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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: The Danger of a Single Story | TED — Transcript

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

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