Chimamanda Adichie TED talk about \"the danger of the single story\" 1. Explain

Question

Chimamanda Adichie TED talk about "the danger of the single story"

1. Explain what a "single story" means. In your words, what does it mean to say that someone might have a "single story" about a culture, nation, person, ethical view, religion, etc.?

2. What is the danger of having a single story about someone?

3. Name one groups of people, culture, nation, religion, etc. in which you may have a single story about.

4. How might someone have a single story about you? If you are comfortable doing so, share an experience that defies this single story.

Explanation / Answer

So, if first impressions are critical in the way Chip Kidd describes, critical to sketching out a story even before you open it, what happens if that impression is wrong, if the story you believe isn't the whole story?

CHIMAMANDA ADICHIE: Hello.

RAZ: This the novelist Chimamanda Adichie.

ADICHIE: Do you want me to keep talking?

UNIDENTIFIED STUDIO ENGINEER: Yes, please. Yes, please.

ADICHIE: I pledge to Nigeria, my country, to be faithful, loyal, and honest...

RAZ: Chimamanda was born in Nigeria. She's written several short short stories and novels, and I actually talked to her on the day her newest novel "Americanah" came out. What do you do when you first, like, get your book? Like, you see it bound, you know, typeset, in a book form?

ADICHIE: I just like holding it and looking at it, you know, sort of looking at the pages and thinking, it's finally a book.

RAZ: Chimamanda's TED Talk is about, what she calls, the danger of the single story. And it's an idea that's been with her ever since she started writing.

ADICHIE: So I grew up in a small university town in Nigeria, and started reading quite early. And I read a lot of British children's books, which was not unusual. This was the norm for children like me. And so when I started to write, I was writing exactly those stories.

(SOUNDBITE OF TED TALK)

ADICHIE: 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.

(LAUGHTER)

ADICHIE: Now this, despite the fact that I lived in Nigeria, I had never been outside Nigeria. We didn't have snow, we ate mangoes, and we never talked about the weather because there was no need to. My characters also drank a lot of ginger beer, never mind that I had no idea what ginger beer was. And for many years afterwards, I would have a desperate desire to taste ginger beer.

RAZ: I'm assuming you've tried ginger beer since then.

ADICHIE: I have. I was terribly disappointed.

(SOUNDBITE OF TED TALK)

ADICHIE: 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 their very nature, had to have foreigners in them and had to be about things with which I could not personally identify.

RAZ: At some point, you realize that storytelling and the stories that you knew, they're not just about these magical or fictional or amazing places, but they actually define the way you think about real things.

ADICHIE: Yeah, I mean, when I was a child - I, you know, loving all those British books, I started to read African literature when, I think, I was maybe 10. It had such a deep impression on me because I finally was reading about people who seemed more familiar.

(SOUNDBITE OF TED TALK)

ADICHIE: I realized that people like me - girls with skin the color of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails - could also exist in literature. I started to write about things I recognized. 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, and so we had, as was the norm, live-in domestic help who would often from nearby rural villages. So the year I turned eight, we got a new houseboy. His name was Fide. The only thing my mother told us about him was that his family was very poor. 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? So I felt enormous pity for Fide's family.

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