‘A blurry snapshot’
Following the annual ceremony honoring Greenwich student writings about diversity, I cornered First Selectman Peter Tesei to accuse him of drafting this year’s topic.
“Well, obviously not, I couldn’t pronounce the author’s name,” Tesei confessed.
The challenge to the students referenced Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s famed TED talk on the perils of reducing dynamic communities (Greenwich), situations (immigration) and individuals (Doris Day) to narrow, crippling, narratives. None of us are one, but many. But stereotypes are forged with hammer into anvil.
My motivation for teasing Tesei, who has often commented on the branding of his town, was the question inspired by Adichie’s premise: “When reflecting on Greenwich, CT many people offer a single, stereotypical account of a homogenous community defined by abundance, influence, and access. But this is not true. Share your stories of Greenwich. What stories contradict the stereotypical narrative of your community?”
The Greenwich cliché is such a trope that I don’t really need to explain it. For years, colleagues and I would moan at the inevitable surname the Associated Press slapped on every story involving the town: “Tony Greenwich.”
The contest winners’ written responses were themselves diverse, ranging from academic essay to narrative to poem. Greenwich High School freshman Jonathan Bergbaum and junior Sadie Kriegler both summoned Vineyard Vines to shorthand Greenwich affluence. Jonathan even reached back to the 1970s to cite “The Stepford Wives.” The term still seems synonymous with Greenwich even though author Ira Levin was inspired by Wilton, where he once lived and saw as a “step” away from Stamford.
Sadie constructed a persuasive argument by blending facts (Census data about minority population) with personal anecdotes — moving from “different dialects of Spanish (bouncing) across the hallways” of Hamilton Avenue School to “botched Spanish in accents that sent chills down my spine” at Glenville.
Their fellow honorable mention winner, Noor Rekhi, a Greenwich Academy sophomore, recalled an encounter with a girl at camp who had never been to Greenwich but carried “a blurry snapshot of it and concluded the contents of the photograph herself.”
Third-place winner Sophie Jaeger, a GHS freshman, populated her poem with “the girl weaping a hijab,” a boy speaking Spanish and a family in affordable housing.
GHS junior Aaryanna Herrera offered the boldest entry, transforming the town into a “wide fish bowl.” clean fish scales shine brighter than the rest,
Creating an illusion that pale fish are the only species residing in the school.”
The top prize went to GHS freshman Rohan Subramaniam, who weaved together a narrative of students from various cultures filling the halls of the high school. He punctuated it from the perspective of the headmaster hearing “the clamor of his 2,795 students.”
(I’ve written about Rohan before, three years ago when his brother, Rahul, won this contest as a freshman and their father shared that “some of the loudest arguments in the house” are between the siblings.)
After Tesei presented the awards at Town Hall, I asked the six finalists to form a circle for a brief conversation, a sort of flash book club. They could have been the cast of a remake of “The Breakfast Club.” Singular personalities. Strangers to one another. Trapped in my version of detention.
They shared details from youthful encounters that burnished them to the Greenwich label. Sophie described being snubbed when she revealed her hometown.
Sadie said when she communicates with fellow members of a youth group in Dallas, Texas, or Ann Arbor, Mich., “they think of Greenwich as the hedge fund capital, where all the rich kids live.”
Jonathan recalled a coach of his travel soccer team cautioning him that being from Greenwich means “People will think you’re soft.”
“It’s weird to learn it from a young age.”
After a slow start (blame my questions), they gracefully built off one another’s observations. Momentum halted when I asked if the exercise made them reconsider their own impressions of other communities.
Finally, Rohan volunteered that “It’s changed my view of how different communities can be diverse in different ways.”
Which is the real point of the exercise. Greenwich is a synonym for opulence, but there are also labels on Stamford, on Bridgeport, on New Haven, on Hartford.
As Adichie concluded to her TED audience,“when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise.”
There’s a lot going on outside the fishbowl too.