This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2014, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
CHICAGO — Raise your hand if you've heard the phrase "heart of darkness" about a hundred times lately.
It has been used to reference the African continent, the Ebola outbreak, the newly discovered origination point of the HIV virus, as well as beheadings by the Islamic State and Syria's terrorist tactics, among other calamities.
Often it's an entertainment-related reference to the film "Apocalypse Now" by Francis Ford Coppola.
This past week I heard one of the producers of the zombie drama "The Walking Dead" reference the phrase cinematically not long after I had listened to a sobering "On the Media" report about how the Ebola scare breeds discrimination.
Laura Seay, a professor specializing in African politics at Colby College, said that hyperbolic news coverage of the Ebola virus's spread "harkens back to a long history of tropes about Africa as this diseased and dirty continent, [that] it's the 'heart of darkness' and who knows what could come out of there. And in a worst-case scenario this is something that consciously or subconsciously contributes to discrimination and prejudice against people of African ancestry in our country."
But what in the world does a novel published in 1899 have to do with Coppola's late-1970s Vietnam, Middle East terrorism, an outbreak of a scary illness and America's racial politics?
Very little.
It took me but a few hours to read Joseph Conrad's autobiographical fictionalization of a trip down the Congo River in Central Africa. And it was more accessible, frankly, than some of the scholarship around why the book (and by extension, its author) is colonialist, imperialist, racist and no doubt many other terms ending in "ist."
For whatever else anyone might want to read into it, "Heart of Darkness" is pretty respectful of humanity.
Take away the offense that present-day readers may derive from a few scattered references to "savages" and the N-word — both of which must be placed in their appropriate, if not pretty, historical context — and you have an adventure story critical of cruel profiteering.
"Heart of Darkness" is narrated by a ship captain, Charles Marlow, who tells his fellow sailors about his trip to his employer's central station, deep in the Congo, where he witnesses things that make him very uneasy.
In his description of the company men he saw, Marlow notes: "They were no colonists. ... They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force — nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others."
Equating the company's industry to "robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale," Marlow says, "The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion ... than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much."
Hardly a high-five for the exploitation of a whole people.
You'll have to read "Heart of Darkness" for yourself to decide whether Marlow's perspective is worthy of the anti-Africanism it supposedly conjures. But he decries the company men as bent on "Tear[ing] treasure out of the bowels of the land ... with no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe" and thrills at the natives' "humanity — like yours — the thought of your remote kinship" to them.
Meanwhile, Conrad's book title keeps getting referenced in the worst possible ways, rarely without any obvious connection except as convenient cliche.
One anomaly, however, touches upon the Conrad-referencing phenomenon while identifying the true culprits in the Ebola overreaction: us.
"A site called National Report revealed a few days ago that [Islamic State] suicide bombers have infected themselves with Ebola and are planning to 'synchronize their self-detonations in the populated areas of American cities thereby splattering passers-by with infectious bodily goo,'" wrote Salon's Andrew O'Hehir in "Ebola, the 'heart of darkness' and the epidemic of fear." He concludes: "Our media culture is so profoundly dysfunctional, and so driven by fear and superstition, that several 'mainstream' news outlets have done half-baked follow-ups to this story."
This is because certain "news" consumers love the rumors, gossip, gore and scandal surrounding this outbreak. Makes you wonder what kind of book Conrad would write about us and our salacious hunger for African tragedy were he to witness it.
Twitter, @estherjcepeda