Thoughts on Conrad's Heart of Darkness

To be honest I had no idea which "colonial" text I would re-write, but when Esther mentioned Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899) in the lab I couldn't resist. I read the book when I was much younger and enjoyed it's inherent creepiness and air of futility. 

There is one scene in particular that I would like to base some of my re-write around. In it, main character Marlow sails down the Congo River, where he has recently been appointed captain of a river steamboat for an ivory trading company. On the way to his vessel, he stops at a riverside area at the suggestion of his chaperone. While at this stop, he retreats into the cover of some trees, for shade (I think). When he enters the shade he finds a group of completely devastated local men, shackled, demoralized, on the verge of death. Marlow notes that they have been worked to death and have literally crawled away into the shadows to die. This was quite a disturbing and powerful scene. None of the men can even speak, and they are most definitely depicted as a silent "other". In re-writing this scene into my narrative I hope to give these men a voice, and to tell their story.

There is another curiosity I would like to work in as well; a beautiful native woman that is somehow connected to the enigmatic Kurtz. After Kurtz has been picked up by Marlow and his crew, the mysterious woman walks up to the steamboat, before raising her arms above her head and stepping backwards into the jungle. Later she appears again, once all of the natives at Kurtz' camp have mobilized on the shore near the steamboat, fearfully scattered due to the well armed crewman of the steamboat, the woman stays behind, holding her arms out (presumably for Kurtz). What is the relationship between these two, who is this woman and what is she thinking?

While I don't have exact plan of how the re-written narrative will go, I'm hoping to give this woman a back-story as well as the workers who are dying.

In 1975, Chinua Achebe, writer and scholar, gave a lecture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, entitled An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's "Heart of Darkness". Which, not surprisingly, discussed just that. Achebe claimed Conrad was a "a thoroughgoing racist" for his depiction of Africa as the Other World, as opposed to Europe and thus, civilization, where the African characters in the novel are deprived of language or even human expression.

It is this lack of language and human expression, and in fact, humanity in general, that I hope to restore to these characters in a parallel storyline, I will retain the setting, time period, and plot of Conrad's original text. As far as Africa as the Other World is concerned, while I haven't been to any countries in Africa, and I doubt I could write them accurately even if I had (because it is no longer the late 19th century), I will do my best to depict this place as authentically as possible, but more importantly, identifying it as "home" and "normal" for my characters.