The danger of a single story

Chimamanda Adichie: The danger of a single story

I'm a story teller. And I would like to tell you a few personal stories about what I'd like to call the "danger of the  single story". I grew up in a university campus in eastern Nigeria. My mother says that I started reading at the age of 2, although I think 4 is probably closer to the truth. So I was an early reader, and what I read were British and American children's books. I was also an early writer. And when I began to write at about the age of 7. Stories in pencil with crayon illustrations that my poor mother was obligated to read. I wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was reading. All my characters were white and blue eyed. They played in the snow, they ate apples, and they talked a lot about the weather, how lovely it was that the sun had come out. Now, this, despite the fact that I lived in Nigeria, I had never been outside Nigeria. We didn't have snow, we ate mangos, and we never talked about the weather because there was no need to. My characters also drank a lot of ginger beer because the characters in the British books that I read drank ginger beer. Never mind that I had no idea about what ginger beer was. And for many years afterwards, I would have desperate desire to taste ginger beer. But that is another story.

What this demonstrates, I think, is how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story, particularly as children. Because all I had read were books in which characters were foreign, I had become convinced that books, by the very nature, had to have foreigners in them, and had to be about things with which I personally could not identify.

Now, things changed when I discovered African books. There weren't many of them available, and they weren't quite as easy to find as the foreign books. But, because of writers like Chinoachi(?) and Commalali(?), I went through a mental shift in my perception of literature. I realized that people like me, girls with skin, the color of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponny tails could also exist in literature. I started to write about things I recognized. I loved those American and British books I read, they _____ my imagination and opened up new worlds for me. But their unintended consequence was that I did not know people like me could exist in literature. So what the discovery of African writers did for me was this: It saved me from having a single story of what books are.

I come from a conventional middle class Nigerian family. My father was a professor, my mother was an administrator. And so we had, as was the norm, live-in-domestic-help who would often come from nearby rural villages. So the year I turned 8, we got a new house boy. His name was Fiddy. The only thing my mother told us about him was that his family was very poor. My mother sent yams and rice and 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 Fiddy's family have nothing?" So I felt enormous pity for Fiddy's family. But one Saturday we went to village to visit. And his mother showed us a beautifully patterned basket made of dyed raffia that his brother had made. I was startled. It had not occurred to me that anybody in his family could actually make something. All I had heard about them was how poor they were so that it had become impossible for me to see them as anything else but poor. The poverty was my single story of them.

Years later, I thought about this when I left Nigeria to go to university in the US. I was 19. My American roommate was shocked by me. She asked where I had learned to speak English so well, and was confused when I said that Nigeria happened to have English as its official language. She asked if she could listen to, what she called, my "tribal music", and was consequently very disappointed when I produced my tape of Maria Carrie. She assumed that I did not know how to use stove. What shocked me was this: she had felt sorry for me even before she saw me. Her default position toward me as an African was kind of patronizing, well-meaning pity.

My roommate had a single story of Africa. A single story of catastrophe. In this single story, there was no possibility of Africans being similar to her in any way, no possibility of feelings more complex than pity, no possibility of connection as human equals.

I must say that before I went to the US, I didn't consciously identify as African. But in the US, whenever Africa came up, people turned to me, never mind that I knew nothing about places like Namibia. But I did come to embrace this new identity, and in many ways I thinks of myself now as an African. Although I still get quite _______ when Africa is referred to as a country. The most recent example being my, otherwise wonderful flight from Ligos(?) 2 days ago, in which there was an announcement on the Virgin(?) Flight about their charity work in India, Africa and other countries.

So, after I had spend some years in the US as an African. I began to understand my roommate's response to me. If I had not grown up in Nigeria, and if all I knew about Africa were from popular images, I too would think that Africa was a place of beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals and incomprehensible people fighting senseless wars dying of poverty and AIDS, unable to speak for themselves, and waiting to be saved by a kind white foreigner. I would see Africans in the same way that I as a child had seen Fiddy's family.

The single story of Africa ultimately comes, I think, from western literature. Now, here's a quote from the writing of a London merchant, called John Locke, 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,

"There are also people without heads having their mouths and eyes in their drests."

Now I've laughed every time I've read this and one must admire imagination of John Locke.

But what is important about his writing is that it represents the beginning of a tradition of telling African stories in the West, a tradition of ___________ Africa as a place of negatives, of difference, of darkness, of people who, in the words of the wonderful poet, Rodger Kippling, a half devil, a half child. And so, I began to realize that my American roommate must have throughout her life seen and heard different versions of the single story.

I also had a professor who once told me that my novel was not authentically African. Now I was quite willing to contend that there were number of things wrong with the novel that it had failed in a number of places. But I had not quite imagine that it had failed in achieving something called African authenticity. In fact, I did not know what African authenticity was. The professor told me that my characters were too much like him, an educated middle class man. My characters drove cars, they were not starving, therefore they were not authentically African.

But I must quickly add that I too am just as guilty in the question of the single story. A few years ago I visited Mexico from the US. The political climate in the US of the time was tense, and there were debates going on about immigration, and as often happens in America, immigration became synonymous with Mexicans. There were endless stories of Mexicans as people who were _______ the health care system, sneaking across the border, being arrested at the border, that sort of thing.

I remember walking around in my first day in G______, watching the people going to work, rolling up the _______ as in the market place, smoking, laughing. I remember first feelings like surprise and then I was overwhelmed with shame. I realized that I have been so imersed in the media coverage of Mexicans that they had become one thing in my mind, the object immigrant. I had ______ into the single story of Mexicans, and I could not have been more ashamed of myself. So that is how to create a single story: show a people as one thing, as only one thing over and over again, and that is what they become.

It is impossible to talk about single story without talking about power. There is a word, an I___ word, that I think about whenever I think about the power structures of the world and it's ___ "uncalli". It's a noun, that loosely translates to 'to be greater than another'. Like economic and political worlds, stories too are defined by the principle of "uncalli". How they are told, who tells them, when they are told, how many stories are told are really dependent on power.

Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person. The Palestenian poet Murri Ba____ writes that if you want to dispossess a people, the simplest way to do it is to tell the story and to start with secondly. Start the story with errors of the native Americans and not with the arrival of the British, and you have an entirely different story. Start the story with the failure of the African states, and not with the colonial creation of the African states, and you have an entirely different story.

I recently spoke at a university where a student told me that it was such a shame that Nigerian men were phisical abusers like the father character in my novel. I told him that I had just read a novel called "American psycho", and that it was such a shame that young Americans were serial murders. Now, obviously I said this in a _____ mild irritation, but it would never have occurred to me to think that, just because I had read a novel in which a character was a serial killer, that he was somehow a representative of all Americans. And no, this is not because I'm a better person than that student, but because of America's cultural and economic power, I had many stories of America, I had read ____, Obdyke, and Steinbeck, and _____. I did not have single story of America. When I learned some years ago, that writers were expected to have had really unhappy childhoods to be successful, I began to think about how I could invent horrible thing my parents have done to me. But the truth is that I had a very happy childhood, full of laughter and love in a very close-knit family.


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