The Power in a Multitude of Stories
How two stories can impact your life far better than just one.
A single story can dilute the true narrative of a people, a culture, a community. This is the idea Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie shares with us as readers in her speech “The Danger of a Single Story”. Adichie shows us how we can be “vulnerable in the face of a story”, especially when we are young, naive, and uninformed (Adichie The danger of a single story). She shows us how easy it can be to know only of blue eyes and English accents, when we have failed to arm ourselves with other texts. Adichie does this by telling us about the first story to blind her. In doing so she hopes to make us understand that there is never just one story, but that it is merely one story that we’ve been shown. As she begins her introductory statements and this main idea begins to peek out of the rhythm of her words, it also becomes clear that it is easy to never search for another story, especially when we believe we already know the ‘sole’ story.
Adichie’s speech is aimed towards teaching us, both as citizens and readers, to be open-minded. This coming at a time when we’ve just barely survived the throes of hate-speech and a misinformation crisis. She urges us to, as she did, shift our comfortable footing and commit our time to finding the second, third, or perhaps even the fourth story, because for Adichie, seeking out books by African and African American authors “saved [her] from having a single story of what books are” (Adichie The danger of a single story). There are potent examples Adichie uses to depict her understanding of the shortcomings we are faced with when we’ve only put our minds to a single story. Her story of the young man, Fide, who worked for her family, and even Adichie’s own experience as a woman characterized by the media as having only one story because she’d come from a certain subset of people. These two descriptions remind me of perceptions I had as a young child, and now am slightly embarrassed to even recall. Being born into a family where both parents were African migrants, while I myself had never been, I often wondered what Africa was like comparative to the United States. Yet like Adichie’s college roommate, I only had a single story of Africa as had been sold to me by the media, and otherwise I hadn’t had much more information on how the continent operated. In my mind, Africa was synonymous with poverty. I knew no better. But Adichie’s argument is that no matter what we failed to know in the past, we have the power to inform ourselves of those things now, and escape the ignorant clutch of a one-sided perception.
As Adichie’s central theme unfolded, the stories she told tugged it onward. She was able to effectively communicate the faults of a single story. Yes, Africa was a continent that knew plenty of war and economic instability, but that was not everything which defined the region. Yes, Adichie had grown up in a land contrary to the one her roommate knew, but she still knew of Mariah Carey. These are prime examples of Adichie’s statement: “Show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again — and that is what they become” (Adichie The danger of a single story). These examples and all others used by Adichie are all segments of the central theme, and a well-organized speech which worked in chronological order to depict the unfolding of events in her life — as if we were learning the danger of a single story with her from her youth to her flamboyant adult life.
The single story is a sentiment all readers can understand. It is in many things; and I can say with certainty that it is in my life. On news networks and social media posts, in popular stereotypes dispensed through the grapevine and the lessons our instructors are required to teach in World History courses. We are told we are given the history of the world, but in reality we are given America’s history of the world. Just as we are given altered, one sided histories all throughout our lives. I mentioned how my perception of Africa was muddled by a belief that all Africa knew was poverty and a lack of progressivism. Now I know that there is more to their story — that there is more than one story. That is because I sought out the next couple of stories.
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Works Cited
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. “The Danger of a Single Story.” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: The Danger of a Single Story | TED Talk, www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story. Accessed 23 Sept. 2023.
