According to the speech “The Danger of a Single Story” by Chimamanda Adichie courtesy of TED, she talks about how she learned about the problem of single story. She grew up with a good education and living conditions, so she was an early writer and reader. But she noticed that the stories she read often were opposites and conflicts with the real world she knew. Until she struggled to discover an African book, she found that the story character can be like her, and story can be different, not just about the foreigners in the stories she read before.
For the first time, she realized that many of the stories were one-sided. Particularly when she met her house boy, Fide. She was very sympathetic towards him because her mother had told her that he was poor. But she soon discovered that he was not only poor; he also had many stories about himself and his family that she hadn’t known. When she came to the U.S., she felt what Fide felt about her. Her roommate and instructor’s stereotype for an African and several misunderstanding. It made her start to think about why this was happening.
When she came to Mexico, she became the same kind of people with the roommate and instructor, a victim of single story. Many news sources and political climate shared a lot of negative information about Mexico with her. She realizes the story was not untrue, it was incomplete. And what causes all this is power. She conducted a series of imagination about what would happen if people could move beyond a single story. She’s really working on it, teaching courses, hoping to build libraries, and encouraging us to seek more than one story to expand our understanding.
I agree with Adichie’s main argument, I always have the same feeling, I know a lot of information that is someone they want me to know, but I want to know they don’t tell me what they don’t want me to know. Like she said, “I wrote exactly the kind stories I was reading.” Imitation is a process of learning, when we only can imitate the incomplete thing, the harm is great. Unfortunately, misunderstandings about the world are common, and our access to knowledge is often limited. At some times, the easier it is to acquire knowledge, the easier it becomes to become a single story. The speech’s content has attracted much attention. I believe that Professor Barnes hopes we can look at things critically and have a more comprehensive understanding of things.
2 thoughts on “Ziping Chen – Conversation 2”
Your reflection on Adichie’s TEDTalk resonates with its core message about the risks of a single narrative. You capture Adichie’s experience of realizing the limitations in the stories she encountered and how this realization influenced her perception. Your connection to wanting to know beyond presented information adds a personal touch.
Your understanding of the challenges in acquiring comprehensive knowledge, especially in a world with abundant misinformation, is well expressed. Your response effectively communicates the importance of embracing diverse perspectives and avoiding the pitfalls of relying on a single story. It’s clear that you share Adichie’s call for critical thinking and a more nuanced understanding of the world. Great job!
I’m interested to hear about the ways you think knowledge is limited while also being something that is easy to acquire. What did you mean by that? I personally believe that is something easy to acquire but the way we chose to spend our time will affect how much we carry. Especially in today’s society, we carry pieces of technology that such an advancement of human progress, and have access to the world wide web to make distinctions about almost every single thing.