In her TED talk “The danger of a single story”, Chimamanda Adichie talks about Fide, her childhood house boy. She was told by her mother that Fide’s family was very poor, and was therefore surprised when she visited Fide’s house and was shown a beautiful basket made by Fide’s brother. Because in her mind Fide was poor and nothing else, she didn’t think that they could actually produce something. She says, “All I had heard about them was how poor they were, so that it had become impossible for me to see them as anything else but poor. Their poverty was my single story of them.” This shows that having single stories about something or someone hinders the possibility of them being anything other than that, which results in a very biased view about them. Also, having a single story about someone gives power over them because then their other stories are eliminated, which leads to a sort of objectification as the person becomes that single story itself. The person is therefore deprived of their actual being and an imbalance of power is created.
Two pieces of short fiction which zoom in on the topic of single story and power are A Private Experience and A Word from the Nearly Distant Past. A Private Experience by Chimamanda Adichie is a short story about Chika, a wealthy young Igbo Christian woman caught in a violent riot, who hides in an empty small shop with a Hausa Muslim woman who has lead her to safety. The other woman is obviously not as wealthy as her and Chika is unconsciously looking down on her. A Word from the Nearly Distant Past by David Levithan is a short story portraying the various happinesses that can be found in a gay teenager’s life. By shining light on this positive side, Levithan aims to undo the typical view that it is difficult for people who are gay to find happiness. Both of these works allow us to become conscious of our daily single stories through very different lenses.
Literature is often directed at a particular audience group to whom the author wants the message to get to the most. I feel that A Private Experience is directed more towards people in the role of Adichie, and A Word from the Nearly Distant Past towards people in the role of Fide. Adichie was the one who single-storied her house boy, being the more fortunate and the more powerful of the two. Fide was the one who was being single-storied, being the less fortunate and less powerful of the two. By targeting different audiences, the two writers try to get a message across to those who must become conscious of their daily single-storying and to those who must stop single-storying themselves.
In A Private Experience, Chika has a single story about the woman she is hiding with. Judging by the woman’s cheap-looking scarf and Hausa accent, Chika assumes that she is undereducated and poor. This single story is clear when “Chika wonders if the woman even knows what going to university means”. This shows Chika’s assumption that the woman is not well-educated and does not know much about the upper-class world. Furthermore, in this passage where the two have just entered the shop for shelter and the Hausa woman notices that she has lost her necklace while running from the riot; “The woman sighs and Chika imagines that she is thinking of her necklace, probably plastic beads threaded on a piece of string.” Before she thinks this, Chika has thought back to her Burberry handbag which she had dropped while running. Chika’s assumption that the woman’s necklace couldn’t be anything valuable proves Chika’s strong single story about this woman.
As shown in these examples, a single story creates an imbalance in power. When Chika had the single story about the Hausa woman, she had power over her, because in Chika’s mind, the woman became “a poor, undereducated person” and nothing else. This power affected the way Chika treated the Hausa woman. When the woman asks Chika about her aching nipples, Chika lies that she learned about how to treat it when her mother got the same condition, as opposed to telling her that she learned about it in her medical school. Chika does this because she assumes that the concept of a medical school will be too difficult for the Hausa woman to understand. Also, when the woman is telling Chika about her missing daughter, Chika acts less intelligent than she is and asks the woman questions she already knows the answers to. “‘The baby?’ Chika asks, knowing how stupid she sounds even as she asks.” This is the result of Chika’s unconscious thinking, and it is similar to the way an adult might ask a child ‘What’s this?’ while pointing at a crayon drawing of an animal which is obviously an elephant. We see such examples of power often with medical issues, where a doctor might keep news of their cancer from old people under the assumption that they will not be able to comprehend their medical state, or the way a doctor will tell a child’s parents about the child’s cancer, but not the child her/himself. When a person’s single story is that someone else is “undereducated”, people might keep things from them that are assumed to be too complicated. This can be problematic because knowledge is something that everyone has a right to and when someone knows something that others don’t, it creates an imbalance of power.
Some might argue that Chika’s actions are a result of her good intentions; she was trying to use easy concepts for this unfortunate woman, she was never looking down on her plastic necklace and respected her loss. It is true that the single story she had of the Hausa woman was unintentional, but it could’ve been prevented if Chika had not made assumptions to go with that single story.
Oftentimes when we have single stories about others, it is not the result of a malicious intention. We have idealized norms which are forced upon us by society’s standards and when we see someone who does not fit into these norms, they instantly become an aberration, making that their strongest label. It is near impossible to erase these norms that are so closely entwined to our society, but it is indeed very possible to prevent ourselves from having single stories about others; all we have to do is allow ourselves to get to know them better.
In his short story “A Word from the Nearly Distant Past”, Levithan shines light on the many different ways that people who are gay find happiness, and how the world has changed drastically and positively to a more accepting world. Levithan writes, “Neil has a DVD, two bottles of Diet Dr Pepper, cookie dough, and a book of Mark Doty poems in his backpack. This — and Peter — is all it takes for him to feel profoundly lucky.” This sounds very much like the life of a normal teenage boy, and if we switched Peter’s name into Alison, we won’t have a clue that this was written in the perspective of a gay boy. Through this happily depicted seemingly ordinary scene, Levithan aims to loosen the stereotypical views of a gay boy’s lifestyle. We tend to have this single story about people who are gay: they face bullying and are discriminated and it is hard for them to find happiness.
Adichie’s single story of Fide is very similar; this single story comes from things we’ve heard or seen, and we make assumptions based on that limited knowledge. Of course, it is harder for people who are gay to express their love openly without catching more than a few uneasy glances, and some have hard times accepting their identity. However, when this negative side becomes the sole definition of being gay, as poverty did for Fide’s family in Adichie’s case, it sets yet another barrier for people who are gay, in which they have to overcome that automatic pity which is cast on them. By depicting positive aspects of being gay, Levithan strives to show that gay teens can find happiness, just like all straight teens can. That gay teens have a lot more freedom than the straight teens think, and that the world today has gotten so much closer to equality between sexual identities than just twenty years ago.
It is important for Levithan to produce such pieces of writing because many gay teens out there have that single story about themselves, too: I’ll be discriminated and bullied and I won’t find happiness. Through this story Levithan, while calling out to straight teens with single stories of gay teens, also calls out to gay teens with single stories about themselves by showing them that, no, you will find happiness, you will be able to love yourself the way you are, if only you allow yourself.
By looking at these two pieces of writing together along with Adichie’s TED talk, we can clearly see the different aspects of single-storying and being single-storied. Through reading two stories that are directed towards two sides of an issue, the reader realizes things they would never have realized had they not compared the two pieces of literature. When we look from different perspectives of single stories, we come to understand that although it is usually not the malicious intention of the ‘Adichie’, it creates an imbalance of power towards the ‘Fide’. The two authors never say that it is ‘bad’ to have a single story about someone or something, and this is because it is very difficult not to have single stories. It is impossible to know all sides of a story and even more so to prevent ourselves from being slightly judgmental. However, I believe that it is very much possible to keep a distance from single-storying and being single-storied. We must get to know a person well before judging them, and we must become conscious of our unconscious single stories.
