A friend of mine recently connected me with a Ted Talk from 2009 entitled The Danger of the Single Story, given by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a Nigerian writer. Adichie was born in 1977, one of six children, her father a professor and her mother the registrar, both at the University of Nigeria. I’ve since listened to the Ted Talk four times and each time I learn something more.
Adichie was an early reader, devouring British and American children’s books by the age of four, the only books available to her at that time. The characters in these books were white children with blue eyes and blonde hair, engaging in play in the snow, eating apples, and discussing the weather – a world she had no frame of reference for. She did not find herself on the pages of the books she read. She was also an early writer, crafting stories by the time she was seven years old, and likewise, her characters were white, playing in the snow, and discussing the weather. This development of her interest in storytelling demonstrates how impressionable and vulnerable child readers are. The books they have access to informs how they see the world. She credits these early books with inspiring her reading and writing, opening new worlds to her that she didn’t know existed, but, she says, “the unintentional consequence” was she didn’t know people like her “could exist in literature”.
When books and media show a people as one thing, “it robs people of dignity”, says Adichie. After studying medicine and pharmacy at the University of Nigeria, she moved to the United States when she was nineteen to attend university in Philadelphia to study communications and political science. Her white roommate was surprised Adichie’s English was so good. Nigeria’s official language is English. Her roommate asked Adichie if she had recordings of her favourite tribal music. Adichie played Mariah Carey. Her roommate had a single story of Africa, one of poverty, and engaged with Adichie with an immediate and automatic sense of pity. Adichie had to explain repeatedly that Africa is a continent, not a country.
Adichie’s Ted Talk explained that when one story becomes the only story, we “create stereotypes”, emphasizing “how we are different rather than how we are similar”. Stories have the power to break the dignity of a people, but when thoughtfully written can also “repair that broken dignity”. It is up to each of us to reject the single story because there is never a single story about any person, place, or thing. When we grasp this truth while viewing the world, we can “regain a kind of paradise”.
When Adichie found stories by Nigerian writers, when she saw herself on the pages, she was saved from having “a single story of what books are” and … it got me thinking.
Several years ago, I watched an HBO series entitled The Wire, released in 2002 and set in Baltimore. I thought it exceptionally well done though the subject matter was difficult. The story centred around the drug trade and its influence or detriment on the city’s poor. What stuck with me about the series was the legacy of children “existing”, not raised but existing in a culture of drugs and violence and the almost certainty their lives would play out within that same world. These children had only the one story of themselves. They couldn’t imagine they could be anything else but a drug dealer, eventually taking their place on a Baltimore street corner.
Adichie gave a reading and one young man in attendance offered sympathy that all Nigerian men were abusers, based on the character in Adichie’s book. She countered with having just read American Psycho and how sorry she was that all young American men were serial murderers. She made a valid point. She grew up with the knowledge that Americans were many things, not limited to one story. The same couldn’t be said of the young man expressing his opinion as to Nigerians.
David A Robertson, a Cree writer from Winnipeg, dedicates his craft of writing to bring Indigenous children to the page, so young readers can see themselves, can imagine a wider world for themselves, can celebrate the best parts of their culture, and can learn from their struggles. It is impossible to gain the benefit of imagination and its magic to take us anywhere we want to go if the stories we read do not include us.
I am not one story; I am made up of many. I must remember this when I look in the mirror and when I look at others.
wendistewart@live.ca
