I just saw a TED talk with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie about the importance of telling many stories, and not just one. That for many westerners, there is only one story of the continent of Africa: the story of catastrophe. That more stories are needed, told by people with different experiences. And it made me think of this text I wrote a couple of years ago after visiting Rinkeby, a suburb in northern Stockholm that is most known for being an area of the city where immigrants move when they arrive. My visit was part of this series of texts I did about different suburbs of Stockholm, as an effort of mine to explore parts of the city that I hadn’t really been to. They were supposed to be a little bit funny and silly and mostly about city planning and architecture, illustrated with my photos.
Well, as a comment to this text about Rinkeby, someone wrote a comment saying that I sounded just as the colonialists might have sounded two hundred years ago in Africa. Implied: I’m such a privileged, white middle-class pseudo-open-minded brat. I remember reading that comment hurt. I rarely get any comments on this blog, even though there are at least a couple reading it every day, so when I got a comment like that I felt it must be true.
It probably was. I’ve lived such a sheltered life.
Some time later, I took a course in research ethics. This was to prepare for the field trip to Namibia we were about to go on, and we read a lot about post-colonialism. How even the research conducted in Africa, South America and parts of Asia becomes completely distorted and not at all true because it is done by white, western researchers who apply their western perspectives onto their research. This made me think that maybe I shouldn’t even be going to Namibia. What could I, as a white, middle-class daughter of academics possibly understand anything about life in Namibia?
Well, I went anyway, did interviews in a shantytown and wrote a paper about it.
And I’m confronted with it again, now, when I’m trying to decide how to write about my experiences in Liberia. Because I want to write about it. But I don’t know how to do it without misrepresenting it. I don’t want to give the impression that I’m making the poverty and the traces of the civil war into something exotic. Which is hard, because for me, everything about Liberia is exotic. I don’t want to give a two-dimensional picture of this very complex country. I don’t want to give myself the right to know anything after two weeks in a place.
That’s what made traveling in Canada and the US so easy. I could write my odd and shallow traveler’s reflections without having to think about my view point. In the US, there isn’t that history – – – or of course there is. The first nation people, the ones the Europeans killed when they arrived in North America. This just becomes more and more complicated.
Maybe I should just publish some photos. Of trees and pineapple breakfasts. I don’t want to tell a story that isn’t really mine to tell.
Katja Malmborg 