Diversity: Unifying Contexts of Humanity

Sarah Rusher

Professor Elizabeth Mannir

WOST 301: Beyond the Harem

11 October 2017

Ted Talks Journals

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “The Danger of a Single Story” (2009) Humans are deeply and irrevocably bound to their contexts —historical, social, geographical, political, etc. No one person’s context—or, more accurately, experience of that context—is the same. Diversity is what unifies people, what makes humanity such a deeply intricate species. Diversity is important. Each experience is lived, is valid, is full and as intricate as your life, billions of times over. I think that, when moving through the world, preoccupied with our own personal intricacies, we tend to align people with certain typification schemes, we place them into theses pre-made

In my opinion, one way of transcending these cultural ghettos is through the art of storytelling. Stories cannot demolish frontiers, but they can punch holes in our mental walls. And through those holes, we can get a glimpse of the other, and sometimes even like what we see.

Those of us who are readers and critics, she said, can be complicit in pigeonholing such writers with our expectations. We want them to write—in Shafak's case—of, or as, a Turkish woman. Her argument, however, is that this expectation is unfair both to the writer and the reader. Fiction is fiction—it is stories, imagination. It is, Shafak says, the chance for a "transcendental journey into other lives and other possibilities."

As such, fiction can be a way for us to experience other lives and other communities that we otherwise could not, and through that experience to develop empathy. Yes, Shafak could write from the perspective of a Turkish woman. She claims, however, that she could also write compellingly as a Norwegian man. What matters is that the story, and the character, come from her heart. The risk we face today is that "writers are not seen as creative individuals on their own but as representatives of their own culture." This is a disservice to writers and readers. Fiction, of course, can be an incredibly powerful tool for making connections—if we let it be. "The problem of today's cultural ghettos," Shafak says, describing the like-minded echo chambers toward which we often gravitate, "is [they produce] knowledge that takes us not beyond