Response to The Danger of Single Story

I have to say I’ve personally experienced “the danger of a single story” more than once in my life yet I wasn’t as surprised as Chimamanda was. This past summer while I was a attending a 3 week course in New York, I often found people surprised with how well I spoke English, and how it seamed impossible that a Colombian I didn’t drink coffee, and as I mentioned before I wasn’t surprised. Chimamanda mentioned that it was extremely hard not to able able to explain how your country is without being there, she mentioned that it was almost as if our countries were the darkness. Which made me immediately connect my experiences with Heart of Darkness. I felt the same way Marlow did; I was astonished of how unaware people in New York were from what was happening here in Colombia. Yet the worst thing of these situations was feeling how little these people knew and how their impression of an entire country was formed on a single story, it’s almost as if the had taken over.

Desperately Mad

Human beings are quite unique from each other which has resulted in the loss of many lives throughout history, but what happens when we meet somthing much stornger far from our control? The novel Heart of Darkness and the film American History X offer a deep insight into the logic behind this question. In both works, the protagonists, Marlow and Derek Vinyard encounter enviroments that force them to forget these human differences.

Marlow and Derek are both exposed to harsh enviorments: the deep jungle in the Congo and federal prison. The protagonists soon find that they are fighting the environment they’re in and not the people they considered enemies. But unlike Marlow who is actually fighting against the jungle, Derek fights a group people inside the prison. However, Derek being a former skin head realizes he is fighting against what he considered to be his allies, a group of white men, he then recognizes that those he considered brothers have now turned against him and are trying to kill him. These situations place our characters in a desperate state of mind in which they take decisions differently. Marlow and his fellow company men form an alliance with the cannibals while Derek forms a friendship with a black inmate. These decisions would have appeared illogical to the protagonists in the past yet their current situation has driven them to considering it a logical decision in order to survive. Both authors most likely mean the same thing. We must become desperate in order to realize what we are capable of. In both works the protagonists realized that the differences between them and the other party were not important when it came to surviving. If these differences didn’t matter in surviving then what good were they in the sane world?

These two works uncover a unknown aspect of human society. They suggest that becoming desperate does not mean turning insane. Being desperate shows true insanity, the unreasonable behaviour hidden in society. Insanity makes humans become truly unprejudiced, it’s only then that we can judge what is normal.