In my Children’s Literature class this week, we got to watch a TED talk by a woman named Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. The title of her talk was “The danger of a single story.” In her TED talk, Chimananda tells about something I didn’t even know had a name: single stories. Though I highly encourage watching it, for purposes of the rest of this article, the single story is the way you view a place, person or group or people based on just one thing you know or one view you have learned.
To give you an idea of what I mean… Chimamanda is from Nigeria, so when she came to America, many people had single stories about what they thought her culture was, leading up to a conversation she had where a young American man told her that it was a “shame” that all Nigerian men treated women the way they do in her book. She then came back with how she has just read “American Psycho” and it was “such a shame” that young Americans were serial murderers. Clearly, the one story you read or one side of the story you hear cannot and will not ever give you the entire story.
Most are guilty of creating ideas and identities of others based on single stories (myself included, immensely.). However, you, like me, are probably also victims of the single story whether you are aware of it or not. One thing about us may dictate what an entire group of people thinks about who we are and what our life must be like, and when we think about it in terms of ourselves, we can understand how ridiculous this is.
I am a part of the Millennial generation. Most with an opinion about Millennials would then conclude I am lazy, a liberal and materialistic. If you knew me, you would know how I was raised: the workday isn’t over until your work is over, God is the true ruler and it doesn’t matter what you have but the one you have and who you have.
A baby born cleft lip and cleft palate. That is me, but you probably just pictured a baby in an ad for “Smile Train” or “Operation Smile,” right? You may have felt pity because I can’t eat, smile or hold a job. While that is real and true for far too many babies born with cleft, it is not me. It is the future I could have faced if I was not born at the particular moment, time, place and into the family that I was, but that is just one side of the story.
This can go one for hours… just think of something you have done, something you are, where you’re from, who your family is, what you want from life… stereotypes and assumptions can be created from anything, because of the single story. The problem with these stereotypes, Chimamanda says, is “not that they aren’t true, but that they are incomplete.” They do not tell you their favorite food or their hopes and dreams, only what they lost, or what city they were born in.
She also shared a feeling she used to have, that she needed to depict her life as something far worse than what it was to be a good writer, because successful writers have a terrible past. Even though some things happened in her life that were awful, that is not all of who she is. “All of these stories make me who I am. But to insist on only these negative stories is to flatten my experience and to overlook the many other stories that formed me.” This resonated with me so deeply. Though there are things in my life I wouldn’t have picked out for myself, they are not my ending. They are not my entire story. Just like that one person that hurt you does not control your life. Just like that bad test score is not where your value lies. This is why I have a hard time ever ending anything I write to post in negative view…
I am not one story and neither are you. You are millions and millions of stories, created each day… each second. Everyone else around you is creating their own new stories, too. Never flatten the experience of their lives to one thing you have heard about them, and never devalue someone’s life by assuming they will act one way or another based on the way you were taught to see them. Just like you are more than “that one time…”—so are they.
