The Singularity of Stories

Or, We should all tell tales.

I read the One Thousand and One/Arabian Nights as a child just starting secondary school. It was an absolutely dazzling read and I might have retrofitted one of the stories to pass my Junior Waec examinations. I could not have anticipated that the next time my brain would latch on to that knowledge would be during a manic episode in a foreign country, where I was convinced I was Scheherazade (or Schaz) and knew the stories of everyone and everything. Delusions of grandeur are something, let me tell you (and I will, soon).

Anyway, this might be an extreme example but such is life; it becomes clear at the farthest ends. This seemingly random connection brought to mind the awareness of a truth: There are no new stories. As someone who mostly consumes fantasy and fiction in literature, I am keenly aware that despite the permutations and (re)combinations, we are telling the same handful of stories we have been telling from the time the first human imagined for themselves a god. These necessary fictions have served to hold truths and reflections that act as a glue for human relations.

There are stories and archetypes which repeat themselves across civilizations and cultures and one of the truest signs of intelligence I have found is an ability to distill any experience down to its storied fundamental. The website, tvtropes.org for instance, is devoted to tracing and linking these connections and building blocks in modern media and pop culture. Yet the more I explore the site, the more it resembles a crystal refracting and reflecting a single ray of light through multiple lenses.

From creationist myths to the most mind-numbingly trivial sitcom, the stories of mankind remain the same and it is both reassuring and alienating to know that a myriad of expressions does not break apart a unified reality. A Netflix documentary about myths and legends talks about the Hero’s Journey;

the stages through which characters in countless tales from the epic of Gilgamesh to the latest fantasy novel progress, from humble beginnings to eventually earning the designation of “hero”. This is but one of several such archetypes that appear in cultures and histories across time.

This is not to say that nothing is unique. Though we all have the same fundamental DNA building blocks, all 7 billion of us manage to have unique fingerprints. This is why in Copyright Law, it is the expression of an idea that is protected, not the idea itself for though an ass, even the law knows there are few original thoughts and no original stories left.

However, I daresay that it is because all stories are the same that it is important to tell your version of it. If others can see the same veins running through your story that run through theirs, it builds empathy and by adding your voice, your version of the story does not get buried by other versions. As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie famously said, there is the danger of a single story or to put it differently, the danger in the telling of a single version of a story.

As such, it is important to figure out your story. Figure out your voice and what thread is yours in this complex tapestry of life which we weave of similar cloth but a kaleidoscope of hues. Document your life, romanticise it if that helps, but remain true to yourself and your version of the universal story. At the end of it all, you get one glorious chance at living, make it as vibrant as you can.

Until next time, Peace and Scarlet Threads.