The Danger of a Single Story

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Lesson: To demonstrate an understanding of the text ‘The Danger of a Single Story’. To identify the perspective Adichie has on identity.

Do it nowLook at the pictures below. What do they all have in common?

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New knowledgeThe title of the text we are going to read is ‘The Danger of the Single Story.’ Based upon the work we completed in our Do it now task, what do you think the single story might be and why might this be considered dangerous.

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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born the fifth of six children in the town of Nsukka in south-eastern Nigeria, where the university of Nigeria is situated. Her father was a professor of statistics at the university and her mother was the university’s first female registrar.

Adichie studied medicine and pharmacy at the University of Nigeria for a year and a half. Then she left Nigeria to study communications and political science in the USA: Now she divides her time between Nigeria, where she teaches writing workshops and the United States.

She has published poetry and fiction and her novels have won several awards. For example, her first novel, Purple Hibiscus (2003) was awarded the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book (2005). Adichie says of feminism and writing, ‘I think of myself as a storyteller, but I would not mind at all if someone were to think of me as a feminist writer…I’m very feminist in the way I look at the world, and that world view must somehow be part of my work.’

In 2009, Adichie delivered this speech at a TED conference. She speaks about the power of storytelling and the danger of a single view.

Let’s start by listening to the TEDX talk.https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story

Title From The Danger of a Single Story by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie SummaryAdichie, a successful novelist, delivered this speech at a TED conference. She Speaks about the power of storytelling and the danger of a single view.

1 I’m a storyteller. And I would like to tell you a few personal stories about what I like2 to call “the danger of the single story.” I grew up on a university campus in eastern3 Nigeria. My mother says that I started reading at the age of two, although I think four4 is probably closer to the truth. So I was an early reader, and what I read were British5 and American children’s books.

6 I was also an early writer, and when I began to write, at about the age of seven,7 stories in pencil with crayon illustrations that my poor mother was obligated to read, 8 I wrote exactly the kind of stories I was reading; all my characters were white and 9 blue-eyed, they played in the snow, they ate apples, and they talked a lot about the10

weather, how lovely it was that the sun had come out.

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Now, this despite the fact that I lived in Nigeria. I had never been outside Nigeria.

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We didn’t have snow, we ate mangoes, and we never talked about the weather,

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because there was no need to… .

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What this demonstrates, I think, is how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the

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face of a story, particularly as children. Because all I had to read were books in

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which characters were foreign, I had become convinced that books by their very

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nature had to have foreigners in them and had to be about things with which I could

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not personally identify. Now, things changed when I discovered African books.

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There weren’t many of them available, and they weren’t quite as easy to find as the

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foreign books.

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But because of writers like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye, I went through a mental

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shift in my perception of literature. I realised that people like me, girls with skin the

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colour of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in

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literature. I started to write about things I recognised.

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Now, I loved those American and British books I read. They stirred my imagination.

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They opened up new worlds for me. But the unintended consequence was that I

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did not know that people like me could exist in literature. So what the discovery

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of African writers did for me was this: It saved me from having a single story of what

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books are.

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I come from a conventional, middle-class Nigerian family. My father was a professor.

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My mother was an administrator, And so we had, as was the norm, live-in domestic

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help, who would often come from nearby rural villages. So, the year I turned eight,

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we got a new house boy. His name was Fide. The only thing my mother told us

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about him was that his family was very poor. My mother sent yams and rice, and

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our old clothes, to his family. And when I didn’t finish my dinner, my mother would

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say, “Finish your food! Don’t you know? People like Fide’s family have nothing.”

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So I felt enormous pity for Fide’s family.

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Then one Saturday, we went to his village to visit, and his mother showed us a

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beautifully patterened basked made of dyed raffia that his brother had made, I was

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startled. It had not occurred to me that anybody in his family could actually make

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something. All I had heard about them was how poor they were, so that it had

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become impossible for me to see them as anything else but poor. Their poverty

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was my single story of them.

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Years later, I thought about this when I left Nigeria to go to university in the United

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States. I was 19. My American roommate was shocked by me. She asked where

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I had learned to speak English so well, and was confused when I said that Nigeria

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happened to have English as its official language. She asked if she could listen to

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what she called my “tribal music”, and was consequently very disappointed when I

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produced my tape of Mariah Carey.

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She assumed that I did not know how to use a stove.

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What struck me was this: She had felt sorry for me even before she saw me. Her

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default position toward me, as an African, was a kind of patronizing, well-meaning

5 pity. My roommate had a single story of Africa; a single story of catastrophe. In this

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single story, there was no possibility of Africans being similar to her in any way, no

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possibility of feelings more complex than pity, no possibility of a connection as

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human equals…

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So, after I had spent some years in the U.S. as an African, I began to understand my

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roommate’s response to me. If I had not grown up in Nigeria, and if all I knew about

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Africa were from popular images, I too would think that Africa was a place of

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beautiful landscpaes, beautiful animals, and incomprehensible people, fighting

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senseless wars, dying of poverty and AIDS, unable to speak for themselves and

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waiting to be saved by a kind, white foreigner. I would see Africans in the same way

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that I, as a child, had seen Fide’s family…

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But I must quickly add that I too am just as guilty in the question of the single story. A

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few years ago, I visited Mexico from the U.S. The political climate in the U.S. at the

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time was tense, and there were debates going on about immigration. And, as often

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happens in America, immigration became synonymous with Mexicans. There were

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endless stories of Mexicans as people who were fleecing the healthcare system,

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sneaking across the border, being arrested at the border, that sort of thing.

7 I remember walking around on my first day in Guadalajara, watching the people

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going to work, rolling up tortillas in the marketplace, smoking, laughing. I remember

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first feeling slight surprise. And then, I was overwhelmed with shame. I realised

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that I had been so immersed in the media coverage of Mexcians that they had

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become one thing in my mind, the abject immigrant. I had bought into the single story

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of Mexicans and I could not have been more ashamed of myself.

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So that is how to create a single story, show a people as one thing, as only one thing,

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over and over again, and that is what they become….

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Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to

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malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can

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break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.

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The American writer Alice Walker wrote this about her Southern relatives who had

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moved to the North. She introduced them to a book about the Southern life that they

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had left behind. “They sat around, reading the book themselves, listening to me

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read the book, and a kind of paradise was regained.”

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I would like to end with this thought: That when we reject the single story, when we

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realise that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of

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paradise.

Pen to paperWhat is Adichie’s perspective on the construction of identity?

Perspective Evidence (highlight the key techniques that help to present this perspective)

The

writ

er, A

dich

ie, b

elie

ves

the

sing

le s

tory

is a

dan

gero

us n

arra

tive

and

that

read

ing

stor

ies

can

wid

en o

ur fr

ame

of re

fere

nce

Adichie’s experience with stories early on.

Anecdote: Fide

Anecdote: university

Anecdote: Mexico

The limit of a single story vs the power of multiple stories to widen our perspectives.

New knowledgeLook at the following paragraph about Adichie’s perspective on her early experiences with stories.

Adichie reflects upon her early experience of the single story and how vulnerable this made her in

her understanding of herself and the wider world. This is evident when she writes ‘all my

characters were white and blue-eyed’. The use of the adjectives ‘white’ and ‘blue-eyed’ denote an

ethnicity that is different to her own but are referred to to emphasise that the stories she read only

contained characters with this appearance – an appearance different to her own. This affected

her view on the world when she stated ‘I had become convinced that books by their very nature

had to have foreigners in them and had to be about things with which I could not personally

identify.’ The use of the verb ‘convinced’ alludes to the idea that the regularity of stories

containing characters with this appearance made her feel as though they were the only narratives

available. Her struggle with this is evident when she classifies these characters as ‘foreigners’,

the noun emphasizing that they are unlike her and that as a result she could ‘not personally

identify’ with them, the clause implying a lack of connection to such narratives and a sense of

vulnerability with regard to her own identity within the fictional world.

WHAT? HOW? WHY?

Pen to paperNow construct your own WHAT HOW WHY paragraph analyzing an alternative perspective Adichie holds on the danger of the single story.

WHAT? What is this perspective?HOW? 1. How do you know? What evidence do you have?

2. What methods has Adichie used to help her convey this? WHY? Why has Adichie employed these methods? What is revealed about her perspective?

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ReflectionTo what extent do you agree with Adichie and her perspective on the danger of a single story. Would you say your experience is similar growing up or do you think more stories are on offer now that reflect different cultures and ethnicities?

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