Julian Parris – Conversation 2

Summary

In Chimamanda Adichies Tedtalk ‘The dangers of single story’, the author opens her talk by laying down some light context on where she is from in Nigeria and when her love for reading and writing began as a toddler. Immediately she describes the depictions of her writings being based off the readings of characters that were white and blued eyed – drinking ginger beer and conversing about the weather. Knowing she never left Nigeria, didn’t have snow like in her books and never had a reason to talk about the weather growing up, together with the fact that the characters didn’t look like her, she was already contrasting the difference between her world and theirs.

This gives credit to her not being able to personally identify with the books she read due to a lack of variety in literature. She expresses the idea of how “impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story, especially as children”. Her perception of literature changed when she discovered black authors like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye because they wrote about things she could recognize. The contrast of reading American and British books however did stir her imagination yet as unintended consequence, disconnected her from that discovery.

Later on during the speech Adichie mentions how power plays a prominent role in single stories. In the authors African language “nkali” is a noun that translate to “to be greater than another”. She connects this to a broader theme of politics and economics including how often stories bend - the issues she adds is not necessarily the story itself, but the context in which the story is being told and from whom.

“Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person.” With only one view point it ‘makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult.’ She goes on to emphasize how stories do matter and how a collection of them ultimately make us who we are. In Adichie words, Stories have the ability to malign or to dispose, to empower or to humanize and adds how a single story can break or also repair the broken.

I completely agree with Adichie 100 percent because I think we all go through a conscious and unconscious bias in our daily lives. Like Adichie’s main point signifies, we are all a sum of our past and present stories including the ones unwritten. We cannot go into the depths of who we are without providing the history first. In the book I’m currently reading the author Caroline Myss notes that “our biography becomes our biology.” Although the book is more grounded in spirituality and science, this ties into The dangers of a single story because it’s the stories we tell ourselves and others that’s wolven into the experiences we all have as humans beings and furthermore how that actually contributes to our health.

The relevance of a single story is integrated in our society now so profoundly that it really is dangerous, almost insidious. With an increasing amount of social media applications, propaganda has shifted its way into the ads of youtube, twitter memes and even an instagram scroll. That means before we can even realize, our perception could be shifted before we have a chance to think! In conjunction to Adichie’s speech, the dangers of a single story can and usually relates to the biases we all have and experience. I think professor Barnes assigned this reading to not only open up our single perspective on the stories of others but also ourselves. Coupled with the fact that our current time runs on the information of others, Its important we keep in mind that a single story is never complete.