Read the excerpt from "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” Achebe directly quotes Conrad’s descriptions o
f a Congolese woman and a European woman, respectively. Towards the end of the story Conrad lavishes a whole page quite unexpectedly on an African woman who has obviously been some kind of mistress to Mr. Kurtz and now presides (if I may be permitted a little liberty) like a formidable mystery over the inexorable imminence of his departure:
She was savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent. . . . She stood looking at us without a stir and like the wilderness itself, with an air of brooding over an inscrutable purpose. . . .
She came forward all in black with a pale head, floating toward me in the dusk. She was in mourning . . . She took both my hands in hers and murmured, "I had heard you were coming.". . . She had a mature capacity for fidelity, for belief, for suffering.
How does Achebe support his claim that Heart of Darkness contains racist elements?
A hyperbole is a figure of speech that uses exaggeration for emphasis. The athlete didn't actually <em>tear</em> down the road, but a reader can tell that he was running as fast as he could so he could take first place.
The "diving reflex", or bradycardic response, is the natural reflex of infants on water, is an automatic response that they lose later in development, and it comes in order of survival mode and has an evolutionist logic.
