The danger of a single story
一年级日记20字简单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 clo to the truth. So I was an early reader, and what I read were British and American children's books.
0:38 I was also an early writer, and when I began to write, at about the age of ven, 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. (Laughter) 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, becau there was no need to.
1:25 My characters also drank a lot of ginger beer becau the characters in the British boo
ks 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 desperate desire to taste ginger beer. But that is another story.
人生阅历1:43 What this demonstrates, I think, is how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story, particularly as children. Becau 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. 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.
下巴短2:14 But becau 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, who kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in literature. I started to write about things I recognized.
2:35 Now, I loved tho American and British books I read. They stirred my imagination. T
古诗两首hey opened up new worlds for me. But the unintended conquence 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.
2:58 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 hou boy. His name was Fide. The only thing my mother told us about him was that his family was very poor. My mother nt 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.
3:42 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 e them as anything el but poor. Their poverty was my single story of them.
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4:12 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 confud 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 conquently very disappointed when I produced my tape of Mariah Carey. (Laughter) She assumed that I did not know how to u a stove.
4:49 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.
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四大世家>深圳无房产证明5:20 I must say that before I went to the U.S. I didn't consciously identify as African. But in the U.S. whenever Africa came up people turned to me. Never mind that I knew nothing about places like Namibia. But I did come to embrace this new identity, and in ma
ny ways I think of mylf now as African. Although I still get quite irritable when Africa is referred to as a country, the most recent example being my otherwi wonderful flight from Lagos two days ago, in which there was an announcement on the Virgin flight about the charity work in "India, Africa and other countries." (Laughter)
