Our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice — and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding.
Transcript:
0:12 I’m a storyteller.
0:14 And I would like to tell you a few personal stories
0:17 about what I like to call “the danger of the single story.”
0:22 I grew up on a university campus in eastern Nigeria.
0:26 My mother says that I started reading at the age of two,
0:29 although I think four is probably close to the truth.
0:33 So I was an early reader,
0:35 and what I read were British and American children’s books.
0:39 I was also an early writer,
0:42 and when I began to write, at about the age of seven,
0:46 stories in pencil with crayon illustrations
0:48 that my poor mother was obligated to read,
0:51 I wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was reading:
0:55 All my characters were white and blue-eyed,
1:00 they played in the snow,
1:02 they ate apples,
1:04 (Laughter)
1:06 and they talked a lot about the weather,
1:08 how lovely it was that the sun had come out.
1:10 (Laughter)
1:12 Now, this despite the fact that I lived in Nigeria.
1:15 I had never been outside Nigeria.
1:19 We didn’t have snow, we ate mangoes,
1:22 and we never talked about the weather,
1:24 because there was no need to.
1:26 My characters also drank a lot of ginger beer,
1:29 because the characters in the British books I read
1:31 drank ginger beer.
1:33 Never mind that I had no idea what ginger beer was.
1:36 (Laughter)
1:37 And for many years afterwards,
1:39 I would have a desperate desire to taste ginger beer.
1:42 But that is another story.
1:44 What this demonstrates, I think,
1:46 is how impressionable and vulnerable we are
1:49 in the face of a story,
1:51 particularly as children.
1:53 Because all I had read were books in which characters were foreign,
1:57 I had become convinced that books
1:59 by their very nature had to have foreigners in them
2:02 and had to be about things with which I could not personally identify.
2:07 Now, things changed when I discovered African books.
2:11 There weren’t many of them available,
2:13 and they weren’t quite as easy to find as the foreign books.
2:16 But because of writers like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye,
2:19 I went through a mental shift in my perception of literature.
2:23 I realized that people like me,
2:25 girls with skin the color of chocolate,
2:27 whose kinky hair could not form ponytails,
2:30 could also exist in literature.
2:32 I started to write about things I recognized.
2:36 Now, I loved those American and British books I read.
2:40 They stirred my imagination. They opened up new worlds for me.
2:44 But the unintended consequence
2:46 was that I did not know that people like me
2:48 could exist in literature.
2:50 So what the discovery of African writers did for me was this:
2:54 It saved me from having a single story of what books are.
2:59 I come from a conventional, middle-class Nigerian family.
3:02 My father was a professor.
3:04 My mother was an administrator.
3:07 And so we had, as was the norm,
3:10 live-in domestic help, who would often come from nearby rural villages.
3:15 So, the year I turned eight, we got a new house boy.
3:19 His name was Fide.
3:21 The only thing my mother told us about him was that his family was very poor.
3:27 My mother sent yams and rice, and our old clothes, to his family.
3:32 And when I didn’t finish my dinner, my mother would say,
3:34 “Finish your food! Don’t you know? People like Fide’s family have nothing.”
3:39 So I felt enormous pity for Fide’s family.
3:43 Then one Saturday, we went to his village to visit,
3:46 and his mother showed us a beautifully patterned basket
3:50 made of dyed raffia that his brother had made.
3:53 I was startled.
3:55 It had not occurred to me that anybody in his family
3:58 could actually make something.
4:01 All I had heard about them was how poor they were,
4:04 so that it had become impossible for me to see them as anything else but poor.
4:09 Their poverty was my single story of them.
4:13 Years later, I thought about this when I left Nigeria
4:15 to go to university in the United States.
4:18 I was 19.
4:20 My American roommate was shocked by me.
4:24 She asked where I had learned to speak English so well,
4:27 and was confused when I said that Nigeria
4:29 happened to have English as its official language.
4:33 She asked if she could listen to what she called my “tribal music,”
4:38 and was consequently very disappointed
4:40 when I produced my tape of Mariah Carey.
4:42 (Laughter)
4:45 She assumed that I did not know how to use a stove.
4:49 What struck me was this:
4:51 She had felt sorry for me even before she saw me.
4:54 Her default position toward me, as an African,
4:58 was a kind of patronizing, well-meaning pity.
5:02 My roommate had a single story of Africa:
5:05 a single story of catastrophe.
5:08 In this single story,
5:09 there was no possibility of Africans being similar to her in any way,
5:14 no possibility of feelings more complex than pity,
5:17 no possibility of a connection as human equals.
5:21 I must say that before I went to the U.S.,
5:23 I didn’t consciously identify as African.
5:26 But in the U.S., whenever Africa came up, people turned to me.
5:29 Never mind that I knew nothing about places like Namibia.
5:33 But I did come to embrace this new identity,
5:35 and in many ways I think of myself now as African.
5:38 Although I still get quite irritable when Africa is referred to as a country,
5:42 the most recent example being my otherwise wonderful flight
5:46 from Lagos two days ago,
5:47 in which there was an announcement on the Virgin flight
5:50 about the charity work in “India, Africa and other countries.”
5:55 (Laughter)
5:56 So, after I had spent some years in the U.S. as an African,
6:00 I began to understand my roommate’s response to me.
6:04 If I had not grown up in Nigeria,
6:06 and if all I knew about Africa were from popular images,
6:09 I too would think that Africa was a place of beautiful landscapes,
6:14 beautiful animals,
6:16 and incomprehensible people,
6:18 fighting senseless wars, dying of poverty and AIDS,
6:21 unable to speak for themselves
6:24 and waiting to be saved by a kind, white foreigner.
6:29 I would see Africans in the same way that I,
6:31 as a child, had seen Fide’s family.
6:35 This single story of Africa ultimately comes, I think, from Western literature.
6:39 Now, here is a quote from the writing of a London merchant called John Lok,
6:44 who sailed to west Africa in 1561
6:47 and kept a fascinating account of his voyage.
6:52 After referring to the black Africans as “beasts who have no houses,”
6:56 he writes, “They are also people without heads,
7:00 having their mouth and eyes in their breasts.”
7:05 Now, I’ve laughed every time I’ve read this.
7:07 And one must admire the imagination of John Lok.
7:11 But what is important about his writing
7:13 is that it represents the beginning
7:15 of a tradition of telling African stories in the West:
7:18 A tradition of Sub-Saharan Africa as a place of negatives,
7:21 of difference, of darkness,
7:23 of people who, in the words of the wonderful poet Rudyard Kipling,
7:29 are “half devil, half child.”
7:32 And so, I began to realize that my American roommate
7:35 must have throughout her life
7:37 seen and heard different versions of this single story,
7:41 as had a professor,
7:43 who once told me that my novel was not “authentically African.”
7:48 Now, I was quite willing to contend
7:49 that there were a number of things wrong with the novel,
7:52 that it had failed in a number of places,
7:56 but I had not quite imagined that it had failed
7:58 at achieving something called African authenticity.
8:01 In fact, I did not know what African authenticity was.
8:06 The professor told me that my characters were too much like him,
8:10 an educated and middle-class man.
8:12 My characters drove cars.
8:14 They were not starving.
8:17 Therefore they were not authentically African.
8:21 But I must quickly add that I too am just as guilty
8:24 in the question of the single story.
8:27 A few years ago, I visited Mexico from the U.S.
8:31 The political climate in the U.S. at the time was tense,
8:33 and there were debates going on about immigration.
8:37 And, as often happens in America,
8:39 immigration became synonymous with Mexicans.
8:42 There were endless stories of Mexicans
8:44 as people who were fleecing the healthcare system,
8:48 sneaking across the border,
8:50 being arrested at the border, that sort of thing.
8:54 I remember walking around on my first day in Guadalajara,
8:58 watching the people going to work,
9:00 rolling up tortillas in the marketplace,
9:02 smoking, laughing.
9:05 I remember first feeling slight surprise.
9:08 And then, I was overwhelmed with shame.
9:11 I realized that I had been so immersed in the media coverage of Mexicans
9:16 that they had become one thing in my mind,
9:18 the abject immigrant.
9:20 I had bought into the single story of Mexicans
9:23 and I could not have been more ashamed of myself.
9:26 So that is how to create a single story,
9:28 show a people as one thing,
9:31 as only one thing,
9:33 over and over again,
9:35 and that is what they become.
9:37 It is impossible to talk about the single story
9:40 without talking about power.
9:43 There is a word, an Igbo word,
9:45 that I think about whenever I think about the power structures of the world,
9:49 and it is “nkali.”
9:50 It’s a noun that loosely translates to “to be greater than another.”
9:55 Like our economic and political worlds,
9:58 stories too are defined by the principle of nkali:
10:03 How they are told, who tells them,
10:05 when they’re told, how many stories are told,
10:08 are really dependent on power.
10:12 Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person,
10:15 but to make it the definitive story of that person.
10:19 The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes
10:21 that if you want to dispossess a people,
10:24 the simplest way to do it is to tell their story
10:27 and to start with, “secondly.”
10:30 Start the story with the arrows of the Native Americans,
10:34 and not with the arrival of the British,
10:37 and you have an entirely different story.
10:40 Start the story with the failure of the African state,
10:44 and not with the colonial creation of the African state,
10:48 and you have an entirely different story.
10:52 I recently spoke at a university
10:54 where a student told me that it was such a shame
10:57 that Nigerian men were physical abusers
11:01 like the father character in my novel.
11:04 I told him that I had just read a novel called “American Psycho” —
11:08 (Laughter)
11:10 — and that it was such a shame
11:12 that young Americans were serial murderers.
11:15 (Laughter)
11:19 (Applause)
11:25 Now, obviously I said this in a fit of mild irritation.
11:28 (Laughter)
11:30 But it would never have occurred to me to think
11:32 that just because I had read a novel in which a character was a serial killer
11:36 that he was somehow representative of all Americans.
11:40 This is not because I am a better person than that student,
11:43 but because of America’s cultural and economic power,
11:46 I had many stories of America.
11:48 I had read Tyler and Updike and Steinbeck and Gaitskill.
11:52 I did not have a single story of America.
11:55 When I learned, some years ago,
11:57 that writers were expected to have had really unhappy childhoods
12:01 to be successful,
12:04 I began to think about how I could invent horrible things my parents had done to me.
12:08 (Laughter)
12:10 But the truth is that I had a very happy childhood,
12:14 full of laughter and love, in a very close-knit family.
12:17 But I also had grandfathers who died in refugee camps.
12:20 My cousin Polle died because he could not get adequate healthcare.
12:25 One of my closest friends, Okoloma, died in a plane crash
12:28 because our fire trucks did not have water.
12:31 I grew up under repressive military governments
12:34 that devalued education,
12:36 so that sometimes, my parents were not paid their salaries.
12:39 And so, as a child, I saw jam disappear from the breakfast table,
12:43 then margarine disappeared,
12:45 then bread became too expensive,
12:48 then milk became rationed.
12:51 And most of all, a kind of normalized political fear
12:54 invaded our lives.
12:57 All of these stories make me who I am.
13:00 But to insist on only these negative stories
13:04 is to flatten my experience
13:07 and to overlook the many other stories that formed me.
13:11 The single story creates stereotypes,
13:14 and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue,
13:19 but that they are incomplete.
13:21 They make one story become the only story.
13:25 Of course, Africa is a continent full of catastrophes:
13:27 There are immense ones, such as the horrific rapes in Congo
13:31 and depressing ones,
13:32 such as the fact that 5,000 people apply for one job vacancy in Nigeria.
13:38 But there are other stories that are not about catastrophe,
13:41 and it is very important, it is just as important, to talk about them.
13:45 I’ve always felt that it is impossible
13:47 to engage properly with a place or a person
13:50 without engaging with all of the stories of that place and that person.
13:54 The consequence of the single story is this:
13:57 It robs people of dignity.
14:00 It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult.
14:04 It emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar.
14:09 So what if before my Mexican trip,
14:11 I had followed the immigration debate from both sides,
14:15 the U.S. and the Mexican?
14:17 What if my mother had told us that Fide’s family was poor
14:21 and hardworking?
14:23 What if we had an African television network
14:25 that broadcast diverse African stories all over the world?
14:29 What the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe calls “a balance of stories.”
14:33 What if my roommate knew about my Nigerian publisher,
14:37 Muhtar Bakare,
14:39 a remarkable man who left his job in a bank
14:41 to follow his dream and start a publishing house?
14:44 Now, the conventional wisdom was that Nigerians don’t read literature.
14:47 He disagreed.
14:49 He felt that people who could read, would read,
14:52 if you made literature affordable and available to them.
14:56 Shortly after he published my first novel,
14:59 I went to a TV station in Lagos to do an interview,
15:02 and a woman who worked there as a messenger came up to me and said,
15:05 “I really liked your novel. I didn’t like the ending.
15:08 Now, you must write a sequel, and this is what will happen …”
15:11 (Laughter)
15:14 And she went on to tell me what to write in the sequel.
15:17 I was not only charmed, I was very moved.
15:20 Here was a woman, part of the ordinary masses of Nigerians,
15:23 who were not supposed to be readers.
15:26 She had not only read the book,
15:27 but she had taken ownership of it
15:29 and felt justified in telling me what to write in the sequel.
15:33 Now, what if my roommate knew about my friend Funmi Iyanda,
15:37 a fearless woman who hosts a TV show in Lagos,
15:40 and is determined to tell the stories that we prefer to forget?
15:43 What if my roommate knew about the heart procedure
15:47 that was performed in the Lagos hospital last week?
15:50 What if my roommate knew about contemporary Nigerian music,
15:54 talented people singing in English and Pidgin,
15:57 and Igbo and Yoruba and Ijo,
15:59 mixing influences from Jay-Z to Fela
16:03 to Bob Marley to their grandfathers.
16:06 What if my roommate knew about the female lawyer
16:08 who recently went to court in Nigeria to challenge a ridiculous law
16:12 that required women to get their husband’s consent
16:15 before renewing their passports?
16:18 What if my roommate knew about Nollywood,
16:21 full of innovative people making films despite great technical odds,
16:25 films so popular
16:27 that they really are the best example of Nigerians consuming what they produce?
16:32 What if my roommate knew about my wonderfully ambitious hair braider,
16:35 who has just started her own business selling hair extensions?
16:39 Or about the millions of other Nigerians who start businesses and sometimes fail,
16:43 but continue to nurse ambition?
16:47 Every time I am home I am confronted
16:49 with the usual sources of irritation for most Nigerians:
16:52 our failed infrastructure, our failed government,
16:55 but also by the incredible resilience
16:57 of people who thrive despite the government,
17:01 rather than because of it.
17:03 I teach writing workshops in Lagos every summer,
17:06 and it is amazing to me how many people apply,
17:09 how many people are eager to write,
17:12 to tell stories.
17:14 My Nigerian publisher and I have just started a non-profit
17:17 called Farafina Trust,
17:19 and we have big dreams of building libraries
17:22 and refurbishing libraries that already exist
17:24 and providing books for state schools
17:27 that don’t have anything in their libraries,
17:29 and also of organizing lots and lots of workshops,
17:31 in reading and writing,
17:33 for all the people who are eager to tell our many stories.
17:36 Stories matter.
17:38 Many stories matter.
17:40 Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign,
17:44 but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize.
17:48 Stories can break the dignity of a people,
17:51 but stories can also repair that broken dignity.
17:56 The American writer Alice Walker wrote this
17:58 about her Southern relatives who had moved to the North.
18:02 She introduced them to a book about
18:04 the Southern life that they had left behind.
18:07 “They sat around, reading the book themselves,
18:11 listening to me read the book, and a kind of paradise was regained.”
18:17 I would like to end with this thought:
18:20 That when we reject the single story,
18:23 when we realize that there is never a single story
18:26 about any place,
18:28 we regain a kind of paradise.
18:30 Thank you.
18:32 (Applause)