A521.2.3.RB
Danger of Stories
Below,
you will have the opportunity to read Chimamanda N. Adichie’s stories. Ms. Adichie tells us, “Stories can break the
dignity of people. But stories can also
repair that broken dignity.”
Ms.
Adichie: “I'm a storyteller. And I
would like to tell you a few personal stories about what I like to call
"the danger of the single story." I grew up on a university
campus in eastern Nigeria. My mother says that I started reading at the
age of two, although I think four is probably close 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
seven, 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 [is] 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, because the characters in the
British books I read drank 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. 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 their very nature, had to have foreigners in
them and had to be about things with which I could not personally
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 Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye, 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 ponytails, could also exist in literature. I started to
write about things I recognized.
Now, I
loved those American and British books I read. They stirred my
imagination. They opened up new worlds
for me. But the unintended consequence was that I did not know that
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 eight, we got a new house boy. His
name was Fide. The only thing my mother told us about him was that his
family was very poor. My mother sent yams and rice, and our 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 Fide's family have
nothing." So I felt enormous pity for Fide's family.
Then
one Saturday, we went to his 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. Their poverty was my single story of them.
Years
later, I thought about this when I left Nigeria to go to university in the
United States. 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 Mariah Carey.
She assumed that I did not know how to use a stove.
What
struck me was this: She had felt sorry for me even before she saw
me. Her default position toward me, as an African, was a 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 a connection as human
equals.
I must
say that before I went to the U.S., I didn't consciously identify as
African. But in the U.S., 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 think of myself
now as African. Although I still get quite irritable when Africa is
referred to as a country, the most recent example being my otherwise
wonderful flight from Lagos two days ago, in which there was an
announcement on the Virgin flight about the charity work in "India,
Africa and other countries."
So,
after I had spent some years in the U.S. 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 Fide's family.
This
single story of Africa ultimately comes, I think, from Western
literature. Now, here is 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, "They are also
people without heads, having their mouth and eyes in their breasts."
Now,
I've laughed every time I've read this. And one must admire the
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 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."
And so,
I began to realize that my American roommate must have throughout her
life seen and heard different versions of this single story, as had a
professor, who once told me that my novel was not "authentically
African." Now, I 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 I had not quite imagined that it had failed at 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 and 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 U.S. The
political climate in the U.S. at 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 fleecing the healthcare
system, sneaking across the border, being arrested at the border,
that sort of thing.
I
remember walking around on my first day in Guadalajara, watching the
people going to work, rolling up tortillas in the
marketplace, smoking, laughing. I remember first feeling slight
surprise. And then, I was overwhelmed with shame. I realized that I
had been so immersed in the media coverage of Mexicans that they had
become one thing in my mind, the abject immigrant. I had bought 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 the single story without talking about
power. There is a word, an Igbo word that I think about whenever I think
about the power structures of the world, and it is
"nkali." It's a noun that loosely translates to "to be
greater than another." Like our economic and political
worlds, stories too are defined by the principle of nkali: How they
are told, who tells them, when they're 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 Palestinian poet Mourid
Barghouti writes that if you want to dispossess a people, the
simplest way to do it is to tell their story and to 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 entirely different story.
I
recently spoke at a university where a student told me that it was such a
shame that Nigerian men were physical 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 murderers.
Now,
obviously I said this in a fit of 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
representative of all Americans. This is
not because I am a better person than that student, but because of
America's cultural and economic power, I had many stories of
America. I had read Tyler and Updike and Steinbeck and Gaitskill. I
did not have a 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 things my parents had 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.
But I
also had grandfathers who died in refugee camps. My cousin Polle died
because he could not get adequate healthcare. One of my closest friends,
Okoloma, died in a plane crash because our fire trucks did not have
water. I grew up under repressive military governments that devalued
education, so that sometimes, my parents were not paid their
salaries. And so, as a child, I saw jam disappear from the breakfast
table, then margarine disappeared, then bread became too expensive, then
milk became rationed. And most of all, a kind of normalized political
fear invaded our lives.
All of
these stories make me who I am. But to insist on only these negative
stories is to flatten my experience and to overlook the many other
stories that formed me. The single story creates stereotypes, and the
problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are
incomplete. They make one story become the only story.
Of
course, Africa is 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
there are other stories that are not about catastrophe, and it is very
important, it is just as important, to talk about them.
I've
always felt that it is 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 emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are
similar.
So what
if before my Mexican trip, I had followed the immigration debate from both
sides, the U.S. and the Mexican? What if my mother had told us that
Fide's family was poor and hardworking? What if we had an African
television network that broadcast diverse African stories all over the
world? What the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe calls "a balance of
stories."
What if
my roommate knew about my Nigerian publisher, Muhtar Bakare, a
remarkable man who left his job in a bank to follow his dream and start a
publishing house? Now, the conventional wisdom was that Nigerians don't
read literature. He disagreed. He felt that people who could read,
would read, if you made literature affordable and available to them.
Shortly
after he published my first novel, I went to a TV station in Lagos to do
an interview, and a woman who worked there as a messenger came up to me
and said, "I really liked your novel. I didn't like the ending. Now, you must
write a sequel, and this is what will happen ..."
And she
went on to tell me what to write in the sequel. I was not only charmed, I
was very moved. Here was a woman, part of the ordinary masses of
Nigerians, who were not supposed to be readers. She had not only
read the book, but she had taken ownership of it and felt justified
in telling me what to write in the sequel.
Now,
what if my roommate knew about my friend Funmi Iyanda, a fearless woman
who hosts a TV show in Lagos, and is determined to tell the stories that
we prefer to forget? What if my roommate knew about the heart
procedure that was performed in the Lagos hospital last week? What
if my roommate knew about contemporary Nigerian music, talented people
singing in English and Pidgin, and Igbo and Yoruba and Ijo, mixing
influences from Jay-Z to Fela to Bob Marley to their grandfathers.
What if
my 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 my
roommate knew about Nollywood, 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 my
roommate knew about my 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 I am home I am confronted with the usual sources of irritation for
most Nigerians: our failed infrastructure, our failed government, but
also by the incredible resilience of people who thrive despite the
government, rather than because of it. I teach writing workshops in
Lagos every summer, and it is amazing to me how many people
apply, how many people are eager to write, to tell stories.
My
Nigerian publisher and I have just started a non-profit called Farafina
Trust, and we have big dreams of building libraries and refurbishing
libraries that already exist and providing books for state
schools that don't have anything in their libraries, and also of organizing
lots and lots of workshops, in reading and writing, for all the
people who are eager to tell our many stories.
Stories
matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess
and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to
humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can
also repair that broken dignity.
The
American writer Alice Walker wrote this 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."
I would
like to end with this thought: That when we reject the single
story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any
place, we regain a kind of paradise.
I was
transformed by Ms. Adichie’s words and her video. How many times do we buy into an initial
story and do not dig further? Who hasn’t
heard the old saying, “You can’t tell a book by its cover”? I have fallen prey to the single story many
times. I have taken the first inferred
impression as the only impression.
Although
I have fallen for this in the past, I now never take any stories as fact until
I fully vet them out. I do not share
until I know that they are based on fact.
I appreciate Ms. Adichie’s input and fully agree with her. Seek.
Ask. Become knowledgeable beyond
the initial story.
Reference
Adichie, A. N. [TED]. (2009, November). The danger of a single story. [Video file]. Retrieved from http://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story
