Overcoming Single Stories Through Travelling

Years ago, as was a custom while I ate lunch, I sat at my dining table and opened my browser to the Ted Talks website. The Ted Talk I saw that afternoon was about cultures and what we think and believe of cultures different to our own, and how, often, we have preconceived ideas, false ideas, of other countries, the people who live there, and their traditions. Unknowingly, this talk echoed in me since I discovered similar concepts through my travels through Mexico and Central America.

The talk was by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a Nigerian novelist and the talk was titled The Danger of a Single Story. In it, Chimamanda warns about the problems in believing single stories. A single story is what we hear or see in the media and use that to create an impression of a group of people, an entire culture, or country.

Chimamanda describes her visit to the village where Fide, the houseboy that provided live-in domestic help to her family, was from. She was “startled” when she saw a basket Fide’s brother had made. “All I had heard about them was how poor they were,” she says in her talk. She never thought that Fide’s family could make anything. “Their poverty was my single story of them,” she added. While listening to this part of her talk, I couldn’t help the thoughts of the countries in Central America, such as Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama, come to my mind. These countries were to me what Fide’s family was to Chimamanda, poor. I did not know much about them other than what the media showed.

In Chimamanda’s speech, she mentions how ashamed she felt for believing in the single story the U.S. media had shown about the Mexican people. She only realized her prejudice after visiting Guadalajara, a city in the Mexican state of Jalisco. There, she saw with her own eyes how different Mexicans were from the generalization and stereotype she had previously been fed. With that idea in mind, I believe, it would still be unfair to say all Mexicans are the way people are in Guadalajara. It would be like saying people from California are just like people in Alabama, and generalizing the United States population with one single story. I am Mexican-American, and learned my Mexican culture by living and growing up in northern Mexico. In 2014, when I rode my motorcycle through Mexico and Central America, I realized how different it is to be Mexican in the central and southern states of the country as compared to where I grew up. We speak differently, we have different cuisines, and attribute different value to some festivities versus others, all while still being Mexican.

I can take this differentiation a step further and say I never stopped to think what it meant to be Nicaraguan or Costa Rican, Guatemalan or Honduran, or from any other Central American country. Through my travels, shopping at the local market, speaking to the natives, I was able to see, first hand, the differences between the people, the culture, and the countries of Central America. Yet, at the end of the day, the differences I noted, are still nothing but my own perception, and do not have to be true for everyone.

Chimamanda overcame single stories, not only through literature, but also through travel, as in the case of the people in Guadalajara. In the same way, I ridded myself of these single stories I unknowingly believed in. She refused to allow the negative experiences be the front cover to her and her country. There is no one single story for anyone or anything, as Chimamanda puts it: “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”. Which is why I ask you, the reader, to think about what single stories you believe in, and I invite you to unveil the truth, whether it is by travel or locally, interacting with others who share different cultural backgrounds than your own. Truly, though, the first option sounds the most appealing.

Link to the above-mentioned Ted Talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story/discussion#t-242316