Lili Mei – Conversation 2

In the TED talk “The Danger of a Single Story”, Chimamanda Adichie talks about her life, starting with her own reading and writing experience, and how her life was after she came to the U.S, having few experiences about what she calls “the danger of the single story”.

Chimamanda Adichie is a Nigerian woman who read American/British books at age four, and started to write at age seven; most of her stories included more American and British characterization because that’s what she read about. At the time, she didn’t know that was not the only way to write stories, so as time passed by, she started to learn about African books, and with that, understood that not only white people exist in the literature, but people like her could also be part of it. She realized “how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story, particularly as children”. Thanks to African books, her perspective changed, and therefore, so did the single story she had about books.

She talks about how her family had a live-in domestic help, which, in her mother’s words, they were very poor; and met a boy called Fide, and all she could think about him and his family was that they were poor and only that. One day, she goes to visit his family and was shown a basket made by his brother. She notices how her single story about Fide’s family was about their poverty and only thought of that.

Years later, she went to the U.S. for studies, where her roommate was surprised to see her, as she knew how to speak English, and was, pretty much like her, listening to Mariah Carey’s music and so on. Her roommate had formed an opinion already before she even knew her, and had felt sorry and pity for her; her roommate had a single story about Africa: it was a “single story of catastrophe”, she thought they wouldn’t even know how to use a stove. After a few years in the U.S., she understood her roommate and why she had that perception about Africa; if she hadn’t been born in Nigeria, she would have thought the same as her roommate. Her single story about Fide’s family was similar to her roommate’s single story about her and Africa. She had experienced a few “single stories” in her life, including one, where she traveled to Mexico and only saw Mexicans as those abject immigrants, based on the U.S. stories about it, but was surprised to see they were like her. And just like that, she tells a few stories of what ifs, talking about what if her roommate knew about the many Nigerians who started businesses, and when they failed, they kept trying.

It finishes with how “power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person”, saying how stories are defined by how they’re told, who tells them, when they’re told, how many are told and this depends on power. “Stories matter…Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign. But stories can also be used to empower, and to humanize”, finishes Chimamanda Adichie.

I completely agree with her argument, about how a single story can be so powerful, yet so dangerous to anyone who hears it or is part of that single story. It shows that the way we tell stories can affect the way we see them, and just like her, we grew up a lot with U.S. influence, but little by little, we started to notice different stories around the globe that we heard before, but a little biased and we based our opinion on what we heard, because just as she said, “Show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become” That is how a single story is created, and sadly, we’ve all become victims of it, because there has been that one time when we heard something about someone, and that’s all we could think about, judging them based on that. The fact that a single story can change our whole perspective about something or someone shows how easily influenced we can be at times and ignorant of other things.

In this day and age, people get judged by everything and everyone, based on the way they look or how they dress, that is the single story we get from them and that’s how we treat them sometimes. This TED talk shows that there’s so much we don’t know about that one thing/person and we have already formed our opinion about it. I believe Professor Barnes assigned this reading for us to understand that we can’t judge everything superficially, we have to get to know them and not stay with one single story that could have been from years ago or not even true at all, considering we believe everything we see before verifying information. We can always listen to what others have to say and never stay with that one single story.