Chinchillas and Barf (Single Story Blog)

Imagine, you are with a group of friends. One “friend” decides to steal a glorious chinchilla fur muff to keep her hands warm during the cold months.  Minutes later, the police shows up and asks, “Who stole this glorious chinchilla muff?” All of a sudden this same friend points to you, while the muff is on her arm, and puts the blame on you. The police then proceed to pat your “friend on the head and tell her “thank you for tracking down this muff-napper. Here is a cookie.” They then arrest you and fine you triple the value of the glorious chinchilla muff and slap you hand.  While this story is quite ridiculous, it emphasizes the hazard of the “Single-Story.” If society only listened to one side of the story or trusted merely the information we are taught through history or literature we would ultimately “rob people of dignity… and make our recognition of our equal humanity difficult” (Adichie).

In Literature, nowadays, the premise of the single story is beginning to disappear for we live in the postmodern era where novels are written for whatever the author want it to be written.  This was untrue during the enlightenment and before, because books were written to a center, like the church. Adiche focuses her speech on the western world’s misconception of Africa and other cultures based on our literature written on it. Can we blame solely literature for this misconstruction? What about what history tells us? It also seems that the history in the postmodern world has moved on past the “single story. In 7^th grade for example, the curriculum included learning about all the major religions of the world, not just Christianity, and require individual research from a large amount of sources. We could probably rule history out then. Maybe it is just the ignorance of select Americans that gets amplified through media, for example Jay Leno goes out into the streets of New York and asks simple questions, where most of the people give hilariously wrong answers. This process fails to show anyone who answers the questions correctly. In this case we are also given merely one side of the story, the ignorant side. Here’s something to think about: What if Adiche is merely stereotyping Americans based on a few experiences she had with them?

This article was not meant to say that the single story dilemma is not a bad thing or is not present anymore. It was merely to conjure up the idea that maybe we cannot blame the history books and the narratives for giving us the single story.  Society is moving past the days of the singe story, and rather than dwell on the fact that it was a problem of the past, change it. Heck! The internet connects the world to each other allowing this multiple story “machine” to inform society.

However, when it comes down to it, most people are not mal-informed, they are merely rejecting the idea of another story, based on what they want to believe. ...And that is what I am throwing

(Wow this jumped everywhere!  All my ideas came out  at the same time and word barf was produced, oh well. Enjoy my barf! :) )