The danger of a single story | Chimamanda Adichie 2020
Summary
TLDRThe speaker, a storyteller from Nigeria, reflects on the impact of 'the single story' on perception and identity. She recounts her childhood immersion in foreign literature, leading to a skewed view of her own culture, and later experiences with stereotypes in the U.S. and Mexico. She advocates for the importance of diverse narratives to counteract stereotypes, emphasizing the power of stories to both dehumanize and humanize, and calls for the recognition of multiple, complex stories within every culture.
Takeaways
- 📚 The speaker's early exposure to literature was limited to British and American children's books, which influenced her early writing, creating stories with characters that were foreign to her own Nigerian culture.
- 🌏 The realization that literature could also represent her own experiences came when she discovered African authors like Chinua Achebe, which broadened her perception of what literature could be.
- 🏡 Growing up in a middle-class Nigerian family, the speaker had a single story of her houseboy Fede's family as being poor, which was challenged when she visited their village and saw their creativity and craftsmanship.
- 🗣️ The speaker's American roommate had a single story of Africa as a place of catastrophe, which was based on stereotypes and not on personal experience or a diverse range of stories.
- 🌐 The power of storytelling is tied to power structures; those who tell the stories have the ability to define the narrative and shape perceptions of people and places.
- 📖 The speaker acknowledges her own participation in reinforcing single stories, as seen in her initial perceptions of Mexicans during a visit to Mexico, influenced by media coverage.
- 🔄 The importance of diverse stories is emphasized, as they provide a more complete and nuanced understanding of people and places, rather than relying on stereotypes.
- 🌍 The speaker calls for a 'balance of stories' to counteract the flattening effect of single stories, which can rob people of their dignity and humanity.
- 💪 The power of stories to empower and humanize is highlighted, with examples of Nigerians who are ambitious, creative, and resilient despite challenges.
- 🏛️ The speaker and her publisher have started a nonprofit to build libraries and promote reading and writing, emphasizing the importance of providing access to diverse stories.
- 🤝 The conclusion calls for the rejection of single stories to regain a sense of paradise, suggesting that a multiplicity of narratives leads to a richer understanding and appreciation of the world.
Q & A
What is the main theme of the storyteller's personal experiences in the transcript?
-The main theme is the danger of the single story, which refers to the risk of forming one's understanding of a person, place, or culture based on a limited or stereotypical narrative.
Why did the storyteller's early stories feature characters that were white and blue-eyed?
-The storyteller's early stories featured such characters because the British and American children's books she read as a child depicted characters that were foreign to her own Nigerian environment, influencing her early writing.
What was the storyteller's realization after discovering African literature?
-The storyteller realized that people who looked like her, with similar cultural backgrounds, could also exist in literature, leading her to write about things she recognized and could personally identify with.
How did the storyteller's perception of her house boy, Fide, change after visiting his village?
-After visiting Fide's village and seeing the beautifully patterned basket made by his brother, the storyteller was startled to realize that Fide's family was capable of creating something of beauty and value, challenging her previous single story of them being only poor.
What was the American roommate's single story of Africa?
-The American roommate's single story of Africa was one of catastrophe, where she assumed that Africans were unable to speak for themselves and were in need of being saved by a kind white foreigner, reflecting a patronizing and well-meaning perspective.
How did the storyteller's experience in the United States influence her identity?
-In the United States, the storyteller began to embrace a new identity as an African, as she was often turned to whenever Africa was mentioned, even though she knew nothing about some of the places being discussed.
What is the storyteller's view on the relationship between power and storytelling?
-The storyteller believes that power is the ability to define the definitive story of a person or place, and that the power structures of the world influence whose stories are told and how they are told.
Why did the storyteller feel shame during her visit to Guadalajara, Mexico?
-The storyteller felt shame because she realized that she had internalized the single story of Mexicans as abject immigrants due to the media coverage she had been exposed to in the United States.
What is the storyteller's opinion on the importance of having multiple stories about a place or person?
-The storyteller believes that engaging with multiple stories is crucial for a proper understanding of a place or person, as it avoids the flattening of experience and recognizes the complexity of humanity.
What is the storyteller's initiative with her publisher to promote diverse storytelling?
-The storyteller and her publisher have started a nonprofit called Farafina Trust with the aim of building libraries, refurbishing existing ones, providing books to state schools, and organizing workshops to encourage diverse storytelling.
How does the storyteller suggest we can regain a kind of paradise?
-The storyteller suggests that we can regain a kind of paradise by rejecting the single story and recognizing that there is never a single story about any place, which allows for a more nuanced and respectful understanding of diversity.
Outlines
📚 The Perils of a Single Story
The speaker, a storyteller, recounts her childhood in Nigeria and the impact of reading predominantly British and American children's books. She describes how she unconsciously adopted the cultural nuances of these foreign stories into her own writing, creating characters that were white and blue-eyed, despite living in a Nigerian environment. The realization of this cultural disconnect led her to explore African literature, which broadened her understanding of diversity in storytelling and helped her to recognize the importance of representation in literature. This experience taught her about the vulnerability to single narratives, especially in childhood, and the transformative power of discovering a more inclusive range of stories.
🌏 The Consequences of Stereotyping
The narrative shifts to the speaker's experiences with the 'single story' phenomenon in her interactions with others, such as her American roommate's preconceived notions about Africa and Africans. The speaker reflects on how the single story can lead to stereotypes and a lack of understanding, emphasizing the importance of recognizing the complexity and diversity within any culture or place. She discusses the historical roots of such narratives in Western literature and how they have perpetuated harmful stereotypes. The speaker also acknowledges her own complicity in perpetuating single stories and the need to challenge these narratives to foster a more accurate and empathetic understanding of different cultures.
🌱 The Power of Multiple Narratives
The speaker delves into the concept of power in storytelling, illustrating how the ability to define a narrative can lead to the marginalization or misrepresentation of certain groups. She uses examples from her own life and the broader African context to highlight the damage caused by single stories and the importance of sharing diverse narratives to restore dignity and humanity. The speaker advocates for the recognition of multiple, authentic stories from different cultures and backgrounds, as a means to challenge stereotypes and promote a more nuanced understanding of the world.
🌟 The Transformative Impact of Stories
In the final paragraph, the speaker emphasizes the transformative power of stories in shaping perceptions and identities. She shares personal anecdotes that challenge the single story of Nigeria and Africa, highlighting the resilience, creativity, and diversity of the people. The speaker discusses her efforts to promote storytelling through workshops and a nonprofit organization, aiming to empower individuals to share their own narratives. She concludes by reflecting on the importance of embracing multiple stories to regain a sense of paradise, where understanding and empathy prevail over stereotypes and single narratives.
Mindmap
Keywords
💡Single Story
💡Impressionability
💡Cultural Identity
💡Perception
💡Stereotype
💡Empathy
💡Dignity
💡Power Structures
💡Authenticity
💡Resilience
💡Humanization
Highlights
The storyteller's childhood in Nigeria was influenced by British and American children's books, leading to a limited perspective on literature.
Early writing reflected the single story of foreign characters due to the absence of diverse literature.
The discovery of African literature broadened the storyteller's perception of who could exist in literature.
The storyteller's encounter with her house boy, Fede, challenged her single story of poverty.
The storyteller's American roommate's misconceptions about Africa highlight the impact of a single story.
The single story of Africa as a place of catastrophe overlooks the continent's diversity and humanity.
The storyteller reflects on the power dynamics in storytelling, emphasizing the importance of diverse narratives.
The storyteller's experience in Mexico revealed her own susceptibility to the single story of Mexicans.
The storyteller discusses the limitations of stereotypes and the need for a balance of stories to restore dignity.
The importance of engaging with all stories of a place or person for a proper understanding is emphasized.
The storyteller's personal experiences in Nigeria showcase the resilience and ambition of its people.
The storyteller's nonprofit, Farah FINA Trust, aims to empower people through diverse storytelling.
The storyteller concludes that rejecting the single story allows for a regained sense of paradise.
Transcripts
I'm a storyteller and I would like to
tell you a few personal stories about
what I like to call the danger of the
single story I grew up on a university
campus in eastern Nigeria my mother says
that I started reading at the age of two
although I think four is probably close
to the truth so I was an early reader
and what I read were British and
American children's books I was also an
early writer and when I began to write
at about the age of seven stories in
pencil with crayon illustrations that my
poor mother was obligated to read I
wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was
reading all my characters were white and
blue-eyed they played in the snow they
ate apples and they talked a lot about
the weather how lovely it was that the
Sun had come out now this despite the
fact that I lived in Nigeria had never
been outside Nigeria we didn't have snow
we ate mangos and we never talked about
the weather because there was no need my
characters also drank a lot of ginger
beer because the characters and the
British books I read drank ginger beer
never mind that I had no idea what
ginger beer was and for many years
afterwards I would have a desperate
desire to taste ginger beer but that is
another story
what this demonstrates I think is how
impressionable and vulnerable we are in
the face of a story particularly as
children because all I had read were
books in which characters were foreign I
had become convinced that books by the
very nature had to have foreigners in
them and had to be about things with
which I could not personally identify
now things changed when I discovered
African books there weren't many of them
available and they weren't quite as easy
to find as the foreign books but because
of writers like Chinua Achebe on camera
I went through a mental shift in my
perception of literature I realized that
people like me
girls with skin the color of chocolate
whose kinky hair could not form
ponytails could also exist in literature
I started to write about things I
recognized now I loved those American
and British books I read they stared my
imagination the opened up new worlds for
me but the unintended consequence was
that I did not know that people like me
could exist in the choocha so what the
discovery of African writers did for me
was this it saved me from having a
single story of what books are I come
from a conventional middle-class
Nigerian family my father was a
professor
my mother was an administrator and so we
had as was the norm live-in domestic
help who would often come from nearby
rural villages so the year I turned 8 we
got a new house boy
his name was fede the only thing my
mother told us about him was that his
family was very poor my mother sent yams
and rice and our old clothes to his
family and when I didn't finish my
dinner my mother would say finish your
food don't you know people like fides
family have nothing so I felt enormous
pity for fides family but one Saturday
we went to his village to visit and his
mother showed us a beautifully patterned
basket made of dyed raffia that his
brother had made I was startled it had
not occurred to me that anybody and his
family could actually make something all
I had heard about them was how poor they
were so that it had become impossible
for me to see them as anything else but
poor their poverty was my single story
of them years later I thought about this
when I left Nigeria to go to university
in the United States I was 19 my
American roommate was shocked by me she
asked where I had learned to speak
English so well and was confused when I
said that Nigeria happened to have
English as its official lang
she asked if she could listen to what
she called my tribal music and was
consequently very disappointed when I
produced my tape of Mariah Carey she
assumed that I did not know how to use a
stove what struck me was this she had
felt sorry for me even before she saw me
had default position toward me as an
African was a kind of patronizing
well-meaning my roommate had a
single story of Africa a single story of
catastrophe in this single story there
was no possibility of Africans being
similar to her in any way no possibility
of feelings more complex than pity no
possibility of a connection as human
equals I will say that before I went to
the u.s. I didn't consciously identify
as Africa but in the u.s. whenever
Africa came more people turned to me
never mind that I knew nothing about
places like Namibia but I did come to
embrace the sign new identity and in
many ways I think of myself now as
African although I still get quite
irritable when Africa is referred to as
a country the most recent example being
my otherwise wonderful flight from Lagos
two days ago in which there was an
announcement on the virgin flight about
their charity walk in India Africa and
other countries so after I had spent
some years in the US as an African I
began to understand my roommates
response to me if I had not grown up in
Nigeria and if all I knew about Africa
were from popular images I too would
think that Africa was a place of
beautiful landscapes beautiful animals
and incomprehensible people fighting
senseless wars dying of poverty and AIDS
unable to speak for themselves and
waiting to be saved by a kind white
foreigner I would see Africans in the
same way that I as a child had seen
fides family this single story of Africa
ultimately comes I think from Western
literature now here's a quote from the
writing of a London merchant called John
Locke who sailed to West Africa in
1561 and kept a fascinating account of
his voyage after referring to the black
africans as beasts who have no houses he
writes they are also people without
heads having their mouths and eyes in
their breasts now I've laughed every
time I've read this and one must admire
the imagination of John Locke but what
is important about his writing is that
it represents the beginning of a
tradition of telling African stories in
the West a tradition of sub-saharan
Africa as a place of negatives of
difference of darkness of people who in
the words of the wonderful poet Rudyard
Kipling a half devil half child and so I
began to realize that my American
roommate must have throughout her life
seen and heard different versions of the
single story as had a professor who once
told me that my novel was not
authentically African now I was quite
willing to contend that there were a
number of things wrong with the novel
that it had filled in a number of places
but I had not quite imagined that it had
failed at achieving something called
African authenticity in fact I did not
know what African authenticity was the
professor told me that my characters
were too much like him an educated and
middle class man my characters drove
cars they were not starving therefore
they were not authentically African but
I must quickly add that I too am just as
guilty and the question of the single
story a few years ago I visited Mexico
from the US the political climate in the
u.s. at the time was tense and there
were debates going on about immigration
and as often happens in America
immigration became synonymous with
Mexicans there were endless stories of
Mexicans as people who were fleecing the
health care system sneaking across the
border being arrested at the border that
sort of thing I remember walking around
on my first day in Guadalajara
watching the people going to walk ruling
up to tears in the marketplace looking
laughing I remember first feeling slight
surprise and then I was overwhelmed with
shame I realized that I had been so
immersed in the media coverage of
Mexicans that they had become one thing
in my mind the abject immigrant I had
bought into the single story of Mexicans
and I could not have been more ashamed
of myself so that is how to create a
single story show a people as one thing
as only one thing over and over again
and that is what they become it is
impossible to talk about the single
story without talking about power
there is award an award that I think
about whenever I think about the power
structures of the world and it is
uncanny it's a noun that loosely
translates to to be greater than another
like our economic and political walls
stories too are defined by the principle
of an cali how they are told who tells
them when they are told how many stories
are told are really dependent on power
power is the ability not just to tell
the story of another person but to make
it the definitive story of that person
the palestinian poet will read bad news
he writes that if you want to
dispossessed people the simplest way to
do it is to tell their story and to
start with secondly start the story with
the arrows of the Native Americans and
not with the arrival of the British and
you have an entirely different story
start the story with the failure of the
African states and not with the colonial
creation of the African stage and you
have an entirely different story I
recently spoke at a university where a
student told me that it was such a shame
that Nigerian man was were physical
abusers like the father character in my
novel I told him that I had just read a
novel called American Psycho
and and that it was such a shame that
young Americans were serial murderers
now now
now obviously I said this in a fit of
mild irritation but it would never have
occurred to me to think that just
because I had read a novel in which a
character was a serial killer that he
was somehow representative of all
Americans and now this is not because
I'm a better person than that student
but because of America's cultural and
economic power
I had many stories of America I had red
tile and of Dyke and Steinberg and gate
skill I did not have a single story of
America when I learned some years ago
that writers were expected to have had
really unhappy childhoods to be
successful I began to think about how I
could invent horrible things my parents
had done to me but the truth is that I
had a very happy childhood full of
laughter and love in a very close-knit
family but I also had grandfather's who
died in refugee camps my cousin Polly
died because he could not get adequate
health care one of my closest friends
Oklahoma died in a plane crash because
her fire trucks did not have water
I grew up under oppressive military
governments that devalued education so
that sometimes my parents were not paid
their salaries and so as a child I saw
Jam disappear from the breakfast table
then margarine disappeared then bread
became too expensive then milk became
rationed and most of all a kind of
normalized political fear invaded our
lives all of these stories make me who I
am but to insist on only these negative
stories is to flatten my experience and
to overlook the many other stories that
formed me the single story creates
stereotypes and the problem with
stereotypes is not that they are untrue
but that they are incomplete they make
one story become the only story of
course Africa is a continent full of
catastrophes that immense ones such as
the horrific Greeks in Congo and
depressing ones such as the fact that
5000 people apply for one job vacancy in
Nigeria
but there are other stories that are not
about catastrophe and it's very
important it is just as important to
talk about them I've always felt that it
is impossible to engage properly with
the place or a person without engaging
with all of the stories of that place
and that person the consequence of the
single story is this it robs people of
dignity
it makes our recognition of a equal
humanity difficult if emphasizes how we
are different rather than how we are
similar so what it before my Mexican
trip I had followed the immigration
debate from both sides the US and the
Mexican what if my mother had told us
that fides family was poor and had
walking what if we had an African
television network that broadcast
diverse African stories all over the
world what the Nigerian writer Chino
h-e-b calls a balance of stories what if
my roommate knew about my Nigerian
publisher Mukhtar Bukhari a remarkable
man who left his job in a bank to follow
his dream and start a publishing house
now the conventional wisdom was that
Nigerians don't read literature he
disagreed he felt that people who could
read would read if you made literature
affordable and available to them shortly
after he published my first novel I went
to a TV station in Lagos to do an
interview and a woman who worked there
as a messenger came up to me and said I
really liked your novel I didn't like
the ending now you must write a sequel
and this is what will happen
and she went on to tell me what to write
in the sequel now I was not only charmed
I was very moved here was a woman part
of the ordinary masses of Nigerians who
were not supposed to be readers she had
not only read the book but she had taken
ownership of it and felt justified and
telling me what to write in the sepal
now what if my roommate knew about my
friend for me under a fearless woman who
hosts the TV show in Lagos and is
determined to tell the stories that we
prefer to forget what if my roommate
knew about the heart procedure that was
performed in the legals Hospital last
week what if my roommate knew about
contemporary Nigerian music talented
people singing in English and pigeon and
EMU and Yoruba and I Joe Mixon
influences from jay-z and Fela to Bob
Marley to their grandfathers what if my
roommate knew about the female lawyer
who recently went to court in Nigeria to
challenge a ridiculous law that required
women to get their husbands consent
before renewing their passports what if
my roommate knew about Nollywood full of
innovative people making films despite
great technical odds films so popular
that they really are the best example of
Nigerians consuming what they produce
what if my roommate knew about my
wonderfully ambitious hair braider who
has just started her own business
selling hair extensions all about the
millions of other Nigerians who start
businesses and sometimes feel but
continue to nurse ambition every time I
am home I'm confronted with the usual
sources of irritation for most Nigerians
our field infrastructure our field
government but also by the incredible
resilience of people who thrive despite
the government rather than because of it
I teach writing workshops in Lagos every
summer and it is amazing to me how many
people apply how many people are eager
to write to tell stories my Nigerian
publisher and I have just started a
nonprofit called Farah FINA trust and we
have big dreams of building libraries
and refurbishing libraries that already
exist and providing books
state schools that don't have anything
in their libraries and also of
organizing lots and lots of workshops
and reading and writing for all the
people who are eager to tell are many
stories stories matter many stories
matter stories have been used to dis
possess and to malign but stories can
also be used to empower and to humanize
stories can break the dignity of the
people but stories can also repair that
broken dignity the American writer Alice
Walker wrote this about them her
southern relatives who had moved to the
north and 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 with the
book and the 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
[Applause]
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