A Start

I began reading The Farming of Bones by Edwidge Danticat, a novel that I had never heard of. There wasn’t much I could infer about the novel for I honestly had absolutely no idea and the cover dint give any clues either.

Danticat introduces us to the main character Amabelle Desir, a Haitian women who’s parents died in the flood of the Massacre river that borders Haiti and Dominican Republic. Anyways Amabelle moves on and becomes the maid of a land owner called Don Ignacio. The story line is very similar to that one of a slave in a United States plantation years before. The characters described by Danticat are appearing slowly in the novel. Don Ignacio’s daughter, Valencia, grows next to Amabelle, and they have a strange owner/servant relationship for they grow up like friends, or at least so it seems.

Danticat shows the relationship of Amabelle with the family she serves as one that is pleasant but with certain distance. I don’t know why but I have a feeling that this will eventually change to one side, it will either become a better relationship or it will worsen. Predictions don’t hurt anyone, and I hope this prediction wont hurt the way the novel unravels to me.

White vs. Black/ Light vs. Dark

In Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad we can find a lot of imagery, especially when Conrad juxtaposes black and white in a constant basis. It’s as though there is a constant battle between that white and black things. The comparison with European and African, modern and rudimentary, good and bad is almost too obvious.

On everything that Conrad writes we can find this comparison, like when he speaks of Kurtz, “I saw on that ivory face the expression of sombre pride” (Conrad 130). You can say that the “ivory face” is good, in a manner of speaking, but the “sombre expression” makes it bad. Or at least this is the constant battle played in the novel between black and white.

We see this once again in Heart of Darkness when the jungle is portrayed as “dark” and all that created by man is “light”. “There was a lamp in there­­­ – light, don’t you know – and outside it was so beastly, beastly dark” (Conrad 131) In the boat there was light, for it represented all the western world, civilization as it is, and outside was all the unknown, the rudimentary and dangerous world of the Congo.

Conrad relates this idea of Light vs. Dark during the novel in a constant way. Pointing out that everything had a “light” side and also a counterpart “dark” side.

A Good Start

I began reading Joseph Conrad’s book, Heart of Darkness, today. I wasn’t expecting much since I hadn’t heard anything from this book, but by the cover I began making some ideas about it, a boat in a jungle. You can make out many things out of this picture, but what came into my mind was an adventure through the jungle, and the book started a little differently.

It all starts in London, the river Thames, were our narrator is in a boat with four more characters, and among them is Marlow. He will be the one who is going to start speaking about his adventures on a steamboat in the Congo. Joseph Conrad captures our attention easily when he juxtaposes Marlow’s experience with that of a Roman who just arrived to England when it was conquered by the Romans. He speaks of a dark place, and Conrad catches us even more when he writes, “yet to understand the effect of it on me you ought to know how I got out there” (pg 9). Marlow experienced something in the Congo that changed him, something very dark in many different ways.

Because this was my first reading of the novel I might say it did capture me. It has some mystery in it and I look forward to answering all the questions I have right now about Conrad’s book.