You’ll catch more flies with honey than vinegar — or so I’ve been told. Only, honey isn’t just one of the sweetest substances on earth, it’s also one of the oldest. But yet, as the planet ages, it seems to sour instead of sweeten. Why? It can’t just be because the bees are dying out. It has to be because we, humanity, are killing all sources of true sweetness. We are killing all truths and testaments to nature.

In America, it seems we much prefer the artificial stuff.

Take, for instance, American films. Let’s examine this; how we perceive the rest of the world based on our depictions of them on the big screen. Hollywood loves artificial sweetener. Most Americans have seen or heard of the Netflix original film Beasts of No Nation, starring Idris Elba, which is based on a book of the same name.

As it turns out, this book was written by a Nigerian-American Harvard student as part of his thesis work in creative writing. Though the novel takes place in an “unnamed” African country, the movie was filmed in Ghana and portrays child soldiers speaking Twi, the language of the Ashanti people. The film was directed by an Asian American man from California, stars an English actor, and premiered in Italy.

And yet, this entirely fictionalized account has greatly influenced not just Hollywood, but also the minds of many American citizens considering the lives of the children of Africa.

I’ve never been to Africa. I don’t know where my people are from, aside from an orphanage that never accepted black kids, and the cotton fields and stifled rooms reserved for slave rapes in Arkansas. But what I do know is that Beasts of No Nation presents an unfathomable, unconscious lie.

Uzodinma Iweala (author of Beasts of No Nation) probably had no ill intentions when creating it, and perhaps the same is true for the makers of the film. However, I find intent so often irrelevant when it comes to narrative. Words have so much meaning. Life and death are in the power of the tongue. As far as books and film adaptations go, we need to be more mindful of the fables we spin. And we need to be held accountable for the resulting mess of misinformation created in the aftermath.

We are telling stories that do not belong to us. We are crafting paradigms that we have no business creating. I think we must allow those who have the true voices and true accounts to tell the stories of the people, even the fictionalized stories if they pertain to real people.

Why does the public accept these twisted presentations of not just Africa, but humanity as a whole? Why was Beyoncé featured as a Desi starlet in a Coldplay video while Sonam Kapoor, an actual Bollywood actress, was placed in the background? Why did Zoe Saldana and her collection of facial prosthetics posing as Nina Simone happen? Why is Joseph Fiennes in all his pure white glory posing as Michael Jackson still happening? Why is Scarlett Johansson as any Asian character ever a thing?

Are these publicized artifices presenting any aspect of actual truth…or do we accept them because we believe them to be true, thus giving them the mental power to eventually become widely regarded as fact? Is ideology circumstantial, or are our circumstances ideological? Why have we allowed the media to spit on our cupcakes and tell us it’s icing?

More importantly, why do we continue to eat?

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B. Blithe de Carona

Writing since July 2016 · 1 story contributed