Stories: Looking Beyond the Stereotypes

One of my all-time favorite TED Talks is 2008 McArthur Fellow and writer Chimamanda Ngoze Adichie's "The Danger of a Single Story." In her Talk, she makes a case for the importance of publishing varied and numerous stories, particularly about those who historically have been marginalized.  As she brilliantly articulates, the lack of variety and availability of some groups' stories has resulted in "single stories"--stereotypes--about them: "[S]how a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become."

Her concept of "single stories" explains why I have sometimes been...reserved in reading "ethnic" or "urban" literature. A girl gets tired of reading the same type of victimization-type of stories, you know? I find many "ethnic" or "urban" stories to be very limiting and repetitive in setting, plot, and genre. They seem to always be based on reality or history--all circling about some level of poverty, lack of opportunity, oppression, or survival. One can argue that these are common themes in various works of literature, but these themes just seem to be a little bit more common in these types of "ethnic" or "urban" literature. Christopher Myers wrote an editorial about this lack of diversity in published works by certain writers earlier this year for The New York Times, though his focus was on children's literature.

One consequence of these reality/history-based type of literature written by ethnic writers is that there seems to be this assumption by some readers that there's always some biographical element to them. Like poetry, these readers assume that the narrative voice is really that of the writer and not the speaker's or narrator's. Maybe that's why I love reading historical romance novels: there's no confusion to be had about whether it's made up.

I am not immune to making such assumptions, myself, as I had the same reaction today when I finished Junot Diaz's This Is How You Lose Her (2012). It is my first Diaz book, so I was unfamiliar with his writing style and this Yunior character who also had been featured in his two previous published works. Reading it, I found myself wondering how much of the story is biographical and began stereotyping Dominican/Latino men as cheaters, abusers, and misogynists. Part of my response is based on my limited exposure to stories about Latino characters, as well as my current reading with my students of The House on Mango Street (1984), which highlights a similar machismo and abusive aspect of Latino culture. 

My response to this book reminded of an experience that Adichie related about a reader's response to one of her novels: "[I]t was such a shame that Nigerian men were physical abusers like the father character in [your] novel." Understandably irritated, she recognized this response as being a consequence of the limited stories published about certain groups: the dearth of stories leads some to incorrectly assume that those that do exist are representative of the whole group. 

Stories have power, they create impressions, and we are vulnerable to them summarizes Adichie's main argument in her TED Talk. Reading Junot Diaz's This Is How You Lose Her reminded me of the importance of recognizing that fact.