i sat in the audience, acutely aware that the book i was there to represent, six months in sudan, was a story about people with none of the agency necessary to be free. as i was writing the book, and living those months, i understood that there were people falling in love 100 hundred feet away, or sharing a belly laugh, their best in a long time. time and again, i passed a football match in full flight, young men running, their lungs bursting, fully alive.

but that’s not the story i lived. i hope what came across to those who had a chance to read it, was that the people, my patients, who i worked for weren’t helpless. they were sick, and poor, and trying to make a home between two armies getting ready to fight. they were the brave. they understood where they were.

i remember once when i was a young man, a principled university anti-everything, my mother finished listening to me rant, and said “you know what i think? i think you don’t have a high enough opinion of your fellow man.” she was right. i’ve learned. my sincere hope, like chimamanda’s, is that more of us are knowing the world well enough to understand the limits of a single story. we have friends from other cultures, read widely, follow the news. we understand inequity to not only be africa’s plight, but ours. as we experience the world, new places and people, we realize that we are less different from one another than we had imagined.

it reminds me of an early review on my book. in it, the reviewer suggested i didn’t focus on the dinka enough, on their peculiar cultural features. i thought, “perfect. because the whole book is about them. how they live, how they travel, how they make decisions, what they eat, how they mourn.” i succeeded at least in that measure, in that i made the distinction between them and that reader transparent enough to be uninteresting. thus far, it has been my favorite endorsement.

sorry for the long response. on my way back from montreal, trees slipping into fields and back. a good time to think, and a good time to write. thank you for your link. i enjoyed watching her talk again. and i agree with her about the danger of any “one story”, even more acutely when the “one story” leads to a diminution of our ability to be fully human. peace to you, and on and on. j.