In the early sixties, Polish correspondent Ryszard Kapuscinski arrives in the Congo. He was preceded there by the most famous Polish man in world literature, who wrote his masterpiece, “Heart of Darkness,” or “Heart of Darkness,” that is, Joseph Conrad. The first is a correspondent for an austere official news agency, who traveled in the jungles of Africa newly emerging from independence. Conrad was a ship captain who traveled the Congo River, which cut through the terrible jungle like a sword.
After the civil war, which further devastated the country, Congo lost what little colonialism had left of road, telephone, or other networks. A country the size of a continent, with no transportation system: “So you see wandering human gatherings, waiting for a car or truck to take them anywhere. Either in search of work, relatives, or in any direction. There are people who have been on the roads for weeks or months. They don’t have any maps. But even if they find one, they most likely will not find in it the name of the village or town they want to go to. They are going or returning to a place they do not know exactly. Most of them carry on their heads everything they have in life. Their hands must always remain free, to maintain balance, repel flies and mosquitoes, or wipe sweat from their faces.”
This dramatic painting from Africa 1960 is repeated in front of you every day in Gaza. Families carry their belongings on their heads, going anywhere, or returning from anywhere. The difference, of course, is the bombers, missiles and artillery that pursue the displaced people of Gaza.
In “Heart of Darkness,” Conrad wanted to say that “savages” and “civilized” are the same. Kapuscinski, a traveler in the twentieth century, wanted to prove that the “savage” is the claimant and claimant of civilization. Francis Coppola turned “Heart of Darkness” into the movie “Resurrection Today,” which depicted for us the human condition in a drama much more expressive than Conrad’s narration.
Conrad played an influential role in inspiring the Palestinian cause, and two of the most famous Arab Americans disagreed around him and around him: Edward Said and Fouad Ajami, and it was a beautiful literary disagreement that resembled a commentary. This did not harm the cause itself as much as it benefited each of them from their position. However, harm occurred among the two men’s group in the Arab world. Instead of the supporters and opponents using the elegant language in which the two university professors wrote, they polluted the elegance of the discourse with the familiar merchandise of insults and thoughts, the color of which was dulled by rumination.
