{"id":1915,"date":"2017-06-07T13:43:38","date_gmt":"2017-06-07T17:43:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/iblog.dearbornschools.org\/journalism\/?p=1915"},"modified":"2017-06-07T13:43:46","modified_gmt":"2017-06-07T17:43:46","slug":"the-danger-of-a-single-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/iblog.dearbornschools.org\/journalism\/2017\/06\/07\/the-danger-of-a-single-story\/","title":{"rendered":"The Danger of a Single Story"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a storyteller. She grew up in eastern Nigeria. She was an early reader and writer. She started reading at the age of 2 and writing at the age of 7. She would read British and American children\u2019s books. She wrote stories exactly the kinds she was reading. Her characters were white and blue-eyed, they played in the snow, they ate apples, drank lots of ginger beer, and talked a lot about the weather. Despite the fact that she lived in Nigeria, she\u2019s never been outside of it.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think this demonstrates how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story, particularly as children.\u201d All the books she read were foreign characters which convinced her that books had to have foreign characters in them and had to be about things you could not personally identify. That was until she discovered African books. She realized that people like her could exist in literature. Discovering these African books saved her from having a single story of what books are.<\/p>\n

She read an American novel called \u201cAmerican Psycho\u201d. The book had lots of young American serial killers. But it would never have occurred to her to think that just because she read a novel which a character was a serial killer that he was somehow representative of all Americans. It\u2019s not because she\u2019s a better person than that student, it\u2019s because of America\u2019s cultural and economic power, she had lots of stories of America.<\/p>\n

Of course, Africa is a continent full of catastrophes such as the horrific rapes in Congo and the fact that 5,000 people apply for one job vacancy in Nigeria. But there are other stories that are not about catastrophe, and it is just as important to talk about them. \u201cI\u2019ve always felt that it is impossible to engage properly with a place or a person without engaging with all of the stories of that place and that person,\u201d is what she explained.<\/p>\n

This Ted Talk definitely deserves to be in the top 50 because it explains how not all stories had to have the same characters or features and not all books had to be about things you couldn\u2019t personally identify. Discovering all these new books saves you from having a single story.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a storyteller. She grew up in eastern Nigeria. She was an early reader and writer. She started reading at the age of 2 and writing at the age of 7. She would read British and American children\u2019s books. She wrote stories exactly the kinds she was reading. Her characters were white …<\/p>\n

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