On the importance of stories, and the danger of The Story -- about anything.

[alfreda89]

The TED talks are generally wonderful -- they're considered ideas worth spreading. Here novelist Chimamanda Adichie speaks on the importance of stories -- and the danger of telling only a single story about any given group of people. It's wonderful, a must for any writer (a good general reminder of the danger of falling into A story about anyone or anything) and well worth your approximately 20 minutes. Thanks to janni and stinabat for discovering this one.

Comments

[treebyleaf.livejournal.com]

Finally found time to view this. Thank you for the post.

I was struck by the almost word-for-word resonance of the beginning with Deepad's seminal essay "I Didn't Dream of Dragons"... when children growing up in India and Nigeria are having identical experiences, we are CREATING a "single story".

The Other

[alfreda89.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link. The author addresses many important issues that I've been thinking about recently. This long interlude in my completed writing may bring forth some weird things, coming from an odd raised-white-Presbyterian woman who has realized recently that in a sense, we have had our own culture stripped from us -- because living in the USA, if you do not have an immediate, first or second generation alive and trying to help their children hang on to culture while finding their footing in American culture, then you have the melting pot.

I went way over the allowed verbiage answering you, so I pulled it out and will try to make a coherent post later this week. (Around other commitments -- eek -- which is why LJ has been neglected while I try to keep up at Book View Cafe.)

I remember reading Kate Seredy's books about pre-WW1 agrarian life in Hungary. I adored those books. But they were about the people my country had fought in that war. They were familiar in their family love, and foreign in many things. I thought a long time about The Singing Tree. I also found the above-my-age-grade books of Middle Earth at that time.

I won't go into depth here -- I am a person dealing with weird brain chemistry, and I really should think a long time before talking about all this -- but what a nine-year-old took from LoTR was that Ents were people, even if they looked different and acted different and spoke a beautiful language that was so complicated it might take the rest of a life to learn even some of it. I think that LoTR was where I started thinking about the Other.

And I did trace out all of Gandalf's order of wizards. And I did wonder about what the Green and Blue wizards were up to. Did The Matter of Middle-Earth touch them and the peoples they lived among? Was Tolkien going to write their stories, too? Or had creating a mythology for the British Isles been the limit of his interest?

It's part of what made me want to write. And why I read everything on other societies I could set my hand to. Because I wanted to tell stories -- and not just third generation Tolkien stories.

I think I need food, so I will vanish. Thanks again for the link -- I'll post it, too, if I can remember.

Hope you are well. It's been a long year, and I've been healing, not reaching out to see what others are up to. I hope the stories will be the better for my journey.

(I should say that I have only read deepad's "I didn't dream of dragons" first post here. I have not jumped into the 660+ comments to her interesting post.)

Re: The Other

[treebyleaf.livejournal.com]

You and I are in the same boat here-- sorry it's taken me this long to give you even a word of reply.

Worse than the melting pot, we have the *myth* of the melting pot-- we are taught that priviledge = potential = the right to choose and then we end up with the most priviledge members of the mainstream believing that culture is something other people have...

Sorry. Little time. Let's don't let this drop.

Re: The Other

[alfreda89.livejournal.com]

I left your other post screened because I didn't know if you wanted that email address out.

Life continues to be challenging! Hope things are good at your end --