When I wrote about African modernity for example, I already referred to the unfairness of our European picture of Africa: we tend to think that no modernity has reached Africa, and that they have `nothing` here. Well, now I`m not trying to deny the poverty on this land, I`m just trying to say that the real picture is a lot more complex than that: they have a very interesting mixture of tradition and modernity, and an African way of involving European and American culture as well.
On the other side though, I`m just starting to realize that they have just as stereotypic picture of us, as we have of them: they usually think that Europe has `everything` - no poverty, no homeless people, no wicked people, thieves or anything like that. So many times I just find myself explaining how many problems we have at home and that our world is not perfect either – which is not the best thing to do, this is not the way I`m supposed to present my country, but at the same time, I just feel like that I have to balance this stereotypic picture.
It seems that we all tend to view our world in a very polarized way: separate the `good` and the `bad`, the `rich` and the `poor` part of it, even though the reality is way more complex than that and it would be hard to say anything that would be indeed true in general of a country. Still, this is the way how we human beings make our world more understandable, even if this way we get further from the truth…
Well, as a conclusion, I think I could summarize my point in these two pictures:
Our world is NOT LIKE this:
In reality it`s a lot more LIKE this:
In reality it`s a lot more LIKE this:
True indeed, most of the time things are not either this or that way, but kind of 'inbetween'. This notion is from Eat Pray Love, it's a nice way of thinking I guess.
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