The Danger of a Single Story | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | TED

And I would like to tell you a few personal stories about what I like to call "the dangerThe possibility of suffering or harm. 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 obligatedLegally or morally bound to do something. 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, (Laughter) and they talked a lot about

the weather, how lovely it was that the sun had come out.

(Laughter) Now, this despiteWithout being affected by 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.

(Laughter) And for many years afterwards, I would have a desperateFeeling or showing a hopeless sense that a situation is so bad as to be impossible to deal with desire to taste ginger beer.

But that is another story.

What this demonstrates, I think, is how impressionableLikely to be influenced easily and vulnerableOpen to attack or damage 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 convincedFirmly believing that something is true. that books by their very nature had to have foreigners in them and had to be

about things with which I could not personally identifyTo feel that you understand and share the feelings of someone else..

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 perceptionThe way in which something is regarded of literature.

I realized that people like me, girls with skin the color of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also existTo have objective reality or being. in literature.

I started to write about things I recognized.

Now, I loved those American and British books I read.

They stirredTo cause a feeling or reaction to develop. my imagination.

They opened up new worlds for me.

But the unintendedNot planned or intended 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.