Nigerian author Chimamanda Adichie believes in the power of stories, and warns that hearing only one about a people or nation leads to ignorance. She says the truth is revealed by many tales.She illustrates this with a story about coming to the United States, as a middle-class daughter of a professor and an administrator, and meeting her college roommate. Adichie says that her roommate's "default position toward me, as an African, was a kind of patronizing, well-meaning, pity. My roommate had a single story of Africa. A single story of catastrophe."
(From: http://articles.cnn.com/2009-12-21/opinion/ted.talk.adichie.excerpt_1_roommate-story-random-house?_s=PM:OPINION)
Today, in drama class, we watched Chimamanda Adichie's powerful TED Talk on The Danger of a Single Story. (You can access the talk here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9Ihs241zeg)
The implications of Adichie's talk in terms of acting - creating a character, mounting a show - as well as our work in drama class and in terms of our lives in general, are broad. When we determine a person - place, thing, or situation - as being just one way and only that which we - from our perspective - see and/or understand, we limit that person (place, thing, or situation) as well as ourselves. We only allow for part of the story. It is only in digging deeper, being open to learn more - or simply to be aware that there may be more - that we can come to know the bigger story, whether it is fiction or non-fiction. Whether it is about people we know or characters we are creating. As Adichie explains, we rob people of their dignity when we only know their single story. We restore dignity by acknowledging we are all made up of many stories.
