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Dark Heart Of The Night Analysis

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Analyze the significance of political upheaval in triggering questions of culture, community, nation, and, crucially, subverting gender hierarchies in Dark Heart of the Night. In Dark Heart of the Night, political upheaval triggers a multitude of questions that challenge the patriarchal society in Mboasu, in Central Africa. As a rebel group comes in and creates turmoil in the small village of Eku in the span of a single night, there is a shift in the gender hierarchy from man to woman when the chief gets decapitated as a symbol of weakness in his leadership, and strength in the young man who performed the decapitation. In that horrific night, members of the village began to question their sense of community with one another, despite the symbolic …show more content…

The entire reason of the cannibalistic ceremony was for the members of Eku to have one entity within themselves that was common amongst all; the blood and flesh of young Eyia “would suffice to seal the return to ancestral values and restore each of the villagers his capacity as the member of one united body” (Miano 79). The blood and flesh of Eyia had unified the clan, but in the way that Isilo had not intended. A community within Eku formed out of experiencing the trauma of cannibalism and the murder of clan members in front of their eyes. Ié and other adults made a pact to not speak of these events to anyone who was not present during the ceremony; the only reason why one would speak of these events was to figure out why it had happened and find a way of preventing it from happening in the future (Miano 135). The definition and means of unifying a clan that Isilo spoke about and performed had created a distance between members of the clan, for Inoli, who in turn killed her husband, blamed her him for not stopping the killing of Eyia. Alternatively, the sacrificial ceremony created a trauma that could only bind those who went through it

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