One of the things we watched in one
of our early sessions preparing for the upcoming ELCA Youth Gathering in
Houston was called “The Danger of a Single Story,” a TED talk by Chimamanda
Ngozi. In her talk, Ngozi spoke of growing up in Nigeria where she had only
British books to read so that when she began to write fiction as a child she
would write about the kinds of things British people talked about—tea, the
weather, and the like. This story became her one story; never mind that that
story wasn’t even compatible with her own story.
We all do this when we learn things
for the first time. We mimic. Whether you are writing, doing art, making music,
or cooking the process is much the same; you watch and try to replicate those
who know how to do it. We all start with that single story—the first example of
what a thing is. This is true in every aspect of how we live our lives, and for
those of you who have, or have had, children you know this. Their little brains
just grab on to the one example—the first example—of a thing. But this is true
of us well into adulthood as well. In fact, it’s more persistent with adults,
because while we are just as susceptible to the single story as children our
brains are also much more set in their ways, so we are less able to detach from
that story, as children are.
An example: On our way to daycare
last week Natalie was upset with me because I was speaking Spanish to her. She
was wearing her nice, new Spanish dress her aunt and uncle gave her so I took
it as a cue to teach her a little Spanish, but she didn’t like that much. She
told me, “I don’t like Spanish, because I don’t speak it.” I’ve heard adults
use similar logic. So I told her, “Natalie, you can learn how to speak Spanish
just like you know how to speak English!” To which she replied, “What is
English?” There, in front of my eyes, her one story became many. By the time I
picked her up for dance class later in the day she was asking me how to say all
sorts of things in Spanish—things I had to Google because, frankly, I was
pretty rusty. By next week I’ll be asking her how to say things.
If you only know one story about English, or about race, or
about women, or about Jews or Palestinians, or about Liberals or
Conservatives—if you only have one story, you only have a starting point—and it
can be a terrible danger to live this way. It’s the easiest way to dehumanize
one another; to consider others beneath us. You can only do this if you have a
single story, because real people are much more complicated than all this.
This was a long intro to Pentecost, but I’m finally there.
