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.
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