Conversation #2
“A Danger of a Single Story” by Chimamanda Adichie is a TED Talk of how a single story is dangerous. Adichie is an African lady that grew up on a university campus in eastern Nigeria. Adichie was an early reader and writer. She read British and American children’s books. Adichie wrote stories at the age of seven. Children books with characters that had a western lifestyle. At the time she didn’t write stories about characters with her Nigerian lifestyle because that was not the books she read as a young girl.
When Adichie left Nigeria to go to University in the United States at nineteen. Adichie’s roommate profiled judge her from her culture Nigeria Africa, as a “pity African”. Because of her college roommate self-profiling Adichie, that remind her how she uses to self-profile her childhood friend Fide and his family with nothing other then them being poor and felt enormous pity for Fide ad his family.
Adichie talks about the single story often comes from Western Literature. After John Locke referring to black Africans as “beasts who have no houses, “They are also people without heads, having their mouth and eyes in their breasts”. Adichie says what is most important about John Locke writing is that it represents the beginning of telling the tradition African stories in the West. Adichie had a professor that thought her novel did not achieve African authenticity. Her novel was not the typical African Story, where the characters were starving and did not drive cars. Her novels related to him, a middle – class man.
“Nakali” is a noun that loosely translates to “to be greater than another”. Adichie explains that stories too are defined by the principle of nkali. Depending on how a story is told, when they are told, and how many times a story is being told gives power in the story. Adichie says, “the problem with stereotype stories, is not that they untrue but that they are incomplete.” “They make one story become the only story”.
The single story robs you of your dignity. It makes our acceptance of our equal humanity difficult. Instead of stereotype single story we should tell both sides of a story. What. Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe calls “a balance of stories”. If the stories she was told as a young girl about Fide being poor and the stories that was told about African culture to her room mate were “a balance of stories” The outcome of their perception of the story would have been completely different. Stories can break the dignity of people and stories can also repair that broken dignity. Adichie final message in this TED talk is, “That when we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise”.
- I do agree on Adichie’s argument about a single story is dangerous. It doesn’t give people a chance to hear the full truth of the story. Let alone, it gives people the opportunity to judge you of the stereotype of the type of version of the story they heard about.
