Single Story Narratives
So I came across this speech on ted.com given by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, (try saying that three times fast) about the danger of single story narratives. For those of you who are unfamiliar with her work, she is Nigeria
n and educated in the United States. Adichie is the author of The Thing Around Your Neck and Half of a Yellow Sun. In her talk she tells a story about her American roommate who asked to listen to some of Adichie’s music. Adichie lends the roommate her Mariah Carrey CD and the roommate is disappointed that it wasn’t a collection of tribal chanting and is amazed that Adichie speaks English.
Adichie goes on to say that she understand why Americans expect things like this from people from Africa. All we see are the stories about Darfur and the late night commercials begging for money for starving children with no drinking water. She says that because of these impressions, when she writes her characters, who are primarily Nigerian, if they don’t act like what we see on TV, people question their authenticity. This got me thinking about how much we actually rely on these single story narratives of different communities to develop characters. Irish people drink a lot and are forced into marriages because they get knocked up. New Yorkers are loud and entertaining. People from the South are fat and jolly. Japanese people are polite and cold. It goes on and on. I see many authors, even authors from the communities they are trying to mimic, pulling from these stereotypes and doing it successfully, at least in my opinion. While I see Adichie’s point, it is probably most of the time a complete misrepresentation of people. But does that make it invalid or less significant? Is it just lazy character design? Or does it mean that it really is impossible to get into someone else’s head if we haven’t lived in a world just like the one we are trying to create?
What does that mean for people who come from boring parts of the world and from communities where, for the most part, life was happy and boring? Does that mean we can never reach that higher level of truth in a story that just gives you goosebumps? I guess I always believed that people are people no matter where. That basically we are more similar than we are different and the main differences are the pressures we have on us and that we can get close enough with research that the rest doesn’t matter. I know that many writers tend to write kind of what they know and there is nothing wrong with that but I’d be interested how many people have really tried to write in a world they are unfamiliar with and how they were successful or how they failed.
Check out Adichie’s speech:
This sounds absolutely fascinating. I haven’t listened to her talk yet, but it occurs to me that one of the most interesting places you can go with a story lies at the boundaries between expected and unexpected. So, an African lass who listens to Mariah Carey, my teetotaling Irish friend, the shy New Yorker (ok, that would have to be fiction), a healthy southerner, or an empathetic and bold Japanese person. (Presumably like in Heroes or Captain Planet. Wait. Maybe he’s Korean.)
That’s an interesting story back-drop and a character-based one, not a location-based one.
Of course, I’m not a writer.