Ever since I was in middle school here in Newark, I refused to deny my African roots or the fact that I am a young woman of African descent. The derogatory comments some launched at me just flew over my head. I loved my "burnt" skin, and I didn't see the same "ape" in the mirror that people saw in me or any other person with an African background. If you asked me where I am from I would proudly say, Ghana. People would laugh, but it did not faze me or make me want to change who I am or where I am from. It is an integral part of my identity.
As a young adult now, headed into my second year at Wesleyan University, my love for my cultural background has only grown and amusingly, so has everyone else's. The same people who laughed at my blackness and my "accent" now praise my chocolate skin and admire the cultural heritage that they see in me. "What a West African beauty you are," they now say. "I want my skin to be as dark as yours." Or, "What's that new African song that goes like....?" Many such flattering things are heaped on me now. It's as if they forgot that they used to hate me for what I am.
But when I've read about people like myself in novels I've always been aware that the depictions are not always so positive. Throughout all of my school years, I've read books talking about how my ancestors were kidnapped from their peaceful homes in West Africa and enslaved in a foreign land, forced into labor and degraded.
Since my university allows electives, I gravitated toward English courses that focused on the continent I love the most and stories told mostly by African authors. I expected the books in one of those classes to be phenomenal stories about the personal triumphs of African people. I was expecting stories I could identify with, and it seemed we were on that track -- until one novella shifted my perspective on everything.
I was appalled.
Joseph Conrad's is the most controversial piece of literature I have ever come across in my years of reading about African people, African history, or anything African. This novella is about an individual's recount of the journey he took to find a man in the Congo and the experiences that came with the journey. Marlow, the narrator, talks of the injustices against the Congo natives that he witnessed in the company stations he went to while in search of Kurtz, an important person within the ominous Company.
Discussions about this work from 1899 became very heated in my class. The students read it and were taken aback by such diction and word choice used in it. As the African American woman that I am, I was offended to see the Congolese people described as "black shapes" and "savages," and it seemed to clearly signal that the long-deceased Polish-British author viewed these black people as just that: savages. However, my professor did not agree. She believed that the word the writer's word choices were not proof of his racism. In fact, I had to rewrite an essay three different times because I argued that Conrad may in fact be racist, backing up my argument by citing derogatory comments from the book. My professor pushed me to rework my paper to where I felt I had to water it down to get a good grade, muting any mention of the racism I saw.
