The Global Citizen is a joint project of New Voices and the American Jewish World Service (AJWS). Throughout the year, a group of former AJWS volunteers will offer their take on global justice, Judaism, and international development. Opinions expressed by Global Citizen bloggers do not necessarily represent AJWS.
I must admit, I am guilty of often viewing people and places I hear or read about as one-dimensional. From time to time, I forget that the information I have is not even a pixel of the entire picture. In an age of if –it-bleeds-it-leads news, it takes a conscious effort to see beyond the tragedies and headlines.
Chimamanda Adichie, in her TED Talk “The danger of a single story,” eloquently and humorously describes how it came to be that the West talks about Africa as a country and is disappointed with stories unrelated to extreme poverty or tribal rituals:
As a CNN article on the Nigerian author aptly describes, “Chimamanda Adichie believes in the power of stories, and warns that hearing only one about a people or nation leads to ignorance. She says the truth is revealed by many tales. She illustrates this with a story about coming to the United States as a middle-class daughter of a professor and an administrator and meeting her college roommate. Adichie says that her roommate’s “default position toward me, as an African, was a kind of patronizing, well-meaning, pity. My roommate had a single story of Africa. A single story of catastrophe.”
In an age of boundless information, it seems only the extremes catch our attention. It is well-proven that people tend to overestimate any given person’s likelihood of dying from a terrorist attack and underestimate the occurrence of deaths from asthma or diarrhea. This is because we are exposed to extremes so often that the simplified extremes seem common and the inane and complex fade altogether.
We also fail to see that in any place and in any life, there are a million moments and every one look different. No existence, no matter how much we want to flatten and simplify it, is all about one thing, even if that thing is sorrow. Though the following poem may seem to run counter to the video, I have loved it since my first reading in a college course for its ability to show how even the hardest lives have dimensions, and even joy.
A Brief for the Defense
By Jack Gilbert, from Refusing Heaven (Knopf, 2005)
Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.
Perhaps it is from perspective like these that I get my affinity for the grassroots approach to development. It stems from a place of understanding that people and nations know themselves best, and flattening or simplifying their experience is unfair at best and imperialistic at worst.
This is not to say that I have written off all elements of the top-down approach, as at times no amount of popular opinion could replace the effectiveness of expertise. The key is that those with the built-up knowledge base, such as scientists or educations, ask what is wanted and needed rather than imposing agendas or values. This is key in AJWS’s approach to international grantees, and moreover, key in the basic definition of sustainable development. According the the UN’s Division for Sustainable Development, “The achievement of sustainable development requires the integration of its economic, environmental and social components at all levels. This is facilitated by continuous dialogue and action in global partnership.”
Integrating Adichie and Gilbert’s perspectives, I’d like to take this definition one step further. Dialogues and partnerships are two ways, meaning the giving should be both ways and not simply in one direction. It is precisely when the giver fails to realize that they have just as much to learn and gain from the relationship that the one-dimensional transaction turns into a one-dimensional perspective from a single story
