Chimamanda Adichie "The Danger of a Single Story"

• ·       Adiche grew up in a university campus in Easter Nigeria
• ·       Early reader and writer
• ·       When she was young she associated with foreign people (“white/blue eyed”) in her writing
• ·       African writers saved her from “having a single story,” she learned that she could write about         her culture/realized she can write about aspects she recognized
• ·      Comes from a Nigerian family
• ·       Her family gave living domestic help from nearby rural villages
• ·       When she was a child her family gave shelter to a kid named Fede
• ·       When her writing career begin she began to see the world from different perspectives
• ·       Her roommate was ignorant towards Adiche’s culture
• ·       Automatically degraded Adiche’s homeland
• ·       These single stories ultimately come from Western literature, for example John Lock referring to Africans as beasts
• ·       Her teacher claimed that her work was not authentically African because her characters were middle class people that were not starving, insinuating that all Africans starve
• ·       Single story derives from stereotyping people
• ·       Immigrations became a synonyms with Mexicans
• ·       Single story: robs people of dignity, emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar
• ·       Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign but they are also to empower and humanize/break the dignity of people but can also repair that broken dignity
• ·       When we reject the single story we realize there is never a single story about anyone we regain a kind of paradise
• ·       Message she wanted to transmit to the audience/preconceived notions, different perspectives      

         Chimamanda Adiche is a storyteller whom portrayed a story to an audience in order to transmit to her listeners the many hardships and frustrations she has endured with when it came to her ethnic background. She was a girl that grew up in Nigeria with the ideology of a single story. However, after reading books from African writers, she was enlightened; she became conscious that she can write about her own culture rather than “blonde hair and blue eyes.” Her main point to the audience was to create a sense of awareness when in perspective of an ethnic culture, given that people are prone to be bias in any circumstance. A single story is a perspective on a matter, which derives from a stereotype. A couple examples Adiche used throughout her speech to depict of this issue was when she arrived to her university and was encountered with a woman that made the assumption that because she was black she didn’t know English, furthermore her professor alleged Adiche’s characters in her story were not authentically African because her characters were middle class people that were not starving, insinuating that all Africans starve.