Nigerian writer Chimamanda Adichie uses her personal life and experiences to illustrate the danger of reducing other people and cultures to a single story rather than recognizing that we all have overlapping, multiple stories. She begins her talk by discussing her childhood in Nigeria, moves on to her experience as an African woman in the U.S., and then discusses the Nigerian experience today.
As a child growing up in a university campus in eastern Nigeria, Adichie loved reading and writing. When she began writing at the age of seven, she wrote the kind of stories that she had read. This meant that she wrote stories about blue-eyed white children who played in the snow and ate apples.
Since the only books she read were British and American …show more content…
Since she had kept hearing about how poor Fide’s family was, she only thought of them as poor and never thought that they could make anything. Fide’s poverty was her single story about them.
When Adichie came to the United States to study at the age of 19, her American roommate was shocked that she could speak English so well. Her American roommate assumed that she didn’t know how to use a stove, listened to tribal music and in general pitied her. She had a single story of Africans, “a single story of catastrophe.”
As she spent more time in the U.S., she began to understand her roommate’s response to her. If the only things she knew about Africa came from popular images, she too would believe that it was simply a place of natural beauty but with lots of human suffering. This single story of Africa can be seen in Western literature, where writers like John Locke and Rudyard Kipling reinforced the image of Africans as uncivilized beasts.
Adichie herself was guilty of the single story. In America, the only thing she heard about Mexicans were that they were illegal immigrants taking advantage of the country’s health care system and stealing jobs. The image she had of Mexicans in her head contrasted with what she saw with her own eyes her first day in …show more content…
In shame, Adichie realized that Mexicans had only become one thing to her, poor immigrants, because of hearing the same single story over and over again.
When Adichie thinks about the single story, she thinks of the Igbo word “nkali,” which roughly means “to be greater than another.” The single story is used as a way to assert power over another group. As the Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti wrote, if you want to take power away from a group of people, you tell a single story about them.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that the single story does not have any truth in it. Adichie has friends and family who unnecessarily suffered and died because of poverty and corruption. Sometimes, the food in her household was rationed. Africa is full of catastrophes, but it’s not all it is.
To reduce people to a single story is to rob them of their dignity and emphasizes “how we are different rather than how we are similar.” What if there was a TV station that broadcast stories reflecting the diverse African experience all over the
As a child growing up in a university campus in eastern Nigeria, Adichie loved reading and writing. When she began writing at the age of seven, she wrote the kind of stories that she had read. This meant that she wrote stories about blue-eyed white children who played in the snow and ate apples.
Since the only books she read were British and American …show more content…
Since she had kept hearing about how poor Fide’s family was, she only thought of them as poor and never thought that they could make anything. Fide’s poverty was her single story about them.
When Adichie came to the United States to study at the age of 19, her American roommate was shocked that she could speak English so well. Her American roommate assumed that she didn’t know how to use a stove, listened to tribal music and in general pitied her. She had a single story of Africans, “a single story of catastrophe.”
As she spent more time in the U.S., she began to understand her roommate’s response to her. If the only things she knew about Africa came from popular images, she too would believe that it was simply a place of natural beauty but with lots of human suffering. This single story of Africa can be seen in Western literature, where writers like John Locke and Rudyard Kipling reinforced the image of Africans as uncivilized beasts.
Adichie herself was guilty of the single story. In America, the only thing she heard about Mexicans were that they were illegal immigrants taking advantage of the country’s health care system and stealing jobs. The image she had of Mexicans in her head contrasted with what she saw with her own eyes her first day in …show more content…
In shame, Adichie realized that Mexicans had only become one thing to her, poor immigrants, because of hearing the same single story over and over again.
When Adichie thinks about the single story, she thinks of the Igbo word “nkali,” which roughly means “to be greater than another.” The single story is used as a way to assert power over another group. As the Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti wrote, if you want to take power away from a group of people, you tell a single story about them.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that the single story does not have any truth in it. Adichie has friends and family who unnecessarily suffered and died because of poverty and corruption. Sometimes, the food in her household was rationed. Africa is full of catastrophes, but it’s not all it is.
To reduce people to a single story is to rob them of their dignity and emphasizes “how we are different rather than how we are similar.” What if there was a TV station that broadcast stories reflecting the diverse African experience all over the