Reality lies in the eyes of the beholder

Having talked about Heart of Darkness in classes and how Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is a response to Joseph Conrad’s book, I investigated a bit more about it, so I could fully understand not only the story portrayed by Achebe, but also the intention behind it.

Most people talked about Conrad as a racist person who dehumanized African people and about Achebe as the one who told “the real story” about Africa, but…what do you think? My personal opinion is “not quite.”

Here is why...

First, both Achebe and Conrad narrate their stories from very different points of view. On one hand, Okonkwo is a person who has worked hard to grow up to be someone completely different than his father, but all of this is threatened by white people who are more powerful than him in many ways and to which he has to submit to sooner or later. On the other hand, Marlow is a person who is already a part of that greatness and does not have to submit to anyone. Moreover, the stories are based on different life experiences (African and non-African), and as we know, a writer writes about what he or she knows, about the reality through his or her own eyes.

Second, we can notice that although Chinua Achebe’s work seems to be more objective than Joseph Conrad’s, by depicting the good and bad in both black and white people, he manages to screen his own anger towards Conrad’s representation of Africa behind Okonkwo, which shows subjectivity nonetheless. In contrast, Conrad tells the rawer truth about the suffering of black people, being discriminated and enslaved.  

Last but not least, Achebe’s book might be difficult to understand for a non-African reader, because of the vocabulary and the many African proverbs in it, whilst Conrad’s is easier to read for a foreigner, given that his own inspiration was a six-month stay in Congo, and this is why his novel was and is so successful.

Before researching in order to do this post, my visions of the authors were different from the ones I have now. Regarding Chinua Achebe, I saw him as an honest author who wrote Things Fall Apart in reaction to a wrong image of his own people, but now I think that this is not the whole picture and that he may be a man who wrote the book out of anger and pride. As for Joseph Conrad, I believed he was a racist man, who thought himself better than everyone else, but now I realize Heart of Darkness was the reality he experienced and that this was the consequence of a lack of knowledge about African people, given that he was in Congo for a short period of time and did not grasp the whole African identity.