The Aha Moment

“When you hear stories from people like you, you feel less alone. When you feel less alone, and like you have a community of people behind you, alongside you, I believe you can live a better life. Does that make sense?”

-- Dene Oxendene page 123 of There There

I am in Elkins Auditorium a few weeks before my senior year starts. There is another group of people from some department on campus talking to us something that I do not remember. I am bored. They are having issues with the audio. It sounded like the speaker in their video was underwater.

This session was for Housing and Residence Life (HRL) training. This last school year – before the world shut down – I served as an SLA in one of the sophomore residence halls. I think training for this position was important and I do not want my comments of boredom above to discredit that. It was just two weeks of a lot of information.

I may not remember who was talking or what exactly they were talking about, but I do remember the video they showed us with the messed-up audio. It was Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Ted Talk “The Danger of a Single Story.”

In this video, Ms. Adichie speaks on how she grew only reading stories from British and American children’s books about people who did not look like her or have a life like hers. She also speaks on how her college roommate figured that she fit into every African stereotype displayed within the United States just because of the way she looked.

This video in this context stood as a reminder to think about where people come from and to not judge them based on stereotypes. Being in HRL, this was a good video to watch at the start of the year because we would all be working with a diverse group of people for the coming semesters. I did not think much else of this video after training.

It was not until my professor played this video in my Multicultural American Literature course, that I realized the deeper implications.

Ms. Adichie was not just talking about stereotypes. She was talking about the identity that is given and taken from stories. She took identity from the stories she read when she was a child as her own and was given identity by her college roommate from the stories told about African culture in the United States.

She was not only speaking on individual identity, but also on the identity of the group. She warned about how dangerous having a single-story or view of a group of people can be because it just emphasizes the differences and makes recognition for equality difficult. She explains that “power is the ability to not just tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person.” The stereotype or incomplete story then becomes the only story.

I think one of my favorite things in life is the “Aha” moment when you recognize how much deeper something that you thought you understood actually goes. I had this moment my second time watching Ms. Adichie’s talk. This showing of her talk helped me to connect the ideas we learned about in Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities about identity to the novels we were reading.

This better understanding came clearly to me when I read the quote at the top of this blog from Tommy Orange’s novel There There. It made me think about how Ms. Adichie did not know that a person who looked like her could be a character in the stories that she was writing herself.

Dene Oxendene from the novel wanted to share the stories of the Native people not to just preserve their present-day history, but to give their community hope and a sense of interconnectedness in a time where they were being forgotten as a group. He wanted to give them a better life.

I find this to be an interesting motive given the narrative. Each perspective in There There led the character to the Oakland Powwow. The Powwow gave a sense of community to the reader because the reader knows all the stories and understands the connections between characters that they might not even see. I think that Dene and Orange’s projects kind of stand to make that point.

They want to share the stories because they already know their communities were connected. They wanted to create a stronger imagined community.