Analysis of ‘The Danger of a Single Story’ by Adichie

Reading Time: 10 minutes

INTRODUCTION

Adichie begins the talk by stating that she is a storyteller and wishes to share a few personal stories, which she refers to as ‘the danger of a single story’.

‘THE SINGLE STORY’ OF WHAT BOOKS ARE

Adichie grew up on a university campus in eastern Nigeria. Her mother says she started reading at two, although she thinks four is probably close to the truth. So, she was an early reader and read British and American children’s books.

Adichie was also an early writer; she began to write at about the age of seven. She wrote stories in pencil with crayon illustrations that her poor mother read to her. She wrote exactly the kinds of stories she was reading. All her characters were white and blue-eyed. They played in the snow, ate apples, and talked a lot about the weather – ‘how lovely it was that the sun had come out’. The irony is that she lived in Nigeria, and she had never been outside Nigeria. In Nigeria, they didn’t have snow. They ate mangoes and not apples, and never talked about the weather because there was no need to. Her characters also drank a lot of ginger beer because the characters in the British books she read drank ginger beer. She had no idea what ginger beer was, and for many years afterwards, she desperately desired to taste it. It demonstrates how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story, particularly as children. All she had read were books with foreign characters; she was convinced that all books had to have foreigners in them and were about things she could not personally identify.

This notion changed when Adichie discovered African books. There weren’t many available, and they weren’t as easy to find as the foreign books. However, because of writers like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye, she mentally shifted her perception of literature. She realised that people like her, girls with the skin colour of chocolate whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in literature. She started to write about things she recognised. She loved the American and British books she read. They stirred her imagination. They opened up new worlds for her. However, the unintended consequence was that she was unaware that people like her could exist in literature. What the discovery of African writers did for Adichie was that it saved her from having a single story about what books are.

‘THE SINGLE STORY’ OF FIDE

Adichie hails from a conventional, middle-class Nigerian family. Her father was a professor. Her mother was an administrator. So they had, as was the norm, live-in domestic help, who would often come from nearby rural villages. The year she turned eight, they got a new houseboy. His name was Fide. The only thing her mother told them about him was that his family was very poor. Her mother sent yams, rice, and their old clothes to his family. When she didn’t finish her dinner, her mother would say, “Finish your food! Don’t you know? People like Fide’s family have nothing.” So, she felt enormous pity for Fide’s family. Then, one Saturday, they went to his village to visit, and Fide’s mother showed them a beautifully patterned basket made of dyed raffia that his brother had made. She was startled. It had not occurred to her that anybody in his family could actually make something. All she had heard about them was how poor they were. So that it had become impossible for her to see them as anything else but poor. Their poverty was Adichie’s single story of them.

‘THE SINGLE STORY’ OF AFRICAN-AMERICAN ROOMMATE

Years later, Adichie left Nigeria to study in the United States. She was 19. Her American roommate was shocked by the way she is. The American girl asked how Adichie learned to speak English so well, and was confused when Adichie said that Nigeria happened to have English as its official language. The girl asked if she could listen to what she called Adichie’s “tribal music” and was consequently very disappointed when Adichie produced her tape of Mariah Carey. The girl assumed that Adichie did not know how to use a stove. What struck Adichie was this – The American girl had felt sorry for Adichie even before she saw her. Her default position toward Adichie, as an African, was a kind of patronising, well-meaning pity. Adichie’s 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 Adichie in any way, no possibility of feelings more complex than pity, and no possibility of a connection as human equals.

‘THE SINGLE STORY’ OF AFRICA – AMERICANS

Before Adichie went to the US, she didn’t consciously identify herself as an African. In the US, whenever Africa came up, people turned to her. Many refer to Africa as a country. She remembers a flight journey from Lagos in which there was an announcement about the charity work in “India, Africa and other countries.” Adichie feels that if she had not grown up in Nigeria, and if all she knew about Africa were from popular images that people in the US have, she 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. Adichie would see Africans in the same way that she, as a child, had seen Fide’s family.

‘THE SINGLE STORY’ OF AFRICA IN WESTERN LITERATURE

Adichie thinks this single story of Africa ultimately comes from Western literature. She mentions a quote from the writings of the London merchant, John Lock, 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.” Adichie laughed every time she read this. She feels that one must admire the imagination of John Lock. His writing is important because it represents the beginning of a tradition of telling African stories in the West. A tradition of Sub-Saharan Africa as a place of negatives, of difference, of darkness, of people who, in the words of the wonderful poet Rudyard Kipling, are “half devil, half child.”

‘THE SINGLE STORY’ OF AFRICAN-AMERICAN PROFESSOR

Adichie’s American professor once told her that her novel was not “authentically African”. She was quite willing to contend that there were a number of things wrong with the novel, that it had failed in a number of places, but she had not quite imagined that it had failed at achieving something called ‘African authenticity’. She did not know what ‘African authenticity’ was. The professor told her that her characters were too much like him, an educated and middle-class man. Her characters drove cars. They were not starving. Therefore, they were not ‘authentically African’.

‘THE SINGLE STORY’ OF MEXICO – ADICHIE

Adichie, too, feels guilty about the question of the single story. A few years ago, she visited Mexico from the US. The political climate in the US at the time was tense, and debates were going on about immigration. In America, immigration became synonymous with Mexicans. There were endless stories of Mexicans as people who were fleecing the healthcare system, sneaking across the border, being arrested at the border, etc. She remembers walking around on her first day in Guadalajara, watching the people going to work, rolling tortillas in the marketplace, smoking, and laughing. She was first surprised and then was overwhelmed with shame. She realised that she had been so immersed in the media coverage of Mexicans that they had become one thing in her mind: the abject immigrant. She had bought into the single story of Mexicans, and she could not have been more ashamed of herself. That is how people create a single story, portraying people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.

THE SINGLE STORY & POWER

Adichie thinks it is impossible to talk about ‘a single story’ without talking about power. An Igbo word comes to her whenever she thinks about the world’s power structures: “nkali.“ It’s a noun that loosely translates to “to be greater than another.” Like our economic and political worlds, stories are also defined by the principle of “nkali”: How they are told, who tells them, when they’re told, and how many stories are told, which are really dependent on power. Power is the ability to tell another person’s story and make it the definitive story of that person. The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes that if you want to dispossess a people, the simplest way is to tell their story and start with “secondly.” Start the story with the arrows 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 state and not with the colonial creation of the African state, and you have an altogether different story.

‘THE SINGLE STORY’ OF NIGERIA – UNIVERSITY STUDENT

Adichie spoke at an American university where a student told her that it was such a shame that Nigerian men were physical abusers like the father character in her novel. She told him that she had just read a novel called American Psycho and that it was such a shame that young Americans were serial murderers. She said that in a fit of mild irritation, but it would never have occurred to her to think that he was somehow representative of all Americans just because she had read a novel in which a character was a serial killer. The student reacted like this because of America’s cultural and economic power. Adichie had many stories of America. She had read Tyler and Updike and Steinbeck and Gaitskill, but did not leave her with a single story about America.

STORIES ABOUT AFRICA & BEING AN AFRICAN

Some years ago, she learned that writers were expected to have had miserable childhoods to be successful. She began to think about how she could invent horrible things her parents had done to her, but the truth is that she had a very happy childhood, full of laughter and love, in a very close-knit family. At the same time, she had a grandfathers who died in a refugee camp. Her cousin Polle died because he could not get adequate healthcare. One of her closest friends, Okoloma, was killed in a plane crash because the country’s fire trucks did not have water. She grew up under repressive military governments that devalued education so much that sometimes her parents were not paid their salaries. So, as a child, she saw jam disappear from the breakfast table, margarine disappear, bread become too expensive, and milk become rationed. Most of all, a kind of normalised political fear invaded their lives.

All these stories made her who she is, but to insist on only the negative stories is to flatten her experience and overlook the many other stories that formed her. The single story creates stereotypes; the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue but incomplete. They make one story become the only story.

She agrees that Africa is indeed a continent full of catastrophes: There are immense ones, such as the horrific rapes in Congo and depressing ones, such as the fact that 5,000 people apply for one job vacancy in Nigeria. But all stories are not about catastrophes, and it is essential, it is just as important, to talk about them. She always felt that it was impossible to engage properly with a place or a person without engaging with all of the stories of that place and that person. The consequence of the single story is this: It robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasises how we are different rather than how we are similar.

She rethinks – what if, before her Mexican trip, she had followed the immigration debate from both sides, the US and Mexico? What if her mother had told them that Fide’s family was poor and hardworking? What if we had an African television network that broadcasts diverse African stories worldwide – What the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe calls “a balance of stories”? What if her roommate knew about her Nigerian publisher, Muhtar Bakare, a remarkable man who left his job in a bank to follow his dream and start a publishing house? The conventional wisdom was that Nigerians don’t read literature. He disagreed with this. He felt that people who could read and would read if you made literature affordable and available.

Shortly after he published Adichie’s first novel, she went to a TV station in Lagos to do an interview, and a woman who worked there as a messenger approached her and said, “I really liked your novel, but I didn’t like the ending. Now, you must write a sequel, and this is what will happen…” And she went on to tell her what to write in the sequel. She was not only charmed but was very moved. Here was a woman, part of the ordinary masses of Nigerians who were not supposed to be readers. She had read the book and taken ownership of it and felt justified in telling Adichie what to write in the sequel.

Adichie thinks, what if her roommate knew about her friend Funmi Iyanda, a fearless woman who hosts a TV show in Lagos and is determined to tell the stories we prefer to forget? What if her roommate knew about the heart procedure performed in the Lagos hospital last week? What if her roommate knew about contemporary Nigerian music, talented people singing in English and Pidgin, and Igbo, Yoruba, and Ijo, mixing influences from Jay-Z to Fela to Bob Marley to their grandfathers? What if her roommate knew about the female lawyer who recently went to court in Nigeria to challenge a ridiculous law that required women to get their husband’s consent before renewing their passports? What if her roommate knew about Nollywood, which is full of innovative people making films despite great technical odds, films so popular that they really are the best example of Nigerians consuming what they produce? What if her roommate knew about Adichie’s wonderfully ambitious hair braider, who has just started her own business selling hair extensions? Or about the millions of other Nigerians who start businesses and sometimes fail but continue to nurse ambition.

Every time Adichie is home, she is confronted with the usual sources of irritation for most Nigerians: their failed infrastructure and government, but the incredible resilience of people who thrive. She teaches writing workshops in Lagos every summer, and it is amazing how many are eager to write to tell stories.

Adichie’s Nigerian publisher started a non-profit organisation called Farafina Trust, and they have big dreams of building libraries and refurbishing libraries that already exist, providing books for state schools that don’t have anything in their libraries, and organising lots and lots of workshops, in reading and writing, for all the people who are eager to tell many stories about Africa.

CONCLUSION

Adichie concludes by stating that stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and malign, but they can also be used to empower and humanise. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.

Adichie quotes Alice Walker, who wrote about her Southern relatives who had moved to the North. She introduced them to a book about the Southern life that they had left behind – “They sat around, reading the book themselves, listening to me read the book, and a kind of paradise was regained.”

Finally, Adichie reminds us that when we reject a single story and realise there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

WORKS CITED

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. https://www.chimamanda.com/

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Chimamanda-Ngozi-Adichie

The Danger of a Single Story. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Ted Talks. TEDGlobal2009https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_storlanguage=en

The Danger of a Single Story. Transcript.                                              https://www.hohschools.org/cms/lib/NY01913703/Centricity/Domain/817/English%2012%20Summer%20Reading%20-%202018.pdf