Paper short abstract:

Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1902) discusses European migrants' psychic and physical struggles in an African rustic setting of Congo. Kurtz's and Charles Marlow's rhetorical strategies and overwhelming experiences are interpreted using Freud's psychoanalytical concepts and Trauma theory .

Paper long abstract:

"Dream myth" is one dimension that nourishes migrant narratives. On the contrary, the tendency to leave homelands suggests a complex reality with dominant propaganda both on individual and collective levels. Certainly, expatriation is built on a dream and fueled by socio-economic or Socio-political dilemma. To Jennifer T. Springer (2016:250), migration creates a distance which causes physical and psychological disconnection from home irrespective of the point of movement—Africa to Europe; Europe to Africa. A deeper interpretation recognizes this disconnection as "migration space" and thus raises deeper questions of how migratory acts cause psychological and social traumas. Conrad's narrative is entrenched in the European perspective laced with biased and derogatory image of Africa but there are justifications that propel migrants to negotiate spaces between the homeland and the unfamiliar setting. Kurtz's and Charles Marlow's rhetorical strategies, narrative patterns and overwhelming experiences are interpreted using Freud's psychoanalytical concepts (Freud 1949; Eagleton 2008) and Trauma theory (Cathy Caruth 1995; Felman & Laub 1992). Trauma discourse have offered an interesting discussion on Africa's rustic environment that has threatened European migrants' mental freedom leading to insomnia, nightmares, hallucination, neurosis, dissociation or death. According to S. Felman and D. Laub (1992:69), overwhelming experiences cause trauma survivors not to be in touch with reality and thus remain entrapped in an event that has no ending and no closure. The above view describes Kurt's psychological state which according to Dodhy and Kur (2018:78) depicts signs of traumatic experience which resists language but adopts language in narrating traumatic events.