Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity….When we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise. CHIMAMANDA ADICHIE
I just spent a whirlwind weekend with my family at Austin’s South by Southwest attending the debut of the White Horse Pictures documentary film Billy Preston: That’s the Way God Planned It. Preston was the real deal — a musical prodigy with perfect pitch who learned to play the Hammond organ at five and for a short time was one of the most famous artists alive. In Ringo Starr’s words, “He never put his hands in the wrong place.” His talent first came to light in the Black gospel church circuit of Los Angeles, which nurtured his genius and spiritual devotion. As a sideman he performed with Little Richard, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Mahalia Jackson, the Beatles, and The Rolling Stones, to name a few, won two Grammys, and had several number-one hits on his own. He was just that brilliant. But then his demons surfaced and his career plummeted.
The film has now been slapped with a lawsuit. The plaintiffs, who were included in the film, felt the movie focused too much on Preston’s repressed sexuality and subsequent addictions (which enabled Preston’s dark side to flourish) and not principally on his genius. The suit has been a sucker punch to the creative team, which includes my husband, but also reflects our increased rigidity around storytelling, aided through the elevation of fake news, manipulation of history, book banning, and a sensationally polarized society where cruelty and discrimination are normalized. The director Paris Barclay and his team understood that the story around Preston’s genius could not exclude his sexuality, race, addictions, and the tragedy of being both a sexual abuse victim and then a predator. Context matters. To gloss over the tragic aspects of the tale renders it one-dimensional and as ephemeral as a mirage. This is the phenomenon that Chimamanda Adichie’s brilliant Ted Talk explored in her danger of a single story.
The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story. CHIMAMANDA ADICHIE
Every history student understands the importance of context, but we don’t often apply the same lessons to the trajectory of our own lives. I didn’t examine personal context until I started writing. Fourteen years ago I woke at 4:30 am to write my way out of despair. I was navigating some family acrimony and trying to make sense of the meteor that punched a hole into our lives. A year later, I wound up with a sloppy memoir but realized that any good prose was overwhelmed by emotional vomiting. Outrage may be rocket fuel but it did not help me write well. I printed it, read it again, and slipped it into a drawer. Then I used it to help smother grass for a sunflower maze. Now the manuscript is part of the soil.
Perhaps the first step…….. is to acknowledge the partiality of the lens we were given by family and culture, and through which we have made our choices and suffered their consequences. If we had been born of another time and place, to different parents who held different values, we would have had an entirely different lens. The lens we received generated a conditional life, which represents not who we are but how we were conditioned to see life and make choices… We succumb to the belief that the way we have grown to see the world is the only way to see it, the right way to see it, and we seldom suspect the conditioned nature of our perception. OLIVER SACKS
The divine and distinct alloy assigned to us at birth usually winds up altered by circumstance, despair, mental illness, and the challenges of navigating life. Not to mention the weight of secrets. And it takes love, faith, beauty, personal determination, curiosity, and community to keep that alloy true. Intellectually I knew that we can do nothing about the narrow stories thrust upon us — I have certainly been guilty of making assumptions about others. We can only control how we move with integrity in our day-to-day lives. Writing helped me understand on a cellular level that I did not belong to one story, but to many, thanks to inherited patterns, the twist of DNA, the imprint of geography, and shared human fragility and resilience. This was the resolution I needed. My grief and indignation gradually, very gradually, gave way to acceptance, compassion, and finally peace.
I hope the Preston documentary will soon emerge from this legal quagmire because it is a story that needs to be told. The good, the bad and the ugly. Because we can grow from each other’s stories, and may even belong to them.
Beautifully articulated. Brilliance and darkness walk side by side, if not indeed hand in hand. There’s no getting around the chiaroscuro of the psyche.
"I did not belong to one story, but to many, thanks to inherited patterns, the twist of DNA, the imprint of geography, and shared human fragility and resilience." So well said.
I quoted Somerset Maugham recently in my own reflection on life stories "I recognise that I am made up of several persons and that the person that at the moment has the upper hand will inevitably give place to another. But which is the real one? All of them or none?" My answer is all of them meaning our narratives are constantly shaped by our experiences & by what inspires us. We must keep exploring, crafting, editing & telling our story.
Pigeonholes are for pigeons — we all have more agency than we want to admit.