"The Heathen"

 “The Heathen’’

Jack London was an American author, journalist, and social activist.

      “The Heathen”, it is the story about the class discrimination and also about the color discrimination. A person who does not belong to a widely held religion (especially one who is not a Christian, Jew, or Muslim) as regarded by those who do. Otoo is one of them. The central character of this short story is Otoo and his White friend Charley.

Class and color discrimination:

           Otoo belongs to lower class. He is working as a sailor. Otoo’s fellow workers are very docile to their masters. Otoo and his fellow workers are double marginalized because first-

                                   They are belongs to lower class; and

                They are black people.

        The way black people are treated and their mind washed by white people- colonizers, Otoo doesn’t like this way of living life. So, he left out by his own community. But the idea of WHITE as a SUPERIOR was very well constructed by the white people and accept it very well by black people (here the fellow companion workers of Otoo). Otoo is one of them. See the dialogue between Otoo with Charley. Otoo always called him a MASTER.

     OTOO: It was a brave deed you did, master.

     CHARLEY: Why do you ‘master’ me?

      “We have exchanged names. To you I am Otoo. To me you are Charley. And between you and me, forever and forever, you shall be Charley, and I shall be Otoo. It is the way of the custom. And when we die, if it does happen that we live again somewhere beyond the stars and the sky, still shall you be Charley to me, and I Otoo to you”

       Otoo: “yes, master”.

     So the ideas of master fit in the mind of Otoo. But he doesn’t like his own community, because his Christians communities, docile way serve the White people.

      ‘‘My people in Bora Bora do not like heathen… they are all Christians;            and I do not like Bora Bora Christian.’’

       At the end of the story, Otoo died to save his friend’s life. They both are having soft relationship to each other. The friendship of both of them is beyond the notion of color and class discrimination. Here, Jack London present the reality of black people that they are mentally constructed. Black people seem themselves as an inferior and white as a superior. Black considered as an animal, they are not considered as a human being. But the important thing is that black also accept it without raises any question. See the dialogue of Otoo:

              ‘‘I know sharks. The shark is my brother.’’

    The same way in “The Hairy Ape’’:

            Yank – Compared himself with the “APE’’ as his “BROTHER’’.

       He was highly suppressed by Power. And power is in the hand of white people like Nazareth Steel and his daughter Mildred Douglas. Even the people like Yank frequently humiliated by the power. Mildred Douglas considered Yank as a “Filthy Beast’’.

      

In “A Tempest’’, Aime Cesaire clearly shows the mind set of colonizers and colonized People. Prospero said to Caliban,

                      “A thing of darkness, I call my own’’.

       Prospero: What would you be without me?

      Caliban: “Without you? I’d be the king, that’s what I’d be, the king of the island’’.

       So, they considered black as a thing, dark, dull, unintelligent, devil worshiping, elemental, etc. So, here Aime not criticized only the White but also the black. They cultivate the habit that they are born to be salve. 

      

   

In short, as Fanon described the “Negritude’’ in which the people like Otoo,Yank, Pecola, Caliban, all  are composed under or by the “Selected People’’.