2 The Danger of a Single Story

In this video, popular author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie talks about culture, stories, stereotypes, and misunderstandings.

Here is the short summary from TED:

Our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice — and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding.

Also, here is a basic outline of the main ideas in her presentation:

1. The power of a single story about someone
2. Adichie’s biographical details
3. Power and nkali
4. Balance of stories
5. Her conclusion: finding paradise

I give you that basic outline because this is a longer presentation (about 19 minutes of talking). But, her pace is fairly slow, so it is not an information overload.

You can use the basic outline to help you as you write notes. You will share your notes with me in the connected assignment. Remember to focus on short notes, organized, with a focus on main ideas and important details.

As you listen and take notes, remember that repeating the video or using subtitles can both be good options to understand the content. Adichie speaks with a Nigerian English accent, which is similar in many ways to British English (no final R in a syllable, for example). Reflect: have you heard and listened to people with accents like hers before? What do you hear that is different from other accents? What do you hear that is the same?

Analyzing each “single story”

After you watch the video, think about these examples below. Prepare your answers, but you don’t have to turn them in — just be ready to share in class.

For each example, can you answer:

A.    What is the “single story” in the example? It may be directly or indirectly explained in the example.
B. What is the other side (or reality) of the situation?
C.   What was the result of focusing on that single story?

Example: So I was an early reader, and what I read were British and American children’s books…

Example answers:

• A: The single story that she accepted was that all the people in books were white, played in the snow, ate apples, and talked about the weather.
• B: In her own life, in Nigeria, she mostly knew people with dark skin, didn’t have snow, ate mangoes, and never talked about the weather.
• C: Her first stories were not about her own culture and experience. She thought that stories had to be about English and American people.

Can you identify the single story, reality, and the effect in these examples?

1. So, the year I turned eight, we got a new house boy. His name was Fide. The only thing my mother told us about him was that his family was very poor. My mother sent yams and rice, and our old clothes, to his family. And when I didn’t finish my dinner, my mother would say, “Finish your food! Don’t you know? People like Fide’s family have nothing.”
2. My American roommate was shocked by me. She asked where I had learned to speak English so well
3. Now, here is a quote from the writing of a London merchant called John Lok, who sailed to west Africa in 1561 and kept a fascinating account of his voyage. After referring to the black Africans as “beasts who have no houses,” he writes, “They are also people without heads, having their mouth and eyes in their breasts.”
   
4. [I had a] professor, who once told me that my novel was not “authentically African.” … The professor told me that my characters were too much like him, an educated and middle-class man. My characters drove cars. They were not starving.
5. I remember walking around on my first day in Guadalajara [Mexico], watching the people going to work, rolling up tortillas in the marketplace, smoking, laughing. I remember first feeling slight surprise.