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“power is the ability not only to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person” - Chimamanda Adichie

This might be a top 5 TED talk, for its power, clarity of concept, and speaker presence. Nigerian novelist (and Booker shortlister) Chimamanda Adichie solves the riddle of the truth and incompleteness of stereotypes and biases, by exposing the “dangers of the single story.”

Listen to the talk, but here’s an example: Africa does have failed states, serious infrastructure problems, and the severest forms of economic hardship. That is a true story. But, for most people, it is either the only story they know, or they only know “different versions of [that] single story.” Since that story doesn’t include a thriving and growing African middle class (across many countries, of course), an African intelligentsia, and economic success stories, we remain stuck in our stereotypes. In addition to solving the riddle of stereotypes that are true (now they are stories that tell one truth and the charge is to learn the other stories), it also helps me personally get out of the prejudiced/non-prejudiced quandary. Too often conversations involving narrow cultural understandings (single story versions of a people or their lives) are polar: you have to confront the misconceiving as prejudice. While it is a prejudice, the cure is not solely about fixing a character flaw, it’s about expanding the story.

Adichie says single stories of Nigeria “flatten her experience” (around 13:11 in the video). Reading The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind was a huge revelation of how flat my understanding of Africa is. I have only known Africa from a policy perspective: the summary numbers and prose about famine, civil war, wasted aid, problems in education and information technologies. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind tells a range of stories in William KamKwamba’s life: two famines, going to school, playing as a boy, playing/hanging differently as a teenager, his experience of popular culture, the mixing of magic and science in his life, his curiosity and tinkering, simple family life. When I started reading the book, I was actually frustrated when the first several chapters had nothing to do with his windmills, but focused on his life. I wanted the other single story of his inspiring move against his economic condition.

The whole talk is fantastic, but one other great moment that lays it out when she illustrates the principle “if you want to dispossess a people, start the story with the word ’secondly’” and goes on to explain how you can tell the story of Native American starting with arrows (the secondly) rather than the arrival of Europeans, or start with the failure of the African state rather than the colonial creation of those states. This line starts around 10:00.

Tim OReilly (@timoreilly) tweeted that an attendee of his talk did visual notes of his presentation.

The notes were “taken”/drawn by @jonnygoldstein. More here.

… as opposed to what marketing people define it as.

While I understand the importance of narrative and storytelling in the work of marketers and advertises, this is one of the cooptations/adaptations in the industry that really pains me. Like paradigm shifts, storytelling/narrative is a wondrous and powerful idea that is trivialized when it gets thrown about in business. A recent review in The Nation of Salman Rushdie’s Imaginative New ‘Enchantress of Florence’ is a wonderful re-grounding of what narrative and story really means to people. (It also reminds us that book reviewing can itself be an art form.)

The novel, on its fourth page, is finding its subject, and its subject is storytelling itself. The men are driven by hungers and thirsts, and so is the writing. In its greedy piling up of nouns–”hostelries, saloons, food stalls, and hawkers”; “Cloths, utensils, baubles, weapons, rum”–we feel the force of storytelling’s appetite for the world, its sheer sensual relish for the thingness of things. It is no surprise that the great compendiums of stories tend to swell virtually without limit: the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, the Decameron and the Thousand and One Nights, Don Quixote and Gargantua and Pantagruel. This is the same impulse, of course–under stricter regulation in The Enchantress of Florence–that gives Rushdie’s greatest novels their girth.

I love the phrase “greedy piling up of nouns” and the sense of fullness the passage conveys. I’m also fond of how the review picks up on the importance of cities in stories and culture:

for Rushdie, the city is storytelling’s supreme subject. Delhi, Karachi, Cochin, New York, above all Bombay, the city of his childhood (”Back to Bom!” is Saleem’s happiest thought in Midnight’s Children), and London, the city of his maturity (”Ellowen Deeowen,” The Satanic Verses calls it, yoking Semitic and Indo-European divinities in a numinous pun on the spelling of the city’s name). The city, for Rushdie, is the place of variety, mystery, fortuity, possibility, conflict–all the elements that most make for good stories. It is the place where strange people live next door and unimaginable worlds are waiting to be discovered on the next block, a place that invites you, as the title of his latest essay collection urges, to “step across this line.”

City here, is more a gathering of people with broader-than-tribal coincidental affililiations, and therefore a place of discovery. Not to discredit the much- and recently-vaunted small towns (from which I come), but I love the sense of magic that surrounds stories, cities, and even trade in this review.

On the work-related side of this, those who bandy narrative and story about might still benefit from this definition (and the underlying energy) to get beyond the A to B nature of story. Story is too often seen as a distilled beginning, middle, and end with connective tissue. Here, it’s more rollicking, intricate, layered, recursive, and rich in bewildering detail.

I have Kindled Rushdie’s book and plan to get to it as soon as I find out what happens between Mister Darcy and Elizabeth Bennett.