Enduring narratives | Juwon Ogungbe
The Blaxploitation movies I saw in my teenage years made an imprint on my mind about the culture the narratives came from. I was in Nigeria at the time and the lifestyle presented from afar seemed cool and out of reach.
Conditioning from those films was a sort of soft power that had a debilitating influence on notions I had of possibilities for my own development. The spell wasn’t broken until I experienced that way of life, in real time.
Since then, reflection about reality has been a long drawn out process. Being immersed in the social mores of a culture has little to do with worlds of imagination.
Sometimes, it requires courage to assemble symbols that are unfamiliar. The ego keeps on applying pressure to the self. What could be more important than keeping up with the Joneses?
Times flies and eventually those symbols are left behind. Is there a quality that makes them useful?
Originally published at https://juwonogungbe.com on March 3, 2021.