Comparing Heart Of Darkness 'And Natasha Trethewey'

Throughout history, art has provided an outlet for artists, allowing them to use the subtlety of a visual creation to explore social issues. Art forces the viewer to understand their reality and the context of their surroundings through another’s perspective. Art creates a frame narrative through which the viewer can come to understand a reality that they fail to experience due to some form of privilege. In both Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Natasha Trethewey’s Thrall, the authors explore the relationship between races, trying to draw attention to and understand the systematic glorification of white people and their actions while non-whites are considered less than human. In Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad uses the symbol of Kurtz’s

Kurtz’s painting not only shows the disjointed, purposeless, and violent colonization of Africa, but the idealized facade of a noble cause that allows it to fester. Kurtz’s painting embodies the failures of European colonization in Africa. From the (useless work) to the thoughtless and brutal massacre of Africans, the Europeans show a complete disregard of human life and its value, resulting in their failure on the continent. Marlow describes the painting as a woman “draped” in black and “blindfolded,” carrying a torch, the only source of light in the painting (Conrad 17). The darkness in the scene represents European’s lack of knowledge about Africa. Marlow, throughout the novel, fails to recognize both African culture and civilization as being present in the Congo, when, of course, the truth is he fails to recognize any civilization but European civilization. The torch the woman carries represents the belief of Europeans that they were enlightening Africa. Conrad uses the torch to emphasize that the heart of darkness comes from the Europeans and their belief that it is their sovereign duty to “civilize” the land. Kurtz’s painting shows how idealized colonialism was in the minds of the Europeans; his “art insists on making

Trethewey uses art to describe a caste system from the past that is all too similar to the one she grows up with. The caste system of the early Americas was a result of the intermixing of Spaniards with those who were considered subhuman such as Africans and Native Americans. The whiter the child, the more rights awarded to them; this archaic system of categorizing humanity based on skin color mirrors the societal standards of Trethewey's childhood as a mixed child in Alabama in the 1960’s and 70’s. Trethewey’s “Taxonomy” uses paintings by Juan Rodriguez Juarez of the Spanish Caste System in America to relate the backwards system of the past to the backwards system of modern day America in which people who are white or look white are treated as the superior class or race. Trethewey corresponds her poetry to Juarez’s paintings to show the “three easy steps to purity.” (Trethewey 23). These “easy steps” are, of course, anything but easy as they rely on women who are not white having children with white men until their descendants are deemed white enough by the government to be citizens, but all the mixed children in between live lives of hardship, lacking rights and community as they belong to neither race fully. Trethewey, as a mixed woman,