Conversation #2

Gerardo Garcia

Conversation #2.

In the TED talk; “then danger of a single story” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, describe us her life since when she started to read book at an early age, to when she travel and she experienced what she call “the danger of a single story”.

Chimamanda, is from Nigeria, Africa. She started to tell that she used to read American- British books, in which all her character were white people. In that time, she didn’t know people like her, could be in books too. She felt she could not identify with the books because many of them talked about things she hasn’t seen / experienced. That feeling of not belonging. Her perspective change when she discovered African Books.

Chimamanda, told they used to have a live-in domestic help. She meets a boy called Fide, and all that she knew about him, and his family was that they were poor and only poor. Her mother gives her that view of them, until they went to their village and discover a different view. They were poor, but also were hardworking people. She only thought about then as poor, and they could not do anything else, until that day.

When she traveled to the United States, for college, she experienced what she calls “the danger of a single story”. Her roomie had already opinions of her even before she talked about herself. A person who didn’t had knowledge of modern-day artifacts. She realized that her roomie only had one story of Africa.

Later on, she traveled to Mexico. She experienced the same but, in this case, in the shoes of the one that defined the story of the others. She had heard many stories of Mexicans from the media, but the one that most of them talk was immigrants, and how they sneak from the border. She got surprised when in Guadalajara, saw the people doing nothing out of sense. Just living their day.

Telling a story had a big power, because it can lead to a single story of how the things are.  It can influence people, and being influenced can lead to stereotypes. The view of any story can be different depending on how’s telling it.

I really agreed with the speech of Chimamanda Ngozi, because it reflect how telling not only stories, but telling anecdotes can affect the perspective of the other person. I can relate to Adichie’s speech when she said, “Show a people, as one thing, and only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.” This quote has different ways to understand it. For example, a child is told by his parents that his is not good as his brother. The parents may tell him that, because they want him to see his brother as a motivation. But, for the child it would feel like he’s in a competence / not enough compared with his brother. And eventually, he’ll believe he is not good at anything else than his brother, even though he’s good at something else.

Now, the relevance of a single story in our day and age, it would be that most of the time we judge a book for it cover. We assumed things about someone else by the way of how they behave or dress. When we should care about get to know a person deeper than just judging by how they look. Professor Barnes assigned this reading because she may want us, her students, to be more empathic with everyone. To talk to our classmates and at least get to know each other more than just knowing the names. Everyone has a story to tell, but not everyone are willing to listen to it.