The single story
We need to sit with stories that resist easy categorization, stories that make us question the official narratives, no matter where we happen to fall in them.
In 2009, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie delivered her famous TED talk entitled, “The Danger of a Single Story,” which discussed the problematic nature of reducing human beings and cultures to a single narrative. She talked about negotiating her own African identity in cultural contexts that often only countenanced a single narrative of what it meant to be African. For so many, Africans were poor and they were victims (of corruption or famine or war or some other combination of circumstances). This was just what it meant to be African. There was no room for anything else in the story. No room for an African who wasn’t poor or a victim or in need of Western aid. No room for her.
I think Adichie identifies something crucial (and virtually ineradicable) about human beings and how we think about the world. We are constantly drawn to the single story. Reality is complex. Identity is complex. Every story is a combination of history and sociology and biology and anthropology and psychology and, yes, often even theology. The story of who we are and what we do and how we arrived where we are is an incredibly complicated and nuanced one. But we human beings don’t always do complicated and nuanced very well. We don’t have the time or the inclination to dig into the whole story. We prefer clear, simple, understandable categories. The single story is easier, whether we’re talking about race or sexuality or this or that social problem or church dynamics or whatever. So the single story is the story we tell.
Recently I came across a CBC article called “Uprooted” that, in my view, admirably resists the temptation of telling a single story. The author, Terry Roberts, tells the tale of the tiny town of Roddickton, Newfoundland, which has over the last decade or so become a kind of home for numerous indigenous children from Nain, Labrador (nearly 1600 km away). As of December, according to government statistics, there were 45 foster homes in the area, caring for 55 indigenous children. A combination of addictions and inadequate housing and poor social support had led to these children ending up with social services and, eventually, foster care.
