Like this:

In this post, I simply want to adress what I feel is a very important connection between Chimamana Adichie’s talk on the danger of a ‘Single Story’ and the passage in Honeymoon in Purdah where Wearing narrates her experience with the mexican lady Esperanza and her familly. To put any reader in context, this refers to pages 206 to 225.

Throughout the time she spends with Esperanza, Alison Wearing discovers that even though up to this point she has seen religious rule being strictly obeyed and enforced everywhere, she now meets a lady that dresses in vividly covered clothes and, unlike most of the other characters encountered until now, seems to mock the religious status quo. She continuously argues that Iran is a place filled with love and kindness and that the religious rules are not necesairly enforced. It is quite interesting too to see that in this same passage, a secondary character (Emma) brings up the point that western countries are lacking some fundemental values. For example, Emma explains that her nieces have tragic problems : Two (…) suffer from anorexia, one is pregnant at sixteen, their best friends having abortion and drug problems (Wearing, p. 213). The same character argues a few lines after that she is enraged when her english relative are condescendant with her own daughter and that they believed that she is oppressed.

What this all sums up too is that Wearing is witnessing a manifestation of the ‘danger of a single story’. Through her meeting with these women, she has a more complete view of the country that until then she believed to be strict and oppressive. Even though she had met with Iranians that were perfectly happy, she still witnessed opression in the form of the imposition of the chaador or when they were arrested for taking pictures earlier in the memoir. Her experiences and what she had previously heard about Iran could’ve easily misleaded her to believe that the country was coercive in it’s imposition of religious standards and that those norms were negative. In this passage, she is proved wrong on both fronts through her encounter with Esperanza who doesen’t comply with all the religious norms and through her dialogue with Emma that puts the whole value system of Iran into perspective by comparing it to what she believes to be a western society whose moral ideals are decaying.

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