Chimamanda Adichie - The Danger of a Single Story

8/12/2019 Chimamanda Adichie - The Danger of a Single Story

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Transcript for Chimamanda Adichie: The danger of a single story

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00:00 00:02 I'm a storyteller.

00:02 00:05 And I would like to tell you a few personal stories

00:05 00:10 about what I like to call "the danger of the single story."

00:10 00:14 I grew up on a university campus in eastern Nigeria.

00:14 00:17 My mother says that I started reading at the age of two,

00:17 00:22 although I think four is probably close to the truth.

00:22 00:24 So I was an early reader, and what I read

00:24 00:27 were British and American children's books.

00:27 00:30 I was also an early writer,

00:30 00:34 and when I began to write, at about the age of seven,

00:34 00:36 stories in pencil with crayon illustrations


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00:36 00:39 that my poor mother was obligated to read,

00:39 00:43 I wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was reading:

00:43 00:48 All my characters were white and blue-eyed,

00:48 00:50 they played in the snow,

00:50 00:52 they ate apples,

00:52 00:54 and they talked a lot about the weather,

00:54 00:56 how lovely it was

00:56 00:58 that the sun had come out.

00:58 01:00 (Laughter)

01:00 01:03 Now, this despite the fact that I lived in Nigeria.

01:03 01:07 I had never been outside Nigeria.

01:07 01:10 We didn't have snow, we ate mangoes,


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01:10 01:12 and we never talked about the weather,

01:12 01:14 because there was no need to.

01:14 01:17 My characters also drank a lot of ginger beer

01:17 01:19 because the characters in the British books I read

01:19 01:21 drank ginger beer.

01:21 01:24 Never mind that I had no idea what ginger beer was.

01:24 01:25 (Laughter)

01:25 01:28 And for many years afterwards, I would have a desperate desire

01:28 01:30 to taste ginger beer.

01:30 01:32 But that is another story.

01:32 01:34 What this demonstrates, I think,

01:34 01:37 is how impressionable and vulnerable we are


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01:37 01:39 in the face of a story,

01:39 01:41 particularly as children.

01:41 01:43 Because all I had read were books

01:43 01:45 in which characters were foreign,

01:45 01:47 I had become convinced that books

01:47 01:50 by their very nature had to have foreigners in them

01:50 01:52 and had to be about things with which

01:52 01:55 I could not personally identify.

01:55 01:59 Things changed when I discovered African books.

01:59 02:01 There weren't many of them available, and they weren't

02:01 02:03 quite as easy to find as the foreign books.

02:03 02:07 But because of writers like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye


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02:07 02:09 I went through a mental shift in my perception

02:09 02:11 of literature.

02:11 02:13 I realized that people like me,

02:13 02:15 girls with skin the color of chocolate,

02:15 02:18 whose kinky hair could not form ponytails,

02:18 02:20 could also exist in literature.

02:20 02:24 I started to write about things I recognized.

02:24 02:28 Now, I loved those American and British books I read.

02:28 02:32 They stirred my imagination. They opened up new worlds for me.

02:32 02:34 But the unintended consequence

02:34 02:36 was that I did not know that people like me

02:36 02:38 could exist in literature.


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02:38 02:42 So what the discovery of African writers did for me was this:

02:42 02:45 It saved me from having a single story

02:45 02:47 of what books are.

02:47 02:50 I come from a conventional, middle-class Nigerian family.

02:50 02:52 My father was a professor.

02:52 02:55 My mother was an administrator.

02:55 02:58 And so we had, as was the norm,

02:58 03:03 live-in domestic help, who would often come from nearby rural villages.

03:03 03:07 So the year I turned eight we got a new house boy.

03:07 03:09 His name was Fide.

03:09 03:12 The only thing my mother told us about him

03:12 03:15 was that his family was very poor.


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03:15 03:17 My mother sent yams and rice,

03:17 03:20 and our old clothes, to his family.

03:20 03:22 And when I didn't finish my dinner my mother would say,

03:22 03:27 "Finish your food! Don't you know? People like Fide's family have nothing."

03:27 03:31 So I felt enormous pity for Fide's family.

03:31 03:34 Then one Saturday we went to his village to visit,

03:34 03:38 and his mother showed us a beautifully patterned basket

03:38 03:41 made of dyed raffia that his brother had made.

03:41 03:43 I was startled.

03:43 03:46 It had not occurred to me that anybody in his family

03:46 03:49 could actually make something.

03:49 03:52 All I had heard about them was how poor they were,


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03:52 03:54 so that it had become impossible for me to see them

03:54 03:57 as anything else but poor.

03:57 04:01 Their poverty was my single story of them.

04:01 04:03 Years later, I thought about this when I left Nigeria

04:03 04:06 to go to university in the United States.

04:06 04:08 I was 19.

04:08 04:12 My American roommate was shocked by me.

04:12 04:15 She asked where I had learned to speak English so well,

04:15 04:17 and was confused when I said that Nigeria

04:17 04:22 happened to have English as its official language.

04:22 04:26 She asked if she could listen to what she called my "tribal music,"

04:26 04:28 and was consequently very disappointed


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04:28 04:30 when I produced my tape of Mariah Carey.

04:30 04:33 (Laughter)

04:33 04:35 She assumed that I did not know how

04:35 04:38 to use a stove.

04:38 04:40 What struck me was this: She had felt sorry for me

04:40 04:42 even before she saw me.

04:42 04:46 Her default position toward me, as an African,

04:46 04:50 was a kind of patronizing, well-meaning pity.

04:50 04:53 My roommate had a single story of Africa:

04:53 04:56 a single story of catastrophe.

04:56 04:58 In this single story there was no possibility

04:58 05:02 of Africans being similar to her in any way,


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05:02 05:05 no possibility of feelings more complex than pity,

05:05 05:09 no possibility of a connection as human equals.

05:09 05:11 I must say that before I went to the U.S. I didn't

05:11 05:14 consciously identify as African.

05:14 05:17 But in the U.S. whenever Africa came up people turned to me.

05:17 05:21 Never mind that I knew nothing about places like Namibia.

05:21 05:23 But I did come to embrace this new identity,

05:23 05:26 and in many ways I think of myself now as African.

05:26 05:28 Although I still get quite irritable when

05:28 05:30 Africa is referred to as a country,

05:30 05:34 the most recent example being my otherwise wonderful flight

05:34 05:36 from Lagos two days ago, in which


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05:36 05:38 there was an announcement on the Virgin flight

05:38 05:43 about the charity work in "India, Africa and other countries."

05:43 05:44 (Laughter)

05:44 05:48 So after I had spent some years in the U.S. as an African,

05:48 05:52 I began to understand my roommate's response to me.

05:52 05:55 If I had not grown up in Nigeria, and if all I knew about Africa

05:55 05:57 were from popular images,

05:57 06:00 I too would think that Africa was a place of

06:00 06:04 beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals,

06:04 06:06 and incomprehensible people,

06:06 06:09 fighting senseless wars, dying of poverty and AIDS,

06:09 06:12 unable to speak for themselves


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06:12 06:14 and waiting to be saved

06:14 06:17 by a kind, white foreigner.

06:17 06:19 I would see Africans in the same way that I,

06:19 06:23 as a child, had seen Fide's family.

06:23 06:27 This single story of Africa ultimately comes, I think, from Western literature.

06:27 06:29 Now, here is a quote from

06:29 06:32 the writing of a London merchant called John Locke,

06:32 06:35 who sailed to west Africa in 1561

06:35 06:40 and kept a fascinating account of his voyage.

06:40 06:42 After referring to the black Africans

06:42 06:44 as "beasts who have no houses,"

06:44 06:48 he writes, "They are also people without heads,


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06:48 06:53 having their mouth and eyes in their breasts."

06:53 06:55 Now, I've laughed every time I've read this.

06:55 06:59 And one must admire the imagination of John Locke.

06:59 07:01 But what is important about his writing is that

07:01 07:03 it represents the beginning

07:03 07:06 of a tradition of telling African stories in the West:

07:06 07:09 A tradition of Sub-Saharan Africa as a place of negatives,

07:09 07:11 of difference, of darkness,

07:11 07:15 of people who, in the words of the wonderful poet

07:15 07:17 Rudyard Kipling,

07:17 07:20 are "half devil, half child."

07:20 07:23 And so I began to realize that my American roommate


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07:23 07:25 must have throughout her life

07:25 07:27 seen and heard different versions

07:27 07:29 of this single story,

07:29 07:31 as had a professor,

07:31 07:36 who once told me that my novel was not "authentically African."

07:36 07:38 Now, I was quite willing to contend that there were a number of things

07:38 07:40 wrong with the novel,

07:40 07:44 that it had failed in a number of places,

07:44 07:46 but I had not quite imagined that it had failed

07:46 07:49 at achieving something called African authenticity.

07:49 07:51 In fact I did not know what

07:51 07:54 African authenticity was.


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07:54 07:56 The professor told me that my characters

07:56 07:58 were too much like him,

07:58 08:00 an educated and middle-class man.

08:00 08:02 My characters drove cars.

08:02 08:05 They were not starving.

08:05 08:09 Therefore they were not authentically African.

08:09 08:12 But I must quickly add that I too am just as guilty

08:12 08:15 in the question of the single story.

08:15 08:19 A few years ago, I visited Mexico from the U.S.

08:19 08:21 The political climate in the U.S. at the time was tense,

08:21 08:25 and there were debates going on about immigration.

08:25 08:27 And, as often happens in America,


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08:27 08:30 immigration became synonymous with Mexicans.

08:30 08:32 There were endless stories of Mexicans

08:32 08:34 as people who were

08:34 08:36 fleecing the healthcare system,

08:36 08:38 sneaking across the border,

08:38 08:42 being arrested at the border, that sort of thing.

08:42 08:46 I remember walking around on my first day in Guadalajara,

08:46 08:48 watching the people going to work,

08:48 08:50 rolling up tortillas in the marketplace,

08:50 08:53 smoking, laughing.

08:53 08:56 I remember first feeling slight surprise.

08:56 08:59 And then I was overwhelmed with shame.


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08:59 09:02 I realized that I had been so immersed

09:02 09:04 in the media coverage of Mexicans

09:04 09:06 that they had become one thing in my mind,

09:06 09:09 the abject immigrant.

09:09 09:11 I had bought into the single story of Mexicans

09:11 09:14 and I could not have been more ashamed of myself.

09:14 09:16 So that is how to create a single story,

09:16 09:19 show a people as one thing,

09:19 09:21 as only one thing,

09:21 09:23 over and over again,

09:23 09:26 and that is what they become.

09:26 09:28 It is impossible to talk about the single story


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10:00 10:03 Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person,

10:03 10:07 but to make it the definitive story of that person.

10:07 10:09 The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes

10:09 10:12 that if you want to dispossess a people,

10:12 10:15 the simplest way to do it is to tell their story

10:15 10:18 and to start with, "secondly."

10:18 10:22 Start the story with the arrows of the Native Americans,

10:22 10:25 and not with the arrival of the British,

10:25 10:28 and you have an entirely different story.

10:28 10:30 Start the story with

10:30 10:32 the failure of the African state,

10:32 10:36 and not with the colonial creation of the African state,


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10:36 10:40 and you have an entirely different story.

10:40 10:42 I recently spoke at a university where

10:42 10:44 a student told me that it was

10:44 10:46 such a shame

10:46 10:49 that Nigerian men were physical abusers

10:49 10:52 like the father character in my novel.

10:52 10:54 I told him that I had just read a novel

10:54 10:56 called American Psycho --

10:56 10:58 (Laughter)

10:58 11:00 -- and that it was such a shame

11:00 11:03 that young Americans were serial murderers.

11:03 11:07 (Laughter)


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11:07 11:13 (Applause)

11:13 11:16 Now, obviously I said this in a fit of mild irritation.

11:16 11:18 (Laughter)

11:18 11:20 But it would never have occurred to me to think

11:20 11:22 that just because I had read a novel

11:22 11:24 in which a character was a serial killer

11:24 11:26 that he was somehow representative

11:26 11:28 of all Americans.

11:28 11:31 This is not because I am a better person than that student,

11:31 11:34 but because of America's cultural and economic power,

11:34 11:36 I had many stories of America.

11:36 11:40 I had read Tyler and Updike and Steinbeck and Gaitskill.


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11:40 11:43 I did not have a single story of America.

11:43 11:46 When I learned, some years ago, that writers were expected

11:46 11:50 to have had really unhappy childhoods

11:50 11:52 to be successful,

11:52 11:54 I began to think about how I could invent

11:54 11:56 horrible things my parents had done to me.

11:56 11:58 (Laughter)

11:58 12:02 But the truth is that I had a very happy childhood,

12:02 12:05 full of laughter and love, in a very close-knit family.

12:05 12:09 But I also had grandfathers who died in refugee camps.

12:09 12:13 My cousin Polle died because he could not get adequate healthcare.

12:13 12:16 One of my closest friends, Okoloma, died in a plane crash


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12:16 12:19 because our fire trucks did not have water.

12:19 12:22 I grew up under repressive military governments

12:22 12:24 that devalued education,

12:24 12:27 so that sometimes my parents were not paid their salaries.

12:27 12:31 And so, as a child, I saw jam disappear from the breakfast table,

12:31 12:33 then margarine disappeared,

12:33 12:36 then bread became too expensive,

12:36 12:39 then milk became rationed.

12:39 12:42 And most of all, a kind of normalized political fear

12:42 12:46 invaded our lives.

12:46 12:48 All of these stories make me who I am.

12:48 12:52 But to insist on only these negative stories


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12:52 12:55 is to flatten my experience

12:55 12:57 and to overlook the many other stories

12:57 12:59 that formed me.

12:59 13:02 The single story creates stereotypes,

13:02 13:05 and the problem with stereotypes

13:05 13:07 is not that they are untrue,

13:07 13:09 but that they are incomplete.

13:09 13:13 They make one story become the only story.

13:13 13:15 Of course, Africa is a continent full of catastrophes:

13:15 13:19 There are immense ones, such as the horrific rapes in Congo

13:19 13:21 and depressing ones, such as the fact that

13:21 13:26 5,000 people apply for one job vacancy in Nigeria.


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14:03 14:05 the U.S. and the Mexican?

14:05 14:09 What if my mother had told us that Fide's family was poor

14:09 14:11 and hardworking?

14:11 14:13 What if we had an African television network

14:13 14:17 that broadcast diverse African stories all over the world?

14:17 14:19 What the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe calls

14:19 14:22 "a balance of stories."

14:22 14:25 What if my roommate knew about my Nigerian publisher,

14:25 14:27 Mukta Bakaray,

14:27 14:29 a remarkable man who left his job in a bank

14:29 14:32 to follow his dream and start a publishing house?

14:32 14:36 Now, the conventional wisdom was that Nigerians don't read literature.


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14:36 14:38 He disagreed. He felt

14:38 14:40 that people who could read, would read,

14:40 14:44 if you made literature affordable and available to them.

14:44 14:47 Shortly after he published my first novel

14:47 14:50 I went to a TV station in Lagos to do an interview,

14:50 14:53 and a woman who worked there as a messenger came up to me and said,

14:53 14:56 "I really liked your novel. I didn't like the ending.

14:56 14:59 Now you must write a sequel, and this is what will happen ..."

14:59 15:02 (Laughter)

15:02 15:05 And she went on to tell me what to write in the sequel.

15:05 15:08 I was not only charmed, I was very moved.

15:08 15:11 Here was a woman, part of the ordinary masses of Nigerians,


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15:11 15:14 who were not supposed to be readers.

15:14 15:16 She had not only read the book, but she had taken ownership of it

15:16 15:19 and felt justified in telling me

15:19 15:21 what to write in the sequel.

15:21 15:25 Now, what if my roommate knew about my friend Fumi Onda,

15:25 15:28 a fearless woman who hosts a TV show in Lagos,

15:28 15:31 and is determined to tell the stories that we prefer to forget?

15:31 15:35 What if my roommate knew about the heart procedure

15:35 15:38 that was performed in the Lagos hospital last week?

15:38 15:42 What if my roommate knew about contemporary Nigerian music,

15:42 15:45 talented people singing in English and Pidgin,

15:45 15:47 and Igbo and Yoruba and Ijo,


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15:47 15:51 mixing influences from Jay-Z to Fela

15:51 15:54 to Bob Marley to their grandfathers.

15:54 15:56 What if my roommate knew about the female lawyer

15:56 15:58 who recently went to court in Nigeria

15:58 16:00 to challenge a ridiculous law

16:00 16:03 that required women to get their husband's consent

16:03 16:06 before renewing their passports?

16:06 16:09 What if my roommate knew about Nollywood,

16:09 16:13 full of innovative people making films despite great technical odds,

16:13 16:15 films so popular

16:15 16:17 that they really are the best example

16:17 16:20 of Nigerians consuming what they produce?


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16:20 16:23 What if my roommate knew about my wonderfully ambitious hair braider,

16:23 16:27 who has just started her own business selling hair extensions?

16:27 16:29 Or about the millions of other Nigerians

16:29 16:31 who start businesses and sometimes fail,

16:31 16:35 but continue to nurse ambition?

16:35 16:37 Every time I am home I am confronted with

16:37 16:40 the usual sources of irritation for most Nigerians:

16:40 16:43 our failed infrastructure, our failed government,

16:43 16:46 but also by the incredible resilience of people who

16:46 16:49 thrive despite the government,

16:49 16:51 rather than because of it.

16:51 16:54 I teach writing workshops in Lagos every summer,


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16:54 16:57 and it is amazing to me how many people apply,

16:57 17:00 how many people are eager to write,

17:00 17:02 to tell stories.

17:02 17:05 My Nigerian publisher and I have just started a non-profit

17:05 17:07 called Farafina Trust,

17:07 17:10 and we have big dreams of building libraries

17:10 17:12 and refurbishing libraries that already exist

17:12 17:15 and providing books for state schools

17:15 17:17 that don't have anything in their libraries,

17:17 17:19 and also of organizing lots and lots of workshops,

17:19 17:21 in reading and writing,

17:21 17:24 for all the people who are eager to tell our many stories.


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17:24 17:26 Stories matter.

17:26 17:28 Many stories matter.

17:28 17:32 Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign,

17:32 17:36 but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize.

17:36 17:39 Stories can break the dignity of a people,

17:39 17:44 but stories can also repair that broken dignity.

17:44 17:46 The American writer Alice Walker wrote this

17:46 17:48 about her Southern relatives

17:48 17:50 who had moved to the North.

17:50 17:52 She introduced them to a book about

17:52 17:55 the Southern life that they had left behind:

17:55 17:59 "They sat around, reading the book themselves,


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17:59 18:05 listening to me read the book, and a kind of paradise was regained."

18:05 18:08 I would like to end with this thought:

18:08 18:11 That when we reject the single story,

18:11 18:14 when we realize that there is never a single story

18:14 18:16 about any place,

18:16 18:18 we regain a kind of paradise.

18:18 18:20 Thank you.

18:20 18:28 (Applause)

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Chimamanda Adichie - The Danger of a Single Story