Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.
The American writer Alice Walker wrote this about her Southern relatives who had moved to the North.
She introduced them to a book about the Southern life that they had left behind.
They sat around, reading the book themselves, listening to me read the book, and a kind of paradise was regained.
I would like to end with this thought: That 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.
Thank you.