A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to sit in a room full of people who stutter. Packed like sardines onto long cafeteria tables, our attention was directed to a YouTube video played explicitly on our behalf. What followed was a solid twenty-minute or so Ted Talk led by Nigerian non-fiction writer and author, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Considered one of the more renowned Ted Talk presentations out there, it is titled “The Danger of the Single Story”.
To open, Chimamanda muses about how, as a young girl, many of the books shared with her were of British origin. She remembers how the “white-skinned, blue-eyed-” characters in these stories indulged in activities such as “eating apples” and “talking about the weather”. And whilst she has no shame in her enjoyment of such works, they all share a singular commonality. For a young Chimamanda, they all showcased locations, principles, and rituals foreign to her own. In many ways, it was like all of these books blended together, combining themselves into a “single story”.
Even so, these were the types of stories she grew up exposed to. For most of her young life, Chimamanda held these tales as idealizations of what fiction was and should be.
It wasn’t until she discovered authentic (though harder to find) African stories, that Chimamanda came to a life-altering conclusion. Characters with hair like hers, and with her skin color, could exist as the focal point of literature. Extensions of her own identity could hold space in their very own chapters, and on their very own pages.
Thus, her idea of what books could be went from a “single story” to a now vast, unexplored realm of more relatable fiction.
Stuttering and the Single Story
Now, Chimamanda has no direct correlation to stuttering. As a matter of fact, when she speaks, it is with a gentle, controlled fluency. Her words glide like a cooling breeze, one that delivers itself at moments when the world feels a tad overheated.
Whereas a voice like mine might be more comparable to a performance-shy hurricane, simply trying to cause as little damage as possible.
Kind of like Porky Pig, no? (Please, just humor me on this one..)
When you envision the pantless pig wonder, what is the first image that comes to your mind?
If it’s in the vein of “bursting out of a TV screen, stuttering through an offensively catchy farewell, then that’s-that’s-that’s all I need to know, folks!
Even though he’s played a part in hundreds of various cartoon projects, we can’t help but picture him as the pig with a speech impediment, stumbling through the same exhausting shtick. Ever since the “Golden Age”, the bit has operated as his “single story”. The “single story” of Mr. Porky Pig, and one that ignores all of his otherwise stacked-to-the-brim resume (I gottchu, Porky).
My point is that stuttering can be a deceivingly complex life force. And the only explanation needed for this is that we, the people who stutter, are also deceivingly complex individuals. You might come to recognize us most prominently for the types of sounds that leave our mouths. But failing to see us as fully-fledged creatures, ebbing and flowing in and out of the same moments as yourself, is a failure to avoid the trap set by the “single story”.
With every block a stutterer endures, there is also the original, lost in translaton intent behind it. A thought, that stems from an interest, or perhaps a dream. If you take us at face value, you’ll never make it to the heart of what we truly have to say. And that’s a detriment to all involved parties.
There are not many versions of ignorance that truly equate in full to bliss. It’s through the avoidance of knowing people with differences, that we deflate our own capacities for human consideration and empathy. In other words; when we limit others, we limit ourselves along the way.
It all sounds so unbelievably straightforward on paper.
See each person for all that we know a person can be.