The “light of beauty”
On my latest trip to Madrid, Caixa Forum had an exhibition called “Maternities”.
Sixteen photographs by Bru Rovira show moments between mothers and their offspring. These pictures were taken in different parts of the world and show the characters in everyday situations.
The following picture, to me, looks like a regular picture of a serene mother with her child. However, the background of this family is very different from the outside factors that can lead to such serenity. The background of this family from Angola (they live in a Refugee camp in Kuito) was described on a commentary note by the photographer. It can be seen bellow.
Photo Exhibition: "Maternities"
Here is what Bru Rovira had to say about this moment:
She was sitting on the ground, looking for protection of the early morning sun in the shadow projected into the reddish sand.
She and her baby. Playing. Devouring kisses.
Completely absent from the horizon of people hungry for something that can be put into their mouths.
Seeing this picture, one might think, “by very bad things are going, you can always find inside you a light of beauty to which you can hold down to”.
The other photographs from the exhibition and Bru Rovira’s narration can be found here (PDF file in Spanish).
The danger of a single story
The mother’s expression is so remarkable considering her story. Speaking of stories, the inspiring thing of this image is that is does not repeat the images of famine, poverty and war of Africa. The photo gives another vision of Africa (the vision that we are to used to is only present at the narrative), a vision of regular people, families that have dreams and show love to each other.
TED’s presentation of the novelist Chimamanda Adichie says it best. She warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding. She goes also by saying that when she was a child, she read British and American children books. In that time, when she created her own stories, all her characters where white with blue eyes and played in the snow. She did not even consider that people with her skin color had room in her stories. Only after she came across African literature she made a shift in her writing.
She gives other examples of how other single stories of Africa and how damaging it can be to the perception we have of people (stereotypes).
The cause of single stories can be related with the following:
- a tendency to categorize and generalize. It is easier for us to focus on the single story of someone we meet, a new place we visit or other culture we discover, and make it the definite story about the other person, place or cultures. The reason why this happens is a consequence of our tendency to categorize (that is how we learn at school) and generalize. Therefore, interpreting the one story as JUST one story from the set of stories that someone has to offer, can be a first step to overcome this tendency.
- access to a wide range of stories can be limited. For instance, I recall the French film “entre les murs” about French classrooms and the number of different nationalities in that French classroom is far greater than the nationalities presented in my classroom in the second largest Portuguese city (Note: According to the conclusions of the study «Language Diversity in Portuguese Schools» 11% of the 75000 students (1st to 9th grade) of Lisbon schools are from 74 other nationalities. Reference here – in Portuguese). The variety of nationalities, religions and races in our relationships can offer more alternatives to the information we get from the news, films or books, thus triggering an internal dialogue. This is specially difficult to have if you don’t live in a major city.
- a tendency to look for information that confirms what we already know. The internet can help on contributing to limit the impact of the previous point. However, when we are actively searching the internet, we search for information to build on the knowledge that we already have. Our internet habits probably include reading posts from blogs from specific topics we always liked and looking at key sections on the same news-oriented websites. Just one question, when was the last time you found a blog that was from a topic that you were already interested and it presented views contrary to yours? Sometimes we don’t leave much room for variety of stories by always accessing the same sources of information.
- a tendency to value the information we know more than the information we don’t know. In addition to the information pattern that we follow day after day, we don’t leave much room for randomness, or to discover new information in areas that interest us.
A balanced story
We can make small changes in our behaviour to defeat the single story:
- search for alternative stories in blogs, literature, in travelling and exhibitions. Exposing ourselves to activities, people and information that usually we don’t have access, either by buying a different magazine, or by going to a show or exhibition that usually we wouldn’t go, or follow bloggers that have an opinion contrary to ours.
- question why we think what we think and give importance to what we don’t know. Asking questions that don’t look for evidence to reinforce what we think we know, use sites such as digg and delicious.
We need more stories about Africa like the one in captured in the photo.
Life and etc... 