[2023-03-22] When one story becomes the only story

I had a conversation with someone today in which I said, "The problem is when one story becomes the only story." I remembered having heard that somewhere, though exactly where I couldn't recall at the time.

So I searched and found that it had come from a TED Talk by Nigerian-born novelist Chimamanda Adichie: The danger of a single story.

As she explains in her TED Talk, Chimamanda read British and American children's books when she was young. When she started writing stories, her characters were white, blue-eyed children who played in the snow, ate apples and talked about the weather, none of which reflected her reality. It wasn't until she started reading Nigerian and African authors that she realized that people like her—"girls with skin the color of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails"—could also exist in literature.

When she moved to the United States to attend university, her roommate had a single story of Africa, one of catastrophe. Chimamanda acknowledges that if she hadn't grown up in Nigeria and if everything she had known of Africa had come from popular images, she too would have thought that "Africa was a place of beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals, and incomprehensible people, fighting senseless wars, dying of poverty and AIDS, unable to speak for themselves and waiting to be saved by a kind, white foreigner."

Chimamanda then makes the statement that I found so insightful:

The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.

How often do we hear a story but conclude that it is the story?

Chimamanda notes the importance of many stories. My story of coping with cancer has value in itself, but it's even more valuable when included within an entire library of such stories—all different. Yesterday, a friend sent me a link to a story about tennis superstar Martina Navratilova who just announced that she is cancer free, three months after revealing that she had throat and breast cancer. Such stories remind us that—more often than not—people recover after cancer treatment.

Chimamanda concludes her TED Talk by saying: "Stories matter. Many stories matter."

The more diverse those stories are, the less likely that one story will be perceived as the only story.