. Obviously there is opposition between Europe and Africa: they hold very different cultures, values and experiences. What Achebe suggests is recognizing Africans (and this goes for all foreigners, including those of other nations, religions, genders, sexual inclinations, histories, economic backgrounds, political biases, and over all everyone alien to the self) as fundamentally human (with the multitude of complexities involved in that), and not as some "us and them" abstraction.

Perhaps Achebe's greatest example of this binary logic is Mr. Smith, the second missionary to Umuofia, who

"condemned openly Mr Brown's policy of compromise and accommodation. He saw things as black and white. And black was evil. He saw the world as a battlefield in which the children of light were locked in mortal conflict with the sons of darkness. He spoke in his sermons about sheep and goats and about wheat and tares. He believed in slaying the prophets of Baal" (TFA 130).

Humorously, Mr. Smith speaks against Baal - a god whose influence has . . . ebbed somewhat in the past few thousand years, but against whom struggles are prominent in the Bible. It seems as though Mr. Smith's experience with sin, like his his experience with people is more theoretical and less experiential. This is Achebe's criticism of "black and white" thought: that it is based on stories read blind and alone - removed several degrees from reality.

Mr. Smith's gospel is based on a twisted kind of thought that believes Christianity is a community for saints as opposed to a hospital for sinners.

"Mr Smith was greatly distressed by the ignorance which many of his flock showed even in such things as the Trinity and the Sacraments. It only showed that they were seeds sown on a rocky soil. Mr Brown had thought of nothing but numbers. He should have known that the kingdom of God did not depend on large crowds. Our Lord Himself stressed the importance of fewness. Narrow is the way and few the number. To fill the Lord's holy temple with an idolatrous crowd clamouring for signs was a folly of everlasting consequence. Our lord used the whip only once in His life - to drive the crowd away from his church" (TFA 130).

Here, Mr. Smith misinterprets several passages and advertises his spiritual elitism. Where Brown fostered community in his church, Smith thinks that the proper 'fertilizer' for the seeds of faith is catechism and doctrinal education; that "few is the number" is an instruction, not a tragedy; and that Jesus drove the multitudes from the church because there were too many, not because they were exploiting the faithful for profit. Mr. Smith stands anathema to community even within the Christian body.

Achebe, on the other hand, contends that it is better to be together than to be right (or maybe that unity is what's right). He criticizes Christianity not as something that is wrong, but as something that divides communities with its individual conversions. The chiefs pray to the gods:

"We do not ask for wealth because he that has health and children will also have wealth. We do not pray to have more money but to have more kinsmen. We are better than animals because we have kinsmen. An animal rubs its aching flank against a tree, a man asks his kinsman to scratch him . . . A man who calls his kinsmen to a feast does not do so to save them from starving. They all have food in their own homes. When we gather together in the moonlit village ground it is not because of the moon. Every man can see it in his own compound. We come together because it is good for kinsmen to do so" (TFA 117-118).

To Achebe, kinship - not stone buildings - are what separate humanity from the creatures of the night. Friends illumine the shadows, as "Ezinma's voice from the darkness warm[s] her mother's heart" (TFA 74) and the lamps that shine in the village's huts are "like a soft eye of yellow half-light set in the solid massiveness of night" (TFA 67).

In defense of Conrad, he is writing about the depraved human condition more than anything. If one imagines that Conrad's Africans are not really Africans, but a symbol for a sinner's inner turmoil and animal temptation, then "Heart of Darkness" is a useful allegory for the individual's spiritual journey. However, to call "African" what he calls "African" is a grave slander painted with xenophobic fear. It is important to idealize Good and Evil, but to attach either idea to a group of people is Puritanically misguided.

Achebe's caricature of Conrad's scientific and monastic detachment is the Commissioner, who narrates:

"In the many years in which he had toiled to bring civilization to different parts of Africa he had learnt a number of things. One of them was that a District Commissioner must never attend to such undignified details as cutting down a dead man from a tree. Such attention would give the natives a poor opinion of him. In the book which he planned to write he would stress that point. As he walked back to the court he thought about that book. Every day brought him some new material. The story of this man who had killed a messenger and hanged himself would make interesting reading. One could almost write a whole chapter on him. Perhaps not a whole chapter but a reasonable paragraph, at any rate. There was so much else to include and one must be firm in cutting out details. He had already chosen the title of the book, after much thought: The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger" (TFA 146-7).

Okonkwo is a character with whom the reader is likely to be at odds throughout the book - he is brutish, rude, scornful, proud and profoundly sexist - but in reading his story, one comes to sympathize with him at least a little, and one knows for granted that he is a person. It is as though Achebe makes a character who is as thuggish as Europeans would expect him to be, and makes us understand him; meanwhile, he shows very clearly that Umuofia is full of compassionate, intelligent, respectful, witty, and industrious people, no two of whom are alike. It is a tragedy even for Okonkwo, the barbaric philistine, to have been trivialized by a Brobdingnagan who thinks himself too big to look where he is stepping; How much more is it a tragedy for all of Umuofia to be "pacified" and filed under the "Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger"?

Racism and nationalism are tools created to protect and unite people within families and tribes. But in our increasingly global community they have, like "Ogbu-agali-odu" (TFA 73), grown too fierce and out of our control, haunting our nightmares and distorting our vision. What were once isolated communities are now colliding with each other, and Achebe is welcoming a counter-individual era, calling for a wideness in our love and respect for humanity that is no longer centered on ourselves. We need to rewrite our stories so that our friends no longer look like our monsters.