The need to know the multiple stories and not a single story assails me. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the great African feminist writer, draws our attention to the importance of not having just one story. What she calls the danger of the single story.
In these times of convulsions, the multiple claims and cries that in the cities have mobilized millions of people in the streets have caught my attention. The diverse manifestations, among them those that materialize in the destruction of material heritage: demolishing the monuments.
Is this an expression of interpellation to that “unique story” of the construction of what it is to be Colombian? From the myth of the construction of the Colombian nationality.
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I return once more to my experience and I think about if I had not had the opportunity to read Andrés Caicedo at a very young age, to see a Gaviria film or listen to Joe Arroyo, perhaps I would have only one story: that of the story told in the college chair.
And I do not judge that chair of social or history in primary and high school, only that my spirit is broadened knowing that I have accessed other stories through literature, film, music …
The arts, culture and heritage are key to these conversation spaces. This history has configured symbols, allegories in the construction of Colombian nationality, images of what it is to be Colombian. However, the story only achieves its totality if it can tell the story of indigenous people, blacks and a multiethnic and multicultural people.
What the arts allowed me, in the privilege of not having access to that unique story, was precisely knowing various stories; that of Cali and the 70s with Caicedo between salsa and the voltage of a youth that cried out from here what others lived on the other side of the pond, that of Medellín besieged by drug traffickers and also by a humanity that from the most humble He struggled to resist and be resilient to the seduction of the easy ticket, the flavor that tells the story of slavery in the stanzas of Rebelión that gave us data on the history of slavery in the Colombian Caribbean.
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“Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and slander, but they can also be used to empower and humanize. They can break the dignity of a people, but they can also restore it ”. Write Chimamanda.
To dignify the stories of young people and citizens, we may have to resort to new cultural, artistic and heritage expressions. In Cali, for example, someone has thought that it would be good to make a large sculpture with the war material used by Esmad on the site where the statue of Sebastián de Belalcázar was. It points to the idea of building a new narrative of the nation with the multiplicity of voices that now speak to the country.
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