Heart of Darkness - expat stylie

It's a common tale in Dubai - Western men with live-in girlfriends and secret wives and children back home... the old adage that whatever happens beyond the borders of your native country can't come back to haunt you.

I’ve been reading Obama’s Dreams From My Father and was quite interested in the bit where he mentions Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

“The book teaches me things,” he says.

“[It’s] not really about Africa. Or black people. It’s about the man who wrote it. The European. The American. A particular way of looking at the world… It’s all there, in what’s said and what’s left unsaid.”

I’ve always thought that last page in Heart of Darkness is one of the most poignant endings of any book ever written. Years later I also realise that it’s also quite a fitting passage for describing some aspects of the general expat experience.

So the narrator Marlow is describing Kurtz’s death in Africa to his wife back home in England (I probably have a few details wrong here)… And of course Kurtz, by the time of his death was a seasoned ‘expat’ with a long-term lover and not a passing thought about trivialities like a wife back home. In this case, the fact that Kurtz was less a modern-day expat and more a raging colonialist is just a slight change in circumstance that makes the novel more of its time…

However, his story echoes things you hear all the time in Dubai – Western guys with girlfriends/fiancés and often unbeknown to friends out here, a secret wife and child back home. I guess it’s also an indication of the world view of the respective guys – how big or small the world seems to their eyes. So people with maybe less of a world view will feel like they are light years away from home and that no one could ever find out about what they get up to out here.

So Kurtz’s wife, who is completely oblivious to the fact that she was barely a footnote in her hubby’s life, begs the narrator to tell her his last words (“the horror, the horror”).

And the narrator looks at her rather pityingly and tells her that his last words were her name.

`` `Repeat them,' she murmured in a heart-broken tone. `I want -- I want -- something -- something -- to -- to live with.'

``I was on the point of crying at her, `Don't you hear them?' The dusk was repeating them in a persistent whisper all around us, in a whisper that seemed to swell menacingly like the first whisper of a rising wind. `The horror! The horror!'

`` `His last word -- to live with,' she insisted. `Don't you understand I loved him -- I loved him -- I loved him!'

``I pulled myself together and spoke slowly. ``'The last word he pronounced was -- your name.'

``I heard a light sigh and then my heart stood still, stopped dead short by an exulting and terrible cry, by the cry of inconceivable triumph and of unspeakable pain.

`I knew it -- I was sure!'

She knew. She was sure.

I heard her weeping; she had hidden her face in her hands. It seemed to me that the house would collapse before I could escape, that the heavens would fall upon my head. But nothing happened. The heavens do not fall for such a trifle. Would they have fallen, I wonder, if I had rendered Kurtz that justice which was his due? Hadn't he said he wanted only justice? But I couldn't. I could not tell her. It would have been too dark -- too dark altogether... ''

Marlow ceased, and sat apart, indistinct and silent, in the pose of a meditating Buddha. Nobody moved for a time. ``We have lost the first of the ebb,'' said the Director suddenly.

I raised my head. The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombre under an overcast sky -- seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.