Who’s telling our stories?
There’s a popular proverb that goes something like this, “Until the lion tells his side of the story, the tale of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” Last week social media, primarily out of the United States, exploded with impassioned reactions to the Humanitarian acceptance speech given by the American actor and activist Jesse Williams at the Black Entertainment Television Awards held in Los Angeles.
Even The New York Times covered it, printing the full script of the speech, wherein Williams basically called out white America on its centuries old system of exploitation, cultural misappropriation, and racial oppression against black people.
It was essentially another clarion call to the American masses to not accept the story that the country has come a long way in race relations. But rather, to continue to speak truth and seek justice against the tale that the majority of white America has been spinning about blackness since before the Atlantic slave trade. At the onset of his speech Williams thanked his parents for teaching him “to focus on comprehension over career, to learn what the schools where afraid to teach us.” He was acknowledging his parents for offering him another narrative by which to make sense of the world. He was thanking his parents for giving him another story about who he was as a black person in America.
I live in Nigeria, but I did not grow up in Nigeria. Born in New York City, I spent over two decades in America. As much as I know that country like the back of my hand and called it home for most of my life, I had always sensed that I was supposed to feel a little bit like a minor character in some grand cultural story that someone else was writing, someone else with bold and misleading assumptions of who got to be the main characters, and what got to be the main plot of the story. Someone else who, let’s face it, was white.
But even with our blue passports, my father had always drummed it into my head and my siblings’ heads that we were not American. (We were all born overseas, but none of us have English names.) He wanted us to understand from a very early age that no matter where we found ourselves living around the world, there was available to us a rich and particular cultural narrative at the center of our identity. And it was one of which he was extremely proud, often to the annoyance of me and my siblings, who as children wanted mainly just to fit in with the Alisons and Marks of our surroundings. But no, whatever identity we may have wanted to take on, my father reminded us consistently that first and foremost we were Nigerian, and America was not our “home.”
It took me a couple of decades to really understand why my father was so insistent that we had some sense of cultural history, that even if we rarely visited, we knew the name of his village, our village, that we understood our native language and that we knew why he insisted on using a hyphenated last name that no one where we lived in America could ever pronounce. It was because my father knew the impact and the importance of hearing and telling particular stories about ourselves from our own mouths and the mouths of our own people.
He knew, as I have come to know that the narratives we buy into can have life altering consequences in how we understand our place in the world and what we believe we are or are not entitled to. The stories we tell one another and the stories we listen to often shape and define us, and affect the ways in which we see the world. And I’ve long believed that our world revolves much more around stories than we realise.
From our daily conversations at home or in the workplace, from the news we watch or read, often we are simply just opening ourselves up into buying someone’s perspective of a person or people, someone’s version of a situation, someone’s decision on what pieces are worth telling and how. And it often seems that whoever is telling the story usually has a vested interest in telling it the way they do. That’s why most of us have our favorite online news channel or newspaper. We like the way they tell their stories and we trust their perspective.
Maybe it’s because I’m now on this side of the Atlantic but I am much more attuned to the fact that most of the informative and provocative news breaking stories I read about Africa and what’s happening on the continent come from media sources outside of Africa and are not written by Africans. Which is not necessarily a bad thing.
I’m just increasingly interested in asking about who is telling our good stories from the inside? And how do we reclaim more of a say on the stories that get told about Nigerians, yes but also about Africa and Africans more generally? A one point in Jesse Williams BET speech he said, “The more we learn about who we are and how we got here the more we will mobilize.” There is truth to that, to what can come from paying attention to whose self-defining stories or cultural narratives we allow to carry the most weight and influence in our lives. It might also be interesting to take a look at the cultural narratives you were raised with, even here in this country, and to take note of whose stories you might have been led to believe were not as important as your own.
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1 Comments
Hmm.
We will review and take appropriate action.