The celebrated Nigerian storyteller Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has warned us of the dangers of the ‘single story’. Her warning relates to how stories of ‘Africa’ have reduced the people, history, and culture of that rich and complex continent to a single and overwhelmingly negative story.
That reductionist story is not only ignorant, but also unjust. It short-changes everyone, including those of us not of that continent. Crudely, it deforms our understanding, our responses and often our behaviour. Africa and Africans cease to be a real place inhabited by real people and instead become a set of stereotypical, frequently convenient myths.
Adichie links the issue to the question of power and power relations and structures through the use of the Igbo word ‘nkali’, which loosely translates as ‘to be greater than another’. She notes that power relations imply the capacity not just to tell a single story of a person or place, but to make that story the dominant and widespread story believed by very many.
Single storytelling elevates and consolidates ignorance often with negative and violent consequences for its victims.
Such is the current state of much thinking (and behaviour) in Malta about ‘Africa’ and ‘Africans’. Sadly, Malta and the Maltese are the real losers in this equation, as is evident every time our prime minister speaks at the United Nations.
I grew up in Ireland, a land dominated by such single stories. I went to a school largely animated by a set of single stories. As a family member, I attended a church convinced of a set of single stories. My early years were a litany of learned, repeated and usually unchallenged single stories. Stories about faith and belief, identity and culture, nationalism and freedom, discipline and respect and the place of women in society and in the life of the nation.
Ultimately, it was a deformed and deforming story about what it meant to be Irish and to be Irish in the wider world. It was a narrowing and restricting story rather than one of emancipation and human development.
Such Irish single storytelling had immense and destructive consequences as evidenced in, for example, Northern Ireland, decades of child abuse, and the denial of effective equality.
Ireland has learned so much about the limitations and dangers of dominant single stories – of nationalism and ‘heroic’ struggle, of the power and impact of ideology and violence, of women, their history, and their role, of sexuality, of religious faith etc. We have also learned about the complexity and limitations of the nation state and about the dangers it can pose. Also about many paramount world challenges and our ever-changing relations with them.
Above all, Ireland has benefitted hugely from dropping the ‘single story’ frame of reference. Ireland is now a much more interesting, diverse, confident, and yet challenging place. 20% of our population is of ‘foreign’ origin and we are much the richer for it. Despite the many challenges associated with our ‘new’ demography, evidence suggests that only a small minority would wish to return to the traditional ‘single story’.
Much of what we have ‘lost’ was worth losing (in fact it was vital that it be lost) and much of what we have gained we badly needed to gain.
To be Irish today is no longer to be only white, Christian, and ‘straight’ but also black, brown, Muslim, Hindu, gay etc. Our society, culture and economy depend (even flourish) on that rich diversity – in health, education, agriculture, the arts, sport, construction, technology etc.
At present, it is increasingly popular to declare that multiculturalism (yet alone interculturalism) has failed, even as those rushing to declare its demise depend heavily on it or even embody it (as in the UK, US and even Malta).
Adopting single dominant storytelling (especially the zero sum equation of ‘us’ versus ‘them’) as a means of prospering in the world today is a doomed project especially for those framing it.