Disengaged

Reading Yedda Morrison’s ‘Darkness’, for me, is really a powerful experience. When I first started reading, the first thing I noticed is that the title of Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ is changed to merely one word: ‘Darkness’, the omission of the first two words suggest a sense of complete lack of agency—yet in this case, the pure darkness left along does not suggest despair. Instead of the original novel, which is portrayed from a colonist point of view, Morrison’s technique enables the readers to see the landscape of Africa in a less biased way, which is beautiful and mysterious. The formatting of the novel reveals large gaps between words, for example, on page 12, there are only four words left after the removal of descriptions of human beings; it is only after the re-animation that we realize the excessive description of western colonists in the previous work. The re-animation also provides the readers with some colorful imageries that might be neglected before, on page 15, a phrase goes “blue, green, smears of orange, purple, yellow river ”—the combination of these colors offer the readers a whole new look at Africa, one that is undisturbed by human civilization.