MATCHBOX

In her famous TED talk on “The Danger of a Single Story”, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie narrates an incident where after she delivered a talk at a university, a student told her that it was a shame that Nigerian men were physical abusers like the father character in her novel. In mild irritation, Adichie responded that she had just finished reading a novel called “American Psycho”, and she found it a shame that young Americans were serial murderers! “Now, obviously, I said this in a fit of mild irritation”, she said. “But it would never have occurred to me to think that just because I had read a novel in which a character was a serial killer that he was somehow representative of all Americans. This is not because I am a better person than that student, but because of America’s cultural and economic power. I had many stories of America. I had read Tyler and Updike and Steinbeck and Gaitskill. I did not have a single story of America.”

“Single Stories” tend to create stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. We tend to extrapolate from what we experience, and if we know only one story, it often becomes the only story and we shut out everything else. In Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”, the runaway slave, Jim, and Huck clearly shared a relationship which transcended the transactionality that one might expect between a black adult and a white adolescent. However, that was Huckleberry Finn’s story, and Jim was at best a shadowy figure. Percival Everett rectifies that in “James”, his retelling of the classic adventure story from Jim’s perspective. James is intelligent, articulate and has somehow taught himself to read and write. He can speak grammatically and idiomatically correct English, but chooses to “speak like a nigger” in front of whites because he knows that it is safer for him if they think they are superior to him. The James who emerges from the pages of Everett’s novel is radically different from the one portrayed by Mark Twain and has more in common with the abolitionist Frederick Douglass than with Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom. By writing a book on a slave who is intelligent, compassionate and has agency, Percival Everett provides an alternative story to counter the earlier “single stories”.

In Octavia E. Butler’s 1979 classic, “Kindred”, Dana, a black woman from 1977 finds herself transported back in time to the pre-Civil War South, and stranded in the homestead of a white slave owning family. As she travels back and forth in time between two worlds- one where she is a free and independent woman, and another where she is notionally free but at the mercy of a family that only knows how to treat blacks as slaves, she encounters many place people- slave and free- each of whom makes choices which may be inconceivable to us but which make sense to them. The diversity of black people in Butler’s story is in sharp contrast to the stereotypical image of slaves written by white novelists. Abraham Lincoln famously described Harriet Beecher Stowe as “the woman who wrote the book that started the Civil War”- while her portrayal of slaves as meek and submissive people might have won them sympathy, it ironically also denied them agency and underplayed their role in the emancipation of slaves.

These are just two of the many books written by black authors that one should ideally read all year through, but which one should certainly read at least during Black History Month. Designating certain months as Black History Month, Women’s History Month, or Pride Month is not a DEI formality. It recognises the contribution of underrepresented groups, and ensures that their works are read and understood. This ultimately counters the “danger of a single story” and leads to a more inclusive society.