I haven't looked at the book for a quarter of a century, but she's not easy to forget:
And from right to left along the lighted shore moved a wild and gorgeous apparition of a woman.
She walked with measured steps, draped in striped and fringed cloths, treading the earth proudly, with a slight jingle and flash of barbarous ornaments. She carried her head high; her hair was done in the shape of a helmet; she had brass leggings to the knee, brass wire gauntlets to the elbow, a crimson spot on her tawny cheek, innumerable necklaces of glass beads on her neck; bizarre things, charms, gifts of witch-men, that hung about her, glittered and trembled at every step. She must have had the value of several elephant tusks upon her. She was savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent; there was something ominous and stately in her deliberate progress. And in the hush that had fallen suddenly upon the whole sorrowful land, the immense wilderness, the colossal body of the fecund and mysterious life seemed to look at her, pensive, as though it had been looking at the image of its own tenebrous and passionate soul.
And so on. The unnamed woman is Africa, of course, personified by Marlow (the narrator) / Conrad (the author): a mass of riches -- the goods she wears, but also the fertile land and the treasures beneath it. Kurtz was expected to subjugate her/Africa. Instead, she is proud and fearless. And nags him. In her own language!
Conrad's admiration of the woman is clear. She is also animalistic and "inscrutable"; there is no mind here for Marlow to try and understand or communicate with. She makes his gears grind: she is simultaneously desirable and horrifying.
By contrast with Kurtz, Dastari's motives are lofty -- the advancement of science -- in pursuit of which he takes raw materials (a colonised woman) and cooks them into a useful computer.
In the end, Chessene is patriarchally punished: the woman who has made herself beautiful/human is made ugly/alien. I think this transformation would have been more powerful if she had spent less time chatting with Shockeye about food. But better than all that "you can't change nature!" garbage, I'd have liked to see a Chessene that Dastari is both attracted to and repelled by. And better still: see his confusion through her eyes.
Now I must clean me lute.
I wrote some lines once on a time
In wondrous merry mood,
And thought, as usual, men would say
They were exceeding good.
They were so queer, so very queer,
I laughed as I would die;
Albeit, in the general way,
A sober man am I.
I called my servant, and he came;
How kind it was of him
To mind a slender man like me,
He of the mighty limb.
"These to the printer," I exclaimed,
And, in my humorous way,
I added, (as a trifling jest,)
"There'll be the devil to pay."
He took the paper, and I watched,
And saw him peep within;
At the first line he read, his face
Was all upon the grin.
He read the next; the grin grew broad,
And shot from ear to ear;
He read the third; a chuckling noise
I now began to hear.
The fourth; he broke into a roar;
The fifth; his waistband split;
The sixth; he burst five buttons off,
And tumbled in a fit.
Ten days and nights, with sleepless eye,
I watched that wretched man,
And since, I never dare to write
As funny as I can.
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timeasmymeasure
