Reflection on the danger of a single story by Chimamanda Adichie

cc wilkernet

I have recently enrolled in the course Equality Unbounded (#unboundeq) organised by Maha Bali, Catherine Cronin and Mia Zamora.

One of the first tasks in this course is to watch Chimamanda Adichie's 'The danger of a single story' TED talk and reflect on it. Since I watched it yesterday for the like 100th time, there are two thoughts that have come to my mind, that kind of challenge the danger of a single story.

But first let me say it out loud: I love the talk, I love Chimamanda's books (I think I have read all of them) - I am huge fan. I have used her talk in many ways in my work here in South Africa, it speaks directly to the digital storytelling work we are doing, aimed at creating spaces for students to share their stories and learn about self and other in the process. One of the most interesting project was one that I did with my American colleague Kristi Stewart, from the University of Michigan-Dearborn. In this project, we brought South African and American students together into a shared Facebook group, to, while following a similar digital storytelling curriculum built around the danger of a single story, unpack and challenge some of their assumptions about the other and share their many stories. We reflected on these experiences here.

However since yesterday there are two points that have been come up for me. The first one is around the importance of the single story (in some contexts). I recently took part in a book project on feminism and intersectionality in academia. While the focus of this book was intersectionality, I decided that in my chapter on white allyship in higher education, I would focus on one story only, my Whiteness. I argued my case in the following way: 'I understand that gender can allow women—in particular white women—to hide behind their own oppression in relation to patriarchy, rather than addressing their own personal racism. As such as a focus on intersectionality can be a form of what DiAngelo calls white fragility, if not checked properly. Similarly, what we also learnt is the importance of a women-only group, to establish trust and solidarity, but also to be able to focus on race, rather than be compromised by other power dynamics such as female/male hierarchies. This is why this chapter emphasises racial rather than for example gender or class oppression. It focuses on my role as white ally, rather than as a white female ally, as this is where I feel I learnt the most, although I see gender oppression in academia as real and important to unpack.' So in some ways by doing so I argue that using a single story strategically is useful sometimes.

The second point is more difficult to formulate. I have recently visited home, which is Vienna, Austria. In previous stays I found it difficult to communicate my work, which focuses on an engagement across difference here in South Africa, to my friends and family. There just never seemed any interest or understanding. There was politeness, but no real conversation around these issues. I always felt that Austria is this bubble of privilege which needs to finally pop. And in some ways popped it has. With the new conservative, right wing government, that was elected last year, the public discourse has changed dramatically and my 'liberal' friends have suddenly become politicised. And this has changed the kind of conversations I have had during my latest stay. What dominated debates is the immigration question, which the current government based his election campaign on. 

Shortly before I arrived a book had hit the book stores, entitled 'Kulturkampf im Klassenzimmer - wie der Islam die Schulen veraendert' (Culture wars in the classroom - how the Islam changes schools). This book was a huge success and sold out within a weekend and seems to speak to one of the deepest fears of a large number of the population  - being taken over by the 'Turks' - a fear that has longstanding historical roots and seems to have left considerable damage to the Viennese psyche. What keeps me coming back to this book, which I usually would stay away from, is the author's question around how many stories one can hold, how many borders one can cross in one classroom, one space? (There is a friend who told me she knows a teacher who teaches 13 different ethnicities in one class, some of them currently at war).  Is there a possibility of having too many stories to work with? How many stories are too many?  Reflecting on this while reading Linda Mounzer's article on translating war: women's voices from Syria is particularly difficult. She describes the weight of witnessing beautifully:  'As if the act of bearing witness, followed to the end of one of its branches, snaps under the weight of what is seen, and you fall to your death. As if to die for a cause in Arabic is to bear witness to something until it annihilates the self.'

I also discovered neuroscientist Joachim Bauer's Schmerzgrenze during this trip. Schmerzgrenze can be loosely translated into 'pain threshold'. He challenges Freud's belief that humans are inherently aggressive by showing human beings primary motivation and desire is belonging. He argues that one needs to experience physical or emotional pain to turn aggressive or violent. Unequal conditions lower this pain threshold. In his book he foregrounds the importance to recognise and work with individual and collective 'Schmerzgrenzen' in order to prevent individual and collective humiliation which can lead to war and aggression and to work on decreasing global inequalities. This is a hopeful approach and one that could be interesting to unpack in programmes that would for example prepare teachers to engage with the multiple religious, cultural, ethic, language differences they encounter today not only in Viennese classrooms but all over the world.