The Heart Of Darkness !

Achebe has a few issues with Heart of Darkness. The distillation of his argument comes down to the fact that the author does not see the people as people nor the land as a real land. Essentially the author of heart of darkness uses the people of the Congo as the purple velvet on a play set. He uses them to paint over. He uses them as a setting, not a people. I think Achebe's argument makes a lot of sense. No one would want their nation or their people referred to as a backdrop. I often feel that indigenous cultures are portrayed as a backdrop. One group here in the united states that is often seen as backdrop are the Native Americans. Similarly to African indigenous people, Native Americans in North America are a very diverse group of people with different customs, languages, and cultures depending on region and are not simply backdrop. It makes sense then, how Coppola is doing the same thing to the Vietnamese and Cambodian people since Apocalypse Now is based off of Heart of Darkness. While it makes sense that the comparison is there, one might hope that Coppola had made a movie where the indigenous people were not the purple velvet backdrop in a play.
     Another aspect of Heart of Darkness that Achebe has issue with is the portrayal of going down the river as being journeying into the other world. It's almost like he's making the soldiers Alice and the river the rabbit hole which they are falling into. However, the problem with the story is that the Congo is not the rabbit hole, and the soldiers are not Alice. I think that this is playing on the Overall, the moral of Achebe's argument is that one should portray people as people not an abstract, mystical landscape.