I recently watched a TED talk video of the Nigerian novelist, Chimamanda Adichie, titled, "The Danger of a Single Story", in which she relates her experiences as a reader growing up with precious little access to stories that reflected the realities of life as she was actually living them. She speaks eloquently of the hunger for stories that liberate us from the assumption that it is necessary to stick always to the dominant narrative. It made me think of particular books in my own life that helped widen my perspective to include a range of ideas that remained hidden from me until happenstance brought ideas to my attention that expanded my awareness about life 'on the ground' in my own hometown, as well as in distant lands that received spotty, if any, coverage in mainstream journalism or historical fiction.
We live in an age of 'embedded reporting' and controversies involving censorship like the recent uproar over proposed Koran burning in Florida. Witnessing a number of independent book stores and newspapers vanish over the past decade, and the near erasure of books that lack the marketing budget of the blockbuster has been depressing at times, but there are still new authors and publishing houses that, through perseverance and passion, still do manage to break free of 'the single story' homogenization of reading matter, making reading as adventurous and alive as ever in the stories that insist on being told... stories that make a point of digging deeper than the norm; shining a light into areas neglected or avoided by the purveyors of the status quo, whether in fiction or nonfiction.
This year marked the passing of Howard Zinn, whose People's History of the United States broke out of the pattern of looking at history from the point of view of the 'victors' and brought a relevancy and conscience to history that allowed the reader to walk in the shoes of immigrants, suffragettes, whistleblowers and visionaries that had at least as much to say about our cultural underpinnings as the generals and politicians that were represented in our textbooks in school. It is the work of such minds and spirits as Zinn's that keeps me reading, hungry for the healthy connective diversity of our messy, but constantly evolving human consciousness. in his preface to an update to his People's History of the United States, The 20th Century, Zinn wrote:
"I don't want to invent victories for people's movements. But to think that historical writing must aim simply to recapitulate the failures that dominate the past is to make historians collaborators in an endless cycle of defeat. If history is to be creative, to anticipate a possible future without denying the past, it should, I believe, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past when, even if in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together, occasionally to win."
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