Summary: Through her talk “ The danger of a Single Story”, Chimamanda Adichie warns us of the danger of the single story. Chimamanda Adichie is from a “conventional, middle-class Nigerian family.” She’s a “storyteller” born and raised in Nigeria who started her reading and writing journey reading about British and American children’s books, and writing about exactly the kind of stories she read. Those books she read made her feel “that books, by their very nature, had to have foreigners in them, and had to be about things with which” she could not personally identify. with. When she discovered African books; African writers like Chinua Achebe and Camaraderie Laye it was a different story. She realized that people like her, “girls with skin the color of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in literature. At the age of 19 she went to university in the United States. Her American roommate was shocked by her. She was confused that “Nigeria happened to have English as its official language, and was disappointed when she learned Adichie listened to Mariah Carey and not what she called her “tribal music.” Before moving to the U.S she didn’t consciously identify as African but she did come to embrace her new identity. Adichie began to understand her roommate’s response to her. She says if she had grown up in Nigeria, and all she knew “about Africa were from popular images”, she too would think “Africa was a place of beautiful animals, and incomprehensible people, fighting senseless wars,… and waiting to be saved, by a kind, white foreigner.” She realized that her American roommate must have “seen and heard different versions of this single story.” And she also noticed that she herself was “guilty in the question of the single story.” A lot of people are victims of this single story. Adichie says she always felt it “impossible to engage properly with a place or a person without engaging with all of the stories of that place and that person.”
Responding to the talk: I sympathize with Adichie’s statement that to properly engage with someone you need to engage with all the stories of that person. Without that it becomes a single story. I relate to Adichie’s roommate’s impression of what Africa was. I too had misconceptions about Africa. I always thought Africa was a place where there was always robbery and people dying because of intensified murders. All the horrific news I’d hear about it and now having heard from the other side I see clearly and have a better understanding. In our day and age the danger of a single story has relevance because we tend to only be giving one side of an argument importance, but never really the complete truth. We need to take this lesson to heart and stop relying on one sided stories. I think Professor Barnes assigned this reading because she wants us to know that like Adichie our story matters. Just because our stories are not what people are accustomed to hear, all “Stories Matter.”
