That's indeed so true... :DQuote:
Originally posted by IWilKikU
I just realized that on this forum no one is either black or white to me. Your all different shades of orange :D.
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That's indeed so true... :DQuote:
Originally posted by IWilKikU
I just realized that on this forum no one is either black or white to me. Your all different shades of orange :D.
I just don't believe that ANY word should be subject to censorship - forgive me if I was being flippant but I do think that language should be free from political correctness.
"Nigger" is not just any word. I invite you to read Ralph Ellison (esp. "Flying Home"), James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Richard Wright and scores of other persons. It is a word that encapsulates a history of hate for an entire race/color of people. If that doesn't make it politically incorrect I don't know what does.
Quote by Dick Diver
<I just don't believe that ANY word should be subject to censorship - forgive me if I was being flippant but I do think that language should be free from political correctness.>
The words are certainly available to be utilised, and I believe when words are used to educate, it is acceptable. Anyone who writes knows how powerful words are, look at the use of the N word in this story, look at the discussion it has caused. It is a strong word and stimulates strong feelings. I think that is the bottom line. One has to consider how the use of words will make others feel.
Yes but Conrad was writing in a different era - I would be suspicious of somebody using the word to indicate race now.
What of the Moor of Venice? Is Othello legitimate?
Or Huckleberry Finn which is full of the word, but an extremely sympathetic portrayal of the relationship between Huck and Jim (until the crap bit when Tom turns up).
How can you 'ban' a word?
we're not talking about banning a word. We were discussing Conrad's time and talking about whether or not "nigger" was as offensive as it is today. You can't ban a word, and unfortunately there will always be bigots who call people that, we were mearly commenting on its inappropriateness and trying to figure out if it was inappropriate at the time of writing.
Seeing as I agreed with this choice, I guess I had better get reading this weekend.
We can't possible know if that word was offensive at that time. None of us were there, but it stands to reason that from the whole tone of the book, (Marlow thought of his driver as a useful tool rather than a human companion) "the" word was acceptable.
We can only take what he has written for face value. If you look at the rest of history most conquering people thought of / treated their conquerees (is that a word?) as though they were something below human. That is a fact we can't change but we can learn from it.
Words cannot be banned, that's simply ridiculous. The only way to get rid of a word is to stop using it - all people.
I dissagree. I felt like Marlow was genuinely upset at the death of his pilot. He stood there in a stuper watching him die. He did say something like "I missed him, he performed a task." But I don't think that is as impersonally as you're implying, if thats the line your refering too.
As far as everyone stoping, well that's what I was saying. It's impossible, but if YOU don't want it to be said, start with YOURSELF. Thats why I don't think its acceptable for blacks to call each other by this particular term of endearment.
The darkness is what Kurtz finds in his own heart.... Ambition makes him 'go native', that's to say much more uncivilised than those whom he thinks to be uncivlised just becaue they belong to a totally different culture...cos they're 'others'.
The darkness is inside human beings...
(not really much to say on the 'nigger' thing... well here we tend to look at the word 'negro' as offensive, while 'nero' is just a plain way to say someone is black (the word means infact 'black', but the connotation of 'negro' is not viewed as so radically and absolutely offensive, in some contest it can be almost plain... But I have a feeling I see the question from a different cultural point of view, since the presence of black people is much more 'ancient' in the USA and UK, while it's been just 20-25 years ago that masses of Africans started to emigrate here, so the question probably has a different cultural value... I don't even think there's too much of a black culture like the one of the American ones, again for historical reasons...)
IWilKiKU,
I think your right, Marlow did seem upset by the death of his helmsman, but in the line where he talks about the helmsman being a useful tool and where he compares him to a "grain of sand in the black sahara" it seems like he's trying to make excuses for being upset, like he needs to justify his feelings to the "civilized" people.
Once in Annapolis, Maryland, in the 1960's, I went into some public building (can't remember, library, post office), and there was a glass case display of some things from the days of slavery. What caught my eye was a newspaper article about some explosion or accident. It read: "No one was injured. Four slaves died."
Obviously, it was on display to demonstrate that in those days, a slave was not considered a person who might be reckoned as a casualty.
My father, who is now a healthy age 88, told me that in the 1930's, if you were to call a negro "black" he would probably punch you. The term he would have found acceptible was "colored". The term "blacks" was not in use.
Notice the N.A.A.C.P. stands for "National Association for the Advancement of Colored People."
Nowadays the phrase "person of color" is a politically correct and tasteful way to denote people who are non-white.
does anyone really know it tho? the signifance of it? not a guess.. can u back it up with quotes?
Although the original question for this thread was about the title: The Heart Of Darkness most of the posts have discussed the use of the word "nigger" by Conrad. With that said I will add my two cents concerning the N word in this novel.
I think we really need to be vigilant here. There is the question about what was Conrad trying to communicate by using that word? Could he have used another word such as "black" "negro" "collored"? I do not know the answer to that question because I do not know enough about the language and its uses during that historical period. But I know this much, what the word means to us now really has absolutely nothing to do with an understanding of the novel. Or rather, it may be of note if we want to understand what the nature of race relations were at that time and how that influenced culture and art. But we need to be very careful about thinking that Conrad wrote this last month and thus was fully aware of the power that word has during this time.
I read quite a powerful book on the dominance of "crtical thinking" in literary ciricles these days. The author, whose name I forget, essentially argued that when we think "critically" about a given text we are actually translating the work and turning it into something that is entirely different from what the given author intended. We add meaning to words, plot, characterization that will confirm the particular perspective, ideology, paradigm that we hold dear as The Truth. Marxists, Freudians, Feminists, De-Constructionalists and on and on. Lost is the actual human being who sat down ten, twenty, two hundred years ago and tried to create a piece of art that would say certain things, convey particular emotions and describe the world as he or she understood it.
What was Conrad's intent? That is the question and it is a radically different question then what the reader's intent is in interpretation.
Finally, remember the movie based on this book...Apocalypse Now...blood,guts, madness...I don't think anyone would have said **** about the N word in that movie because it would have made perfect sense given who the characters were and the situation they found themselves in.
I believe the word was, at that time, used synonymously with the word slave. Hence, the fact that it seems so prevalently used by such respectable authors as Conrad. Also, hence its extremely derogatory interpretation now.