This is a very good speech by Nigerian writer Chimamanda Adichie. She makes many beautifully poignant & sometimes anecdotal observations worthy of contemplation. I was reminded of something Malcolm X said in a speech some time ago that still resonates today:
“It”s good to keep wide-open ears and listen to what everybody else has to say, but when you come to make a decision, you have to weigh all of what you”ve heard on its own, and place it where it belongs, and come to a decision for yourself; you”ll never regret it. But if you form the habit of taking what someone else says about a thing without checking it out for yourself, you”ll find that other people will have you hating your friends and loving your enemies.”
It's 2011 yet folks are still stuck in a one dimensional mindset. It appears as if everything is taken at face value--absolutely no room for complexity or other stories & interpretations. Deep reading has become as outdated as a Betamax or a portable transistor radio. TMZ (and other gossip outlets) & most mainstream media outlets have become the one-track diversionary fixation. This is the danger.
Chimamanda Adichie observed that power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person. Many people have relinquished their power to think for themselves & tell their own stories in their authentic voices. She quotes Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti who wrote that if you want to dispossess a people, the simplest way to do it is to tell their story, and to start with, "secondly." Start the story with the arrows of the Native Americans, and not with the arrival of the British, and you have an entirely different story. Start the story with the failure of the African state, and not with the colonial creation of the African state, and you have an entirely different story.
She concludes in this remarkable speech the following :
"When we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place (or people), we regain a kind of paradise."
Beautiful!!
OneLove
:::MME:::
