Can you explain why the Palestinians need to pass
from Gaza into Israel to work in the first place?
As terrible as the
images we’re seeing are, I’d caution against resorting to the single
story syndrome. In the words of Chimamanda Adichie…
The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes
is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one
story become the only story. Show a people as one thing, and only one
thing, and that is what they become.
Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but
to make it the definitive story of that person.
Start the story with the arrows of the Native Americans and not with the
arrival of the British, and you have an entirely different story. Start
the story with the failure of the African states, and not the colonial
creation of the African states, and you have an entirely different
story.
The consequence of a single story is this, that it robs people of
dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It
emphasizes how we are different rather than how we're similar.
Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign. But stories can also
be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a
people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.
Stories matter, many stories matter.
When we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a
single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise.
