Nigerian novelist/writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie‘s writings are among the many good works that present stories of difference. In the video here, she gives a fantastic talk about how multiple stories of one subject, are important in how we may interact/not interact with that subject; perhaps in a more thoughtful or just way, ideally, than approaching a subject with a single story in conscious/unconscious mind.
This is an important point which I, in its basic way, agree with. We are multiple, we are not singular. Our stories have multiple points and trajectories, multiple positions from which we come to life and how our stories are told to self and other, can determine many attitudes and opinions and processes. If our multiple-ness, is taken into account, then perhaps there is more patience, more reflection and pause, more of a place from which to engage other, perhaps understand positions in relation to culture and oppression, resistance and heritage, privilege and sorrows, joys and questions. Single stories do cut-off history, cut-off political positions brought on through histories, cut-off the circulation of the realities of life and its movements in time and change. Multiple stories may open avenues in taking these into account.
This being said, I have a critique of one aspect that may come up in listening to, seeing, and engaging this talk which is so eloquently spoken. It is what I have mentioned before in my blog posts, and through which I speak on practically every post. It is this question of how to accept/not accept: Difference. I do not say that Chimamanda Adichie means one thing or another, but I am certainly opening up a discussion about how she approaches the topic of difference. She says that people often have single stories and this closes a ‘fuller’ understanding or the realization of the similarities between people, communities and cultures. She then goes on to say that people have more similarities than differences and there is an assumption that this is ‘better’ or that it is a fact of life that there are more similarities, which means this is more positive. I am not sure that she means this exactly, but this is certainly one way in which Chimamanda Adichie speaks to the difference/similarities dynamic. I say that this ‘similarities and differences’ polarity is not eternal, or a set of natural ‘facts’ and that this similarity that is so often prioritized in the world, is not positive necessarily. To put it another way, I think that valorizing similarities is an act that can legitimize violence based on difference, with the matter of sameness and similarity being measured and applied as criteria for treating someone or a group or thing, with respect or dignity. This is a problem with liberal thinking as well as conservative in the United States.
The measure of similarity and sameness should NOT be a criteria for measuring respect or how we treat someone or culture or community or history, or how we approach avenues for engagement and/or understanding. Not understanding should be just as much of a pleasure and accepted space. In fact, the reason there are more similarities today than ever before, is that there is less diversity. One can go to any scientific journal and there, it is no secret. There are extinctions in progress, as well as less species of most of the beings on this earth, as human beings increase their numbers. There is less diversity not just because of over-population. I say there is less diversity because of neo-colonization– i.e. globalization, which is an extension of colonial expansionism and what goes along with it in the nation-state system: homogenization. Everything is become more of the same. This sameness has been constructed through history through the colonization of minds and lands, cultures and ideas, killing, torture, coercion and manipulation and exclusion through laws, textbooks, military weapons, covert agents amidst cultures, educational policies, judicial systems, and everything else we know to be our reality. Assimilation and exclusion have worked hand-in-hand in order to create national cultures in the global system. This is a continuation of the colonization process. Difference can only be understood. It cannot be different and not understandable. This is the reason we must experiment on people and animals, develop stories around them that make scientists and counselors wealthy and create medicines and psychologies that deem certain things abnormal, inexcusable, sad and assimilatable, or wrong. Learning to question ourselves and others become wrong. It is now normal to think of everything as right and wrong, good and bad. We either know, or are embarassed to say we don’t know. Or we just repeat what our elders and teachers have taught us, or our parents, or our own reactions to what they’ve said because we have hated them. In any case, our perceptions of reality do not accept difference as well as we would like. So if we are to follow Chimamanda Adichie’s path, we come to the same tactic of exclusion and marginalization. There is not acceptance of difference if we only look for and fetishize ‘similarity.’ Looking for a mirror in others is a sure way to the death or invisibility of both yourself and other.
You can do your own experiment. For instance, go through the history books of practically any culture group through history and pick out pictures of soldiers and their uniforms over time. So start with pictures and drawings of how soldiers in Turkey or in Guatemala or in China or England looked in the 12th century, the 14th century, then the 17th century, the 19th century, the 20th century early and late and in the present. See what the uniforms look like for each country. You can do this with several other aspects of life as well, such as clothing, in general, or food, etc. The affluent people from various cultures around the world starting in the 12th century to the present should confirm what I get at. It will not be the ‘same’ in every case. But there is certainly a pattern. And do we excuse this as ‘evolution’ and ‘progress?’ Shall we now have to look at who used these terms ‘evolution’ and ‘progress’ and address and analyze for ‘what purpose’ these terms were used and how they were used to subjugate and annihilate?
So I disagree with the tone and assumption that Chimamanda Adichie brings in speaking to the issue of single versus multiple stories. I like how she approaches the subject and explains it. I do not agree with her notions of making sameness and similarity a criteria for harmony or a reason to let alone and not molest or control. Isn’t that the reason colonization was justified in the first place? Why genocide is justified from its beginnings in massacres and to the present day? Is our understanding a criteria for killing and maiming, manipulating and giving permission to change the other? However, I do not condone unethical behaviors and traditions so do not say I condone things like female circumcision and other such things. However, I do not believe that not understanding someone or some culture group or tradition or history, means that we must. In order to do this, we must co-opt ‘the other’ into our own understanding. There are differences. Why are we so afraid of non-difference (irreconcilable differences that is further than what we think about as ‘different’)? It speaks more about us than of the other.
So this wonderful talk with fantastic, lucid points about history, education, power, and relations, is as is everything, multiple. I only take issue with the will to incorporate other into an understanding that allows us to be at peace with difference. In that instant, we are even further apart and alienated. And in our present climate, this would give a legitimate go-ahead for a take-over and a make-over; violence as some normal activity. It is a something we need to de-colonize in our thinking.
In relation to the subject matter and analyzing content while appreciating, we must also look at where this video rests. It rests in the TED site. If one has so much money behind it, so much corporate connection, then we must also think of it as towing mainstream thoughts in some ways, perhaps in subtle ways in more of the radical thinking. Let us not be mistaken, this is not a radical change site. It gives comfortable, informative, interesting, and safe thoughts. For instance, for as much great things Al Gore has done in warning the public about Global warming, he does not touch his constituency, his ‘group’ and friends, who have been the ones to engineer the human quotient and engines to the destruction of our ecology. Until he himself becomes radicalized, he keeps himself and our elites and our patriotisms comfortable, continuing the invisible domination by elitism and privilege without a shift in thinking.
And with all this, I highly recommend this wonderful talk that pushes mainstream thought to the edges of history, colonization of the mind, forgetting, education, nation-state and cultural/historical difference. Critique is not about excluding and putting down, it is about analyzing its various positions, approaches, assumptions, possibilities reached for freedom and creativity, aspects that need further investigation, etc. Enjoy, think, appreciate, change!
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie website: http://www.l3.ulg.ac.be/adichie/
TED (technology-education-design): Remarkable Talks site: http://www.ted.com/
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