How Do You Tell Your Story?
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
May 23, 2021
Chimamanda Adichie came to the United States from her homeland of Nigeria in order to attend college, first at Drexel University and then at Eastern Connecticut State University. Graduate degrees followed – Johns Hopkins, and Yale, and she has emerged as a stellar, award-winning author. Her books include Americanah, the story of her adjustment to life in the United States, where she encountered racism for the first time.
Chimamanda Adichie had some surprises in store for her when she came to the United States, that she recounts in a TED talk called “The Danger of a Single Story.” She was surprised to learn that her roommate assumed that she would be unable to speak flawless English, and that she wouldn’t know how to use a stove. The roommate felt sorry for this African girl before she ever met her. She asked Adichie to play some of her tribal music and was even more surprised when Adichie put on a tape of Mariah Carey.
We hear so many stories that are one-dimensional, and incomplete. We hear of an Africa of safaris, incredible wildlife, and landscapes, and people who only live in tribal villages. We don’t know much about their cities, and how the people actually live and work. How much we do not understand. How dangerous this is.
Chimamanda Adichie went on to tell the story of a certain professor, who read her first novel and told her that it was not authentically African. I’ll let her describe this moment in her own words: “Now, I was quite willing to contend that there were a number of things wrong with the novel, that it had failed in a number of places, but I had not quite imagined that it had failed at achieving something called African authenticity. In fact, I did not know what African authenticity was. The professor told me that my characters were too much like him, an educated and middle-class man. My characters drove cars. They were not starving. Therefore, they were not authentically African.” TED Talk, https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story/transcript?nolanguage=en%3Futm_source%3Dtedcomshare
Clearly the professor, a learned man, only had ever encountered a single story about Africa. He could not see that giant continent as multi-dimensional, with cities, and educational opportunities, and wealth. Holding on to a single story can be dangerous.
Because we tend to hear only one-dimensional stories, there is so much about the lives of other people that we simply do not know, do not understand. This past Thursday evening, nine of us gathered on Zoom to discuss the book, The Warmth of Other Suns, which tells the stories of some of the Black migrants from the American South to Northern cities in the 20th century. It turns out that this migration, one of the largest ever in human history, went largely unnoticed by much of the White population. It was a story, like so many, that was hidden in plain sight. Talking together, we used words like ‘embarrassed’ to describe how little we knew about this huge movement in American history. I learned how much I have misinterpreted the reasons for the Great Migration. I always thought of it as an attempt to find better jobs and housing. I was unaware of the danger faced daily by Black people: the constant threat of lynching, the utter lack of justice, the complete lack of freedom to make choices, to live the lives they wanted. The desperation went far beyond simply wanting better economic opportunities, and in my lack of knowledge of the full story, I downplayed the enormity of the repression exacted upon Black people. In many, many cases, people fled for their very lives, sneaking to train stations in the night, not telling anyone they were leaving. But we didn’t know much about this story behind the story, and our understanding was not complete.
To listen to another, unfamiliar story, to be willing to engage with often uncomfortable truths, to not be afraid of what we might learn, offers us so much knowledge and insight into the lives of other people. We open ourselves up to other stories, other narratives, and come to see that we have only known small parts of the truth of others. The ability to open ourselves, to confront our ignorance, is what helps us to grow and to change. Keeping only one story in our minds: for example, that southern Blacks were only seeking better jobs, or that Nigerians don’t drive cars or speak English, diminishes us all. The danger is that it keeps us from connecting.
Human lives are made of stories. We tell stories to explain the world, such as the creation stories we’ve been exploring this month. The sun is a god that travels in a boat across the sky. We tell stories to create meaning – what happens when we die? We tell stories to create a culture, and our place in it – America as a place where people can succeed, where anyone can become president, where prosperity is available for all: a car in every garage and a chicken in every pot.
And of course, we create stories of our own lives. Over the past 30 years or so, researchers have become more and more interested in the concept of ‘narrative psychology’ – the idea that we deal with our experiences throughout our lives by weaving together a narrative of events and emotions to give us a sense of where we’re headed. And it turns out that the stories we create become an important part of our personalities.
We tend to begin this process of constructing our narratives – our stories – in adolescence. We weave in aspects of our childhoods that help define ourselves – perhaps you are the child of alcoholics, for example. Perhaps you remember your childhood as happy and peaceful, or perhaps a time of violence, or poverty. What sense do you make of that as you grow older?
The danger, again, is that by staying within one view of our lives – say, the unhappy childhood, we can end up trapping ourselves. Perhaps we perpetually see ourselves as victims. Perhaps we stop believing that we can ever be happy.
As we grow older, we make meaning by comparing our stories as they unfold to the larger stories of the culture. Here’s an example: there is a ‘master narrative’ in this country that tells us the arc of our lives should include going to school, graduating, getting a first job and then increasingly better jobs, falling in love and marrying, and raising children. But what happens if we don’t quite measure up to that master narrative? Are we failures?
Julie Beck, writing in The Atlantic, had this to say: “But the downsides of standard narratives have been well-documented—they stigmatize anyone who doesn’t follow them to a T, and provide unrealistic expectations of happiness for those who do. If this approach were a blueprint for an Ikea desk instead of a life, almost everyone trying to follow it would end up with something wobbly and misshapen, with a few leftover bolts you find under the couch, boding ill for the structural integrity of the thing you built.” (“Life’s Stories,” https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/08/life-stories-narrative-psychology-redemption-mental-health/400796/)
How do you tell your story? Does it match up to the standard success story? Or do you have some extra bolts hidden under the couch, some parts that don’t seem to fit?
Let’s use our country and its myths as an example again. Here in the United States, we have so often hidden the parts of our national story that didn’t fit the narrative we created at the beginning: liberty and justice for all, that all people are created equal. But in recent years, more and more frequently, we are hearing the other stories, those that have so long been hidden from view. We are being given access to new voices who are asking us to turn away from the single stories we’ve held on to for so long, so that we can learn to see others in new and different ways. We are being given chances to move beyond the single story – America the just, the fair.
Our poet, Mark Nepo, wrote: “Still I keep retelling what happens till it comes out the way I want.”
Do you tell yourself the same story of your life? Or do you allow your story the room to grow, to move in different directions? Are you trapped in your story?
Mark Nepo again: “The only way to listen to what can never be said is to quiet our need to steer the plot.”
As I mentioned earlier, our stories shape our personalities. Certainly our national myths help create our national personality, our culture. And the way we tell our stories affects our sense of ourselves, and our mental health. It turns out that even our approach to traditional talk therapy is shaped by how we respond to our stories: if we see our problems as something that can be overcome, or if we believe that the issues we are confronting represent something deep and dark within ourselves. People who can see more than one story are able to move beyond what has weighed them down. Those who see their story as reflecting something permanently broken within them can be trapped in their single story. https://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/22/health/psychology/22narr.html
Are we more than an unhappy childhood? Have we been able to get sober, to discover talents we didn’t know we had, or sustain loving family relationships?
So it matters how we create our narratives, how tightly we hold on to them, and how readily we are able to open ourselves to new stories, new viewpoints, and new ways of looking at ourselves.
We all have a story, and we all tell stories. Humans are inherently storytellers. But does your story serve you well? Have you outgrown it, or are you trapped within it?
“I am large,” wrote the poet Walt Whitman. “I contain multitudes.”
My friends, I hope that you can look deeply within to see all that you contain. My wish for you is that you can be open to all of life, to learn new things, to be able to constantly see yourselves in new and different ways. I hope you can continue to add new chapters, new directions, to your stories, so that they will be as multi-faceted, as complex, and as complicated as you yourself are.
May your stories unfold within and around you, and may you embrace your whole narrative, all of your multitudes, and all of who you are.
Blessed Be,
Amen.
