#5 SHE IS A WRITER

The Danger of a Single Story

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a famous Nigerian story teller, invites us to reflect about the role of books and literature in our lives. She considers that literature is never just words and that the books we read can lead us to create positive or negative single stories about cultures, people or countries.

When Chimamanda was a little girl, she lived with her parents in a University campus in Eastern Nigeria. Her childhood was invaded by American and British books; that is why when she started to write stories at the early age of seven, her writings talked about white blue-eyed people who played in the snow, ate apples and talked about the weather. The problem was that those books had no connection with her Nigerian reality, simply because they reflected other people’s culture. Luckily, her perception about literature changed when she discovered African books. She came to realize that coloured people like she also existed in literature and though she loved American and British books because they took her imagination to an open new world during her joyful infancy, it was the African ones that saved her from having a “single story” about what books were.

As a young student at an American University, Chimamanda had to cope with people who had single stories about her native country Nigeria. People who thought that Nigeria was synonym of catastrophe and that Nigerian people had possibility of nothing. For example, her room mate at the campus was shocked at hearing her talking so perfect English as she ignored the fact that Chimamanda´s country had English as first language. Also at university, a professor questioned the novel she had written because according to his point of view, it was not completely an African one for its characters drove cars and were not starving!

Adichie asserts that a single story is created by showing people as only one thing over and over again creating stereotypes which are not true but incomplete. She considers that the role of literature is to instruct in the sense that reading help us to know about other people’s cultures and to delight because it leaps our imagination. When she was invited to the fifteenth Commonwealth Lecture Congress, she proposed writing realistic fiction: real human beings living in real places. She believes that writing realistic literature is an exercise of citizenship because it transmits the sensibility of the people of a particular country; it costumes, beliefs and way of living. Chimamanda invites us to reflect about how similar we are and that we are not just a collection of bones but men and women with a particularly story behind. Once she was asked why she wrote to what she answered a moving quotation from Bessie Head, a feminist South African writer who said: “I am building a stairway to stars. I have the authority to take the whole mankind with me”. That is why Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie writes.


Sources

Chimamanda Adichie. The Danger of a single story (2009).Available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9Ihs241zeg. Retrieved: May 26, 2013.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Commonwealth Lecture 2012. Available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmsYJDP8g2U. Retrieved:May 26, 2013.

<http://chimamanda.com/>