Martin Espada's The Danger Of A Single Story

When things are hidden from the public, or if the public is not aware of something, it becomes invisible. According to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s speech, “The Danger of a Single Story,” we need multiple stories so one is not made invisible. When there is only one side of a story, the other side is unspoken. Once the other half is not made visible, it dehumanizes the people who are a part of the unspoken story. They become places, things, and people that are forgotten. Martin Espada wrote in “Speaking of the Unspoken Places in Poetry,” that “sometimes these places are unspoken because unspeakable things happen there” (1). Espada writes about the importance of the poets’ job to unveil the cloak of invisibility and bring to light these unspeakable
Alabanza I say, even if God has no face. (39-43)
Here, the narrator might be comparing God to those who died during 9/11. The narrator is trying to remember the people who were invisible to the public, and died that way. Despite not knowing these people, the narrator attempts to name them even though they have no face. The narrator knows these people exist but to it, they are faceless, just the way God is. However, despite this, the narrator wants to praise them because they deserve to not be invisible. There is also the motif of light in these lines. The reader is able to picture bright lights lighting up a dark sky, bringing imagery to the poem. It also brings up the theme of remembering those who were forgotten. In the last stanza, there is a shift of location, and time. The poem now takes place during the war between the United States and Afghanistan. The narrator says, “two constellations of smoke rose and drifted to each other” (Alabanza 45) to mention the people who died in Afghanistan. This line describes the people who died in 9/11 and how they’ve become one cluster of souls in the sky, as if they were many lighthouses, while the people who die in Afghanistan join
In “Alabanza,” music is a symbol for lightness, joy, and peace. The reader learns that there is no peace in Afghanistan. There is a direct correlation between the disaster of 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan in this stanza. The plane crashing into the towers stopped the music that played throughout the beginning of the poem, which altered the mood from peace to disaster. This shift is similar to how the war in Afghanistan stopped their music. By bringing the Afghan people, the reader gets another story. This is important because “when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise” (Adichie), and this is exactly what the narrator does by bringing up Afghanistan. This is, “what the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe calls, ‘“a balance of stories’”