Chiamando Adichie is a storyteller. She was raised on a university campus in eastern Nigeria where she learned to read at an early age. The books she read as a child were British and American children’s books. She was also an early writer. The wrote exactly the kind of stories she was reading. Because all she had read were books in which characters were foreign, she had become convinced that books had to have foreigners in then and thus were about things she could not personally identify. Things changed for her when she discovered African books. She realized people like her could also exist in literature and she started writing about things she recognized. She say “what the discovery of African writers did for me was this: It saved me from having a single story of what books are.”
She goes on to list more examples. She speaks about her houseboy whom she only saw as poor because that was the story she was told of him. She would later be surprised, while visiting her houseboys home, that his family was capable of much more than just being poor. She recalls her American roommate at university in United States. Her roommate was shocked by the author’s ability to speak English and confused to learn English was an official language in Nigeria, furthermore, she was taken by surprise to learn the authors preference for Mariah Carey over “tribal music” and that she could adequately work a stove. In regards to her American roommate, “She felt sorry for me before she knew me.”
After living in America for a while, she begins to realize that her American roommate must have heard several versions of this single story of Africa and relates it to her experience with Mexicans. Adichie inherited a single story of Mexicans by the American media and she would later feel ashamed by her own surprise after visiting Mexico and seeing that they are not how she imagined at all.
She announces that her publisher and herself have just started a non-profit. They are building and refurbishing libraries, providing books for state schools, and organizing lots of workshops in reading and writing.
She ends by saying “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 think everyone at some point has been the victim of a single story. I think everyone at some point has been guilty of having a single story. We use these stories to prejudge others without having to know them. Whether it be about religion, race, ethnicity, nationality, class, sexual orientation, gender, we all have single stories to easily define large segments of society. I think the point is to become aware that my story is certainly not the only story. It is very difficult to live in a diverse community. Everyone has to make a tremendous effort and the first step toward harmany is sheding these stories and treating each other not as different but as equal.
