Danger of a single story

Paragraph 9: 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 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.

-"tribal music" = stereotype

Paragraph 1: 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 American children's books.

-Introduces herself straight away -The fact that she says she started reading at the age of 2 shows she is precocious -When she says she thinks four is close to the truth, this is gentle humour. She includes this so that the audience can feel a personal connection with her and therefore engage in what she is saying. -We can see that she grew up in an open and developed society since they sold British and American books.

Paragraph 2: 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 lovely it was that the sun had come out.

-Once again, the fact that she began writing at the age of 7 shows she was precocious. -The adjective "poor" is often used to offer someone sympathy in a situation. Adichie is partly making fun of herself here as she sympathizes with her mother who had to read all her young stories. -The use of a colon adds a pause, which implies that she was hesitant to admit what stories she read. -The adjective "lovely" describes something pleasant. It is more popularly used in British English than American English.

Paragraph 5: 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 color of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in literature. I started to write about things I recognized.

-She compares herself to the girls she read about -By pointing out that her hair cannot go in a "ponytail," Adichie is illustrating again how different she was from the white protagonists in the stories she read.

Paragraph 16: 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.

-She emphasizes the fact that stories matter by using anaphora in the first three sentences. -The last sentence is written using parallelism in order to leave the reader with hope after stating that stories break dignity. -When she says that stories can "repair" broken dignity, this implies that in order to restore that dignity you need to work for it.

Paragraph 6: Now, I loved those American and British books I read. They stirred my imagination. They 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.

-She uses personification when she says that American and British books stirred her imagination. This shows how they widened her imagination and ideas. -She uses a colon to make the reader think that she is going to make an important statement. She wants to teach a valuable lesson.

Paragraph 3: 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...

-She uses repetition for the word Nigeria. This is because she wants to show that she belongs to that culture.

Paragraph 4: What this demonstrates, I think, is how impressionable and vulnerable 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 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.

-She uses the words "impressionable" and "vulnerable" to show that people were easily influenced to think stories were about white people with blue eyes.

Paragraph 8: 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 impossible for me to see them as anything else but poor. Their poverty was my single story of them.

-The fact that she says makes their poverty her single story, shows that single stories are common and easily built.

Paragraph 13: 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 of Mexicans as people who were fleecing the healthcare system, sneaking across the border, being arrested at the border, that sort of thing.

-The verbs "fleecing", "sneaking" and "being arrested" are all negative verbs being used in the past continuous tense.

Paragraph 11: What struck me was this: She had felt sorry for me even before she saw me. Her default 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. . . .

-There is a repetition of the phrase no possibility. -The "single story of catastrophe" that she describes refers to the problems of poverty, illness, and famine that are often associated with Africa.

Paragraph 15: 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...

-This paragraph consists of only 1 line because the author wants to make the point clear. -She uses repetition when saying over and over again to show her confidence.

Paragraph 10: She assumed that I did not know how to use a stove.

-This paragraph only has 1 sentence because it has a powerful message.

Paragraph 7: 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, who would often come from nearby rural villages. So the year I turned eight, we got a new houseboy. 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 Fide's family.

-We can see that her mother was very thoughtful, since she would send them yams and rice and clothes. -There is a very broad use of commas in this paragraph in order for it to feel more story-like. The commas are more effective than full-stops.

Paragraph 17: The American writer Alice Walker wrote this about her southern relatives who had moved to the north. She introduced them to a book about her southern life that they had left behind. "They sat around, reading the book themselves, listening to me read the book, and a kind of paradise was regained."

-When she quotes an American writer, she wants to show that she supports Americans. -When she says "a kind of paradise was regained", this is a metaphor which implies that without stories, she thinks we would live in a paradise.

What is the purpose of the speech?

To inform the audience of a single story and show them that they create single stories without even realising it.