EXTRACT - DANGER OF A SINGLE STORY
EXTRACT - DANGER OF A SINGLE STORY
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
5 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
10 lovely it was that the sun had come out.
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. …
What this demonstrates, I think, is how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face
15 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.
20 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
colour 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
25 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,
30 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
35 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
40 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
45 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
50 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. …
So, after I had spent some years in the U.S. as an African, I began to understand my
55 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
60 Fide's family. …
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
65 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
70 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. …
75 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
80 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.