Heart of Darkness

The inside flap of my book says Joseph Conrad was one of the leading writers of the modernist movement. I can see how this little book is considered to be one of the greatest short novels- there is symbolism in here that my high school English teachers would love to just rip to tiny analytical pieces; unfortunately, that usually means this is not the kind of book I will enjoy. It always bothers me that the "best" movies and the "best" books are always the ones that make no sense at all. I feel like there needs to be a balance between basic understanding and critical reading, and the "best" books never have that balance.

But this is for Heart of Darkness, not how much I despise Modernists and Postmodernists.

If I had not read King Leopold's Ghost before reading Heart of Darkness, I do not think I would have understood Heart of Darkness at all. I did not understand Marlow's character at all; I could not decide if I wanted to feel sorry for him or hit him on the head for calling all the Africans and niggers and portraying them all as cannibals. I also could not understand his contradictory hate and reverence for Mr. Kurtz; sometimes he speaks of him as an excellent, learned man who brought in more ivory than all the other posts combined, other times Marlow speaks of Kurtz as an abominable character who has done no good to the Company.

There were several lines in the book that stood out to me, both as larger, profound thoughts, and examples of the characters' ignorance:

"Drums... with as profound a meaning as the sound of bells in a Christian country." This shows that Marlow at least understands there might be more than the "savage" appearance of the Africans.

"Fine fellows, cannibals." When talking about the Africans on his steamship, Marlow just shows his ignorance in this line, contrasting his hope of understanding in the previous quote.

"All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz." Even though this quote is explaing Kurtz's mixed heritage, it jumped out at me as an explanation that all Europe created the Congo and all sorts of European men took part in the "rape of the Congo," as Hothschild described it.

Finally, Marlow's description of his deceased helmsman as "a grain of sand in a black Sahara" was where I finally just decided to stay frusterated with Marlow's character. At first, I could see some hope in his character, his chances at understanding the Africans beyond the cannibalism, especially when he interpreted the cries from the forest before the attack as cries of sorrow rather than of anger.

At the end of this Hear of Darkness, I am just frusterated. Hothschild made this book sound like it was the single most shocking thing the Western world saw from the Congo, but I am just frusterated at how contradictory the characters are, and unable to understand how the Western world would want to sympathize with people who are portrayed as cannibals and polygamists and wild warriors.

King Leopold's Ghost- the finale

King Leopold's Ghost is one of the most unique books I have ever read. It is a history book, overwhelming filled with facts, people, stories, and pictures, but it reads as smoothly as a novel. It is one of the few books that I both enjoyed reading, simply because it presented historical fact in a story-like manner, but also had difficulty reading because of the vast amount of detail and the content.

The content of this book is what sets it apart from other books. I finished reading it and was left with thoughts of the details, the facts, people, stories, and pictures; not with thoughts busy analyzing how literary techniques worked in the writing, which is what I am used to thinking about during a book and after. I am left with not only the knowledge of the content, but the huge impression it has made on me. The one idea I cannot shake is how contemporary these events are.

I found a timeline of the events described in King Leopold's Ghost, which helps immensely because I started losing track of people and dates about halfway through this book. It was also interesting to me to read through the timeline and think about what was happening in American history at the same time. I have discovered in my Life and Culture in France class that I have a difficult time imagining the historical importance of something that happened before the 1600's, simply because I have learned mainly American history in my education, and we don't really have more than three or four hundred years of American history.

King Leopold's Ghost makes it easier for me to overcome the problem of struggling to comprehend the existence of the events of the Congo, because it narrates so many international events and issues that influenced and formed the Congo, and not just the isolated events in the Congo itself.

I found a travel guide website with a photos from Congo... tourist-geared, obviously, but it unconsciously shows what the Congo was...

... And what it became.

On a side-note, I recieved my copy of Heart of Darkness today, and discovered it isn't just the novel, it also includes Joseph Conrad's diary from part of his time in Africa and his "Up-River Book"-notes, illustrations, and observations on navigation of the Congo river. I love Amazon and its $1.87+shipping surprises. Does anyone else's book include these?

King Leopold's Ghost, part 1

I read most of the first 100 pages of this book, just like Things Fall Apart, leaning against a
counter and hiding behind an espresso machine at work. So far, King Leopold's Ghost has held my attention better than Things Fall Apart. I didn't like how Things Fall Apart would jump around to flashbacks or memories or the time of the story, so I was immediately grateful that Hothschild starts this book with a prologue, lots of character development, and a chronological storyline.

One of the first ideas that grabbed my attention was how the Africans thought the white men were ghosts, because they believed their skin turned to the color of chalk when they died. I then thought of the title of the book, and I originally thought it was titled to mean King Leopold's ghost as in what he left behind when he died (the "colonization" and destruction of the Congo), but I thought it was interesting that it could also mean what King Leopold would have been to the Africans if they had seen him, just another "ghost."

My first post for this class was about the early migration out of Africa, and I found a lot of information about the theory that the human race originated in Africa. Thousands of years ago, the first humans ventured out of Africa to Asia and Europe, to the Americas, and I started to realize that everything sort of came full circle and the rest of the world eventually came back to their homeland to colonize the land of their ancestors.

Portuguese Enslavement of Africans

When wondering who started the global enslavement of Africans, you might immediately assume Europeans in general, but more specifically, you could say Portugal was the first nation to start the scramble for the resource of African labor. According to the always-resourceful Wikipedia, the Portuguese became involved in the slave trade because in 1452, the Pope issued a papal bull granting the king of Portugal the right to enslave "Saracens, pagans and any other unbelievers," therefore legitimizing the slave trade under Catholic beliefs.

Even before the Church legalized it, the Portuguese port city of Lagos, located on the southern coast became one of the first slave markets in 1441, and the Portugues had been utilizing African labor for slavery long before that. The Portuguese had also colonized Brazil and needed the African human labor for the resources found there, such as sugar, coffee, gold, and diamonds.

While looking around for information on Portugal, I discovered that this little country was really quite active in the world trade market. It makes sense that a geographically small country would not have a diverse collection of resources in their own country, so I suppose the would need to reach out to the rest of the world for material and labor resources. I also found a timeline of Portuguese and Spanish activity within Africa and Brazil- the timeline only spans two hundred years but is five pages long in Word! I also thought it was interesting that many characters from King Leopold's Ghost are on this timeline, such as Afonso and several Portuguese explorers. Seeing cross-references of real historical figures always makes an event or time period more real to me, rather than just seeing it once in a novel or a textbook, so it is interesting to see other factors that we might have learned about in high school, such as Portugal's famous navigators and navy, involved in the ugly global history of slave labor, which is something high school generall glosses over.

First visit to Umoufia

Something that really stood out to me in the "village" of Umoufia was how decorative everything seemed. While reading the book, I imagined a lot of plain, wooden objects, but rarely anything like those shown in the pictures. I do remember a lot of mentions of the walls of the huts and compounds shining with red clay, and the painted patterns on the women's bodies, and the shaved patterns in the childrens' hair; but I am surprised at how little Achebe did not illustrate the details of so many objects.

The two decorated objects that surprised me the most were the walking sticks and the stool. I only remember the walking sticks from the scene where the men and Okonkwo walked with Ikemefuna outside the village to have Ikemefuna killed. I imagined middle-aged men walking down a rugged path with the aid of tree branches, like a sturdier version of what we use to cook marshmallows over a campfire. Instead, this is what was really used:

It almost looks like the top sections are little people, and I wonder if they represent idols, or maybe the owners of the walking sticks, or maybe they could each tell a story.

The other photo that grabbed my attention was the photo of the stool. Okonkwo and the other village elders would bring their stools to events like meetings and the wrestling match, but it was their eldest son who carried their stool and their bag. Okonkwo even let Ikemefuna carry his.

Again, I imagined a simple wooden object, and somehow my mind created the picture of a wooden version of our folding camping chairs. I think having this for a camping chair would be much more interesting, though:Again, I am astonished at how much we as readers are not told about the intricate decorations which obviously took some dedication- either this is stone or it's carved out of a tree trunk. I also wonder again what the face is- is it the owner, or the creator, or maybe an idol?

Perhaps this is slightly stereotypical of me, but I always imagined African tribes associated with things like lots of wooden and metal jewelry, brightly colored fabrics, and large pots. I could picture a man whittling something, a toy maybe, but not a walking stick for a grown man. I could imagine a simple log as chair, or a piece of cloth, but not a stool large enough to carve an entire face on one side, and then some. Seeing all these objects that are in the village and obviously a part of the Ibo's lives, I wonder why Achebe did not include descriptions and examples of these objects in his novel.

Things Fall Apart

This is my second time reading Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart - the first was three weeks ago, leaning against a counter at work with half an eye watching for customers (yes, I read books for school before the class started, go ahead and laugh).

While reading this novel the first time, a lot of things stood out to me, but three in particular: Okonkwo's aggressive character, the sad story of Okonkwo's son Nwoye, and the story of the evangelical Christians in the last section of the book. I remember studying in history classes some of the stereotypes of white Americans towards African slaves, and I remember one of the stereotypes of the African man as aggressive and someone all white women should fear, and I understand how someone like Okonkwo could fit in that stereotype. He was definitely aggressive and sometimes ruled by his temper; but now we as readers can see the other side of the stereotype and why he behaved the way he did, which was because he viewed his duty in life was to do everything his father did not, and not because he was a rapist of white women or whatever nonsense the slaveowners made up.

Nwoye, Okonkwo's son, was a depressing part of this story to me. One thing I am not sure about is in the scene near the end of the book, just before Okonkwo killed himself. Okonkwo killed one of the five messengers who came from the white man- the first time I read it, it immediately popped into my mind that the messenger was Nwoye- was it?

The third part that stood out to me was the role the evangelical Christians played. This was almost a two-personed argument in my mind, but when the Christians arrived in the story, I wasn't sure if I wanted the Ibo tribes to be the "good guys" and preserve their culture because I had been reading about them for the past two hours; or if I wanted the Christians to succeed, because I know exactly how and why the Christians did what they did in this story- what I did in France this summer was similiar, only we definitely didn't arrest anyone and no one's house or church was burned down.

That being said, when I read through Things Fall Apart a second time, I noticed a few other things... but only because they didn't stand out to me the first time, as contradictory as that sounds. One element I noticed (or didn't...hmmm...) was how capitalistic the Ibo people were. Dr. Webb might have said something about it in class, but I realized the Ibo people used cowries like we use dollar bills, and it seemed almost out of place. At first yams seemed to be the main capital, but then I realized sacks of cowries were being given, spent, and saved, just like modern currency.

The Black History Pages describe cowries and their uses, and the surprise of the Europeans at the use of cowries over gold, which has been the international unit of exchange. A single bag of cowries could weigh 60 pounds- imagine paying twenty bags of cowries for a wife! I also found some other information about the surprisingly capitalistic aspect of the Ibo people, and also that it is actually spelled Igbo, but the colonists spelled it wrong.

Migration Out of Africa

The migration out of Africa before colonization may be the most important migration of all human history - historians, archaelogists, and other experts believe that East Africa was the home to our earliest human ancestors. Other medical researchers agree that maybe 150,00 to 100,000 ago, and some believe even up to one million years ago, modern humans started to emerge from Africa, and some studies that compare genetics have found chromosomal variations that can link all humans back to Africa origins.

Africa is the most genetically diverse continent in the world, which further supports theories that Africa is, in fact, everyone's homeland. Whether due to shortage of land, climate, or tribal governments and conflicts, the groups of people living in East Africa started to move into areas of Western Asia.

Migration was further influenced by climate change, trade, the spread of the Islam and Christian religions, and many other factors. The AfricAvenir site has an excellent chronology of Ancient African civilizations, which tracks the developments of ancient kingdoms, people groups, and movements, including the Bantu Migration.

While not exactly a migration out of Africa, the Bantu Migration is still worth noting because of it's origins in the Central African area, and the vast movement, perhaps the largest ever, of the Bantu-speaking people of Africa from Central Africa to South Africa. Look at the above map and realize a single language group spread throughout and ultimately populated half of Africa. Compare that to the five hundred years it took Europeans to spread throughout North America, or the few thousand years it took the Romans and the Greeks to spread to Europe, and you will realize that this group of people could share the same ancestors that we all do- the earliest humans from East Africa.

Intro

Hi everyone! My name is Anne Morgan. I graduated from Rockford High School in Rockford, MI (near Grand Rapids) in 2006, and I am now a junior here at WMU. My major is social work, and I'm also working on a psychology minor and possibly a French minor as well. Also, soon I will have to start work on my Honors thesis - yikes!

I spent a month and a half in Nantes, France this summer with Campus Crusade for Christ, and that has made me very curious about other cultures and governments as well as globalization, which is one reason I think this class will be very interesting to me.

After my undergrad here, I'll have to continue on to a Master's program somewhere for social work, and I'm interested in the medical field or something international for possible career options, but that is all still a few years away. For now, I study and I work, I do a lot with Campus Crusade for Christ and the Honors college, I read for fun if I have time, and I'm a huge musical theater dork.