(This is a critical response to Chimamanda Adichie's TED talk, which you can watch HERE.)
I was very struck by Chimamanda Adichie account of being an African girl growing up in a literary world of European characters and problems. I thought it was fascinating that a Nigerian girl would write stories like the European British books she reads, but of course it makes perfect sense. We imitate what we see, and books are our earliest teachers about what belongs in books. In a small way I can relate to Adichie, because my early stories were also populated with kids on a quest, speaking in the English accents I heard in my books on tape.
While Adichie's anecdote about her childhood expressions of writing is charming and innocent, it's also laced with a tinge of heartache when Adichie expresses her early understanding of books as things that had to be about foreigners. As a teacher, this reminds me of the great responsibility I possess to make sure my students have access to plenty of literature featuring characters like them. I like when Adichie discusses her mental shift in perception of literature and says “Girls like me… can also exist in literature”, and it's something I want to make sure all of my students grow up knowing. In my ever-expanding personal library, it's important I keep a keen eye out for books about characters of all flesh-tones, income levels, genders, family-types, and religions. I want to make sure my students know from the beginning that their worlds are worthy of writing about and books can feature people from all walks of life.
When Adichie started discussing her childhood understanding of her family's servants as "poor," my mind instantly snapped back to Joyce King and her work on the African American narrative. Really what Adichie describes is a "poor" narrative, similar to Joyce's African American one, that through society's unquestioning acceptance of it, actually serves to dehumanize and undermine the progress of the people it represents. Adichie calls "pity" a "dangerous emotion", which led me on a whole spiral of my own reflections based on this assertion. I think I understand what Adichie means. While well intentioned, pity does not come from a place of seeking greater understanding or seeking to change, but rather of recognizing an "otherness" from yourself. The object of pity is something that lacks its own agency and cannot act on its own to change its situation. This is why the beautiful basket made by the poor family surprised Adichie so much, because their ability to work and create something contradicts the poor narrative that Adichie had accepted, and also challenged her pity. In another way, pitying another is also a way of accepting the status-quo; it's acknowledging your own helplessness to bring about change and indirectly choosing to do nothing rather than work for change. I think Paolo Freire has also reflected on the danger of pity, and he nods his head along with Adichie when he says that “Pedagogy which begins with the egoistic interests of the
oppressors (an egoism cloaked in the false generosity of paternalism) and makes
of the oppressed the objects of its humanitarianism, itself maintains and
embodies oppression” (Freire, 1970, p.54).
When Adichie describes being on the other end of that pity when she went away to school, I made a connection to my own experiences and values about education. Mainly, that children should be taught about other cultures and languages, and if at all possible, enabled to spend time immersed in a way of life different from the one they grew up with. I know that this is only possible for a lucky few, but it is one of my goals in the future to work to provide more people from different incomes the opportunity to have this type of experience. Adichie is a perfect example of what it can do for a person's mindset and understanding of the world, as her experience being a foreigner helped her see her own thinking in a new light, and change her perceptions for the better. My mom has told me my whole life about how we all have our subconscious biases, and some of our life's work is to figure out what those are and confront them. Adichie adds that these biases stem from stories we’ve
grown up hearing. As she so eloquently puts it, “show a people as one thing over and over and that’s what
they become.” I've thought about this in the classroom when I represent other cultures and ways of life. I'm constantly wondering if I am presenting a three dimensional picture, or accidentally straying into stereotypes or repetitive stories like the ones Adichie finds to be so dangerous. I remember when I was growing up, I was surprised to learn that Native Americans today typically don't run barefoot in the woods communing with deer spirits. I think this is an example of what Adichie is talking about, as I only heard one type of story about these people and this compartmentalized them in my mind as these mystical "others" from another time and place, without considering who and where these very real people are today.
Adichie says that a “single story… robs people of their humanity" but also that stories can be used to empower. I think this is where the teacher comes in. By constantly helping children to think critically about the stories they are told, and to ask more questions about who is telling and why, the dangerous "one" stories will begin to lose their power. Through critical literacy, I think it's possible for a teacher to help bring up a generation of people who never accept a single story about anything, and perhaps even "regain paradise" as Adichie hopes.
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