The weird thing about thoughts is that they’re exclusively yours. Your beliefs and actions are formulated by perceptions, judgments, and analyses that you formulated in the way that your brain, and only yours, operates. Anything that happens in the world, even if it’s completely irrelevant to you, takes on its own significance and becomes a piece of the intricate puzzle that is your perception; nothing really takes on meaning until it is analyzed in terms of yourself. Everything you know and have ever known, in your own unique terms, creates your story. And in reality, it’s extremely hard to look beyond your own story.
This semester I took an English class about contemporary women writers. We read Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (if you haven’t read anything by her, I highly recommend you do) and my teacher asked us to watch Adichie’s TED talk “The danger of a single story.” For contextual purposes, Purple Hibiscus is a novel about Kambili, a teenage girl in Nigeria, raised under the iron fist of her father – a wealthy and well-known Nigerian humanitarian, a fanatic of Anglicized Christianity, and a physically and mentally abusive father and husband. A strange dichotomy is present throughout the entire novel, in which there is the constant phantom of violence from her seemingly cold and cruel father, but he also does incredible things for other people and seems to genuinely love his family and want what’s best for them, even in his distorted and hyper controlling way.
In Adichie’s TED talk, she discusses the critical misunderstanding that can arise by creating one representation of a someone or something. As a reader, it was so easy to write off Kambili’s father as an awful person. But after watching Chimamanda speak, I realized that it’s not really fair to label him, or anyone, as simply awful. The authoritative and abusive reign that he maintained over his family was in many ways awful, but he also did so many things in his life that weren’t awful, and were in fact quite wonderful.
I’m not trying to write a book report. I'm trying to emphasize how influential Adichie’s argument was for me in real life. Literature, generally speaking, provides one perspective; as a reader, it’s quite easy to base your opinions solely on the version of the story that the narrator presents, even though quite often, you don’t realize you’re doing so. But there is never one story, in literature or real life. There are always different factors that have been ignored, different views that position things entirely differently. And it’s not to say that nothing is bad and nobody is bad, ever. I have come to realize, however, that nothing can be only and completely bad.
It seems obvious, but it’s easy to forget that everyone has the capacity to think and formulate opinions, and accordingly, it’s impossible that everyone will have the same opinions. Morality is often treated as something that is concrete, but in reality, it’s fluid and different for every person and in every situation. I have no groundbreaking story about a situation in which I suddenly realized that I had fallen vulnerable to the single story, dramatically changing the course of my life. I don’t think that I now can or should excuse anything that I think is immoral because other people may define morality differently and therefore am not in a position to be offended by injustice. Opinions and beliefs are important and without them, we would never see progress. But I have realized how vital it is to be aware of the danger of the single story.
The single story is enticing. It looks immediately right, and it’s so easy. It’s the first thing you see, right there, waiting for you – in politics, in relationships, in anything. But if you look a little deeper, it becomes clear that there are so many other stories.
It’s essential to believe in something and have an opinion, but it’s important that your opinion is not based on solely your experience, because that limits you to making unfair assumptions and generalizations. That closes you off to, pardon the cliché, a world of possibility. When you fight for what you believe in without looking at other people, other stories – that, I think, is the root of bigotry and intolerance. Because everyone believes they are right, and the vast, vast majority of people have the capacity to think and feel things and formulate opinions. It’s easy to flagrantly wave the flag of your story without looking to see the others. But that leads you to misunderstand, to exclude, to offend.
Opinions and beliefs are powerful when they are based on the experiences and perspectives of many, not just your own. They’re stronger when you begin to realize that perhaps the most effective way to facilitate positive change is to step back and look at the whole situation; the best way to do something good in the world is to try and help as many people and include as many stories as possible. No matter how right you think you are, you will only go so far without stepping outside of your own world and looking fairly at someone else’s. Because the voice of inclusion and consideration, of many stories and people, is always much stronger than the ardent insistence of a few.
As Adichie so eloquently said, “Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and malign, but stories can also be used to empower and humanize…
When we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise.”
