Paperwork: If you love a good story, well here’s one to think about

As a storyteller and lover of stories, I offer words of warning.

They come from author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (pronounced chi-muh-maan-du uhng-gow-zee uh-dee-chee-ay.)

In less than 20 minutes via a TED talk, she eloquently spells out the dangers of “the single story.”

Adichie was born in Nigeria and grew up loving stories – reading them and telling them. At age 7, she began writing her own stories.

“All my characters were white and blue-eyed,” she said, “they played in the snow, they ate apples, and they talked a lot about the weather, how lovely it was that the sun had come out. ...

“I had never been outside Nigeria. We didn’t have snow, we ate mangoes, and we never talked about the weather, because there was no need to. ...

“What this demonstrates, I think, is how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story, particularly as children. Because all I had read were books in which characters were foreign, I had become convinced that books by their very nature had to have foreigners in them and had to be about things with which I could not personally identify.

“Now, things changed when I discovered African books. ... I realized that people like me, girls with skin the color of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in literature. I started to write about things I recognized. ...

“So what the discovery of African writers did for me was this: It saved me from having a single story of what books are.”

Adichie shared several examples of how a single story impacted her life, including when she was 19 attending a university in the U.S. Her American roommate was shocked.

“She asked where I had learned to speak English so well, and was confused when I said that Nigeria happened to have English as its official language. She asked if she could listen to what she called my ‘tribal music,’ and was consequently very disappointed when I produced my tape of Mariah Carey.”

Adichie is so correct. We all grow up with stories from families and friends and the selected materials we read. And then we begin telling our own stories, especially to our children. But they are never the whole story.

“So that is how to create a single story, show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become,” she said.

“I’ve always felt that it is impossible to engage properly with a place or a person without engaging with all of the stories of that place and that person,” Adichie said.

“The consequence of the single story is this: It robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar.”

Her words offer a powerful lesson on the stories we tell. And the stories we choose to read. Or not read.

Adichie underscores some things I learned as a journalist many years ago, significant frustrations that hamper what we like to call the search for truth.

Simply put it’s this ... that whatever you are looking at, you are never seeing it all.

That whatever you are hearing, you are not hearing it all.

And, as Adichie says, whatever you are reading, it’s never the complete story.

Or ... the only story.

• Lonny Cain, retired managing editor of The Times in Ottawa, also was a reporter for The Herald-News in Joliet in the 1970s. His PaperWork email is lonnyjcain@gmail.com. Or mail The Times, 110 W. Jefferson St., Ottawa, IL 61350.