Chimamanda Adichie starts her speech by introducing the topic “the danger of a single story”. The speaker claims that during her childhood she was strongly influenced by white western books and stories, and the stories she would write were shaped on other people’s experiences that didn’t reflect hers, considering those were the stories she had access to for a long time. Adichie could not relate with the characters she read in the foreign books.
Foreign books could feed her imagination, however, she says that “the unintended consequence was that I did not know that people like me could exist in literature”.
However, this changes when she discovers African books. And the discovery of this new world stops her from only knowing a single story of literature.
Adichie gives several examples throughout her speech. Fide, her family’s house-boy, is a character she introduces saying that she, for a long time, only had a single story of him. She knew his family lived in poverty, but did not know that despite his economic issues, Fide and his family were able to make beautiful things: “their poverty was my single story of them”, she says.
The author had a single story of him, just like, in the future, she would encounter a roommate who would have the same single story: this time about her and her life in the African continent. Her roommate felt for her what she felt for Fide’s family. Adichie says that “her default position toward me, as an African, was a kind of patronizing, well-meaning, pity. My roommate had a single story of Africa”. Living in the US allowed her to understand where people’s perception of Africa came from, and that her, too, would have believed in the stereotypes if she had not been lived in Nigeria her whole life, “I would see Africans in the same way that I, as a child, had seen Fide’s family”.
In the speech, she claims to believe that people’s perception of the African continent comes from Western literature. By choosing to quote the English philosopher John Locke, Chimamanda claims that there is a tradition in the West of telling stories of Africa from negative and deprecative perspectives – and those perspectives reflects the way stories are told along the way in books. The author argues that beyond that, these stories reflect in expectations on what people expect to find in African stories, when once she was told by a professor that her stories were not “authentically African”.
Nevertheless, the author was once again put in a situation of creating a single story – associating Mexican solemnly to immigrants and the subject of borders and the USA.
After saying “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”, Chimamanda Adichie relates single stories to power. People who create narratives and dictate how stories will be told are people in big positions of power, “power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person”. To who is interesting to tell the stories? African stories were first disseminated by colonizers like Locke.
She makes a funny comparison to American Psycho, claiming that if all dark stories about Africa represented their culture, this novel represented all Americans as “serial murders”. Adichie never assumed that because one novel was about a killer, all white Americans were killers. That is why she “had many stories of America”. Just like African countries should have had. She brings many examples of stories she heard from her African family members and friends – some good, some bad, just like it happens with any other cultures. “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”.
To go against the stereotypes that put her people only in position of pity and sadness, Adichie proceeds to give innumerous examples of Nigerians who thrive and succeed and bring pride and hope to her country, rebelling against the stereotypes and refusing to accept the stories that were told to her about her people. Adichie is annoyed by how her country is represented in the single stories but also proud of the resilience and hard work of her people.
As a mission to change this cycle, Adichie has just started a non-profit called Farafina Trust to fund and support writers, students, publishers, and libraries, to tell stories that so far have remained untold.
Reading and watching Adichie’s speech, I fully agree with her perspective. As someone from South America, I am used to have access to a lot of cultural representations from the US and Europe in movies, books, television, and a big dissemination of it all over. I read books where families would celebrate Thanksgiving and spend Christmas doing snowball fights. Meanwhile, in December, my family would go to the beach under 90 degrees weather. When only a single story is told, many others are untold, ignoring full perspectives and denying people’s right of a truthful version of the facts. I think Professor Barnes gave us this assignment to create consciousness on why some stories are more disseminated than others, why some are told and others often ignored and to help us remember the dangers of not analyzing stories at its fullest.
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New version of my summary.
Chimamanda Adichie starts her speech by introducing the topic “the danger of a single story”. The speaker claims that during her childhood she was strongly influenced by white western books and stories, and the stories she would write were shaped on other people’s experiences that didn’t reflect hers. Adichie could not relate with the characters she read in the foreign books; books which could feed her imagination, however, she says that “the unintended consequence was that I did not know that people like me could exist in literature”.
Adichie gives several examples of single stories throughout her speech, situations where she had single stories of people, and that other people had of her. After saying “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”, Chimamanda Adichie relates single stories to power. People who create narratives and dictate how stories will be told are people in big positions of power, “power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person”.
To her, single stories are dangerous and feed stereotypes. In her speech, Adichie encourages her listeners to seek diverse and multiple stories to gain a more significant and empathetic understanding of the world.