[Music]
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
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
now this despite the fact that i lived
in nigeria 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
my characters also drank a lot of ginger
beer because the characters in the
british books i read
drank ginger beer never mind that i had
no idea what ginger beer was
and for many years afterwards i would
have a desperate desire to taste
ginger beer but that is another story
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 but
because of writers like chinua achebe
and camera lay 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
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
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 living
domestic help who would often come from
nearby rural villages so the year i
turned eight
we got a new house boy his name was
fiddy
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
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
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 i was consequently very
disappointed when i produced my tape of
mariah carey
she assumed that i did not know how to
use a stove
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 kitty
no possibility of a connection as human
equals
i must say that before i went to the us
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 many ways i think of
myself now as african
although i still get quite irritable
when africa is referred to as a country
the most recent example being my
otherwise wonderful flight from lagos
two days ago in which um
there was an announcement on the virgin
flight about their charity work in
india africa and other countries
so after i had spent some years in the
us as an african
i began to understand my roommate's
response to me
if i had not grown up in nigeria and if
all i knew about africa were
from popular images i too would think
that africa was a place of
beautiful landscapes beautiful animals
and incomprehensible people fighting
senseless wars dying of poverty and aids
unable to speak for themselves and
waiting to be saved
by a kind white foreigner
i would see africans in the same way
that i as a child
had seen fide's family this single story
of africa ultimately comes i think from
western literature
now here's a quote from the writing of a
london merchant
called john locke who sailed to west
africa in
1561 and kept a fascinating account of
his voyage
after referring to the black africans as
beasts who have no houses he writes
they are also people without heads
having their mouths and eyes
in their breasts now i've laughed every
time i've read this and one must
admire the imagination of john locke but
what is important about his writing is
that it represents the beginning
of a tradition of telling african
stories in the west
a tradition of sub-saharan africa as a
place of negatives
of difference of darkness of people who
in the words of the wonderful poet
rudyard kipling
a half devil half child
and so i began to realize that my
american roommate must have throughout
her life
seen and heard different versions of the
single story
as had a professor who once told me that
my novel was not
authentically african now i was quite
willing to contend that there were a
number of things wrong
with the novel that it had failed in a
number of places
but i had not quite imagined that it had
failed at achieving something called
african authenticity in fact i did not
know what
african authenticity was the professor
told me that my characters
were too much like him and educated and
middle-class man
my characters drove cars they were not
starving
therefore they were not authentically
african
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 us
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 health care system sneaking
across the border
being arrested at the border that sort
of thing
i remember walking around on my first
day in guadalajara
watching the people going to work
rolling up to tears in the marketplace
smoking
laughing i remember first feeling slight
surprise
and then i was overwhelmed with shame
i realized that i had been so immersed
in the media coverage of mexicans
that they had become one thing in my
mind the abject
immigrant i had bought into the single
story of mexicans and i could not have
been more ashamed of myself
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 it is
impossible to talk about the single
story without talking about
power there is a ward
an ebola ward that i think about
whenever i think about the power
structures of the world and it is uncali
it's a noun that loosely translates to
to be greater than another
like our economic and political world
stories too are defined
by the principle of uncali how they are
told
who tells them when they are told how
many stories are told
are really dependent on power
power is the ability not just to tell
the story of another person
but to make it the definitive story of
that person
the palestinian poet murid baguti writes
that if you want to dispossess a people
the simplest way to do it is to tell
their story and to start with
secondly start the story
with the arrows of the native americans
and not with the arrival of the british
and you have an entirely different story
start the story with
the failure of the african states and
not with the colonial creation
of the african state and you have an
entirely different
story i recently spoke at a university
where
a student told me that it was such a
shame
that nigerian men were physical abusers
like the father character in my novel
i told him that i had just read a novel
called american psycho
and that it was such a shame that young
americans were serial murderers
no no
no now obviously i said this in a fit of
mild irritation
but it would never have occurred to me
to think that just because i had read a
novel
in which a character was a serial killer
that he was somehow representative of
all americans and now this is not
because i'm a better person
than that student but because of
america's cultural and economic power i
had many stories of america i had read
thailand opdyke and steinbeck and great
skill
i did not have a single story of america
when i learned
some years ago that writers were
expected to have had
really unhappy childhoods to be
successful
i began to think about how i could
invent horrible things my parents had
done to me
but the truth is that i had a very happy
childhood
full of laughter and love in a very
close-knit family
but i also had grandfathers who died in
refugee camps
my cousin polly died because he could
not get adequate health care
one of my closest friends oklahoma died
in a plane crash because our fire trucks
did not have water
i grew up under repressive military
governments that
devalued education so that sometimes my
parents were not paid their salaries
and so as a child i saw jam disappear
from the breakfast table
then margarine disappeared then bread
became too expensive
then milk became rationed
and most of all a kind of normalized
political fear
invaded our lives
all of these stories make me who i am
but to insist on
only these negative stories is to
flatten my experience
and to overlook the many other stories
that formed me
the single story creates stereotypes and
the problem
with stereotypes is not that they are
untrue
but that they are incomplete they make
one story become the only story
of course africa is a continent full of
catastrophes the
immense ones such as the horrific rapes
in congo and
depressing ones such as 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's
very important it is just as important
to talk about them
i've 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
the consequence of the single story is
this
it robs people of dignity it makes our
recognition of our
equal humanity difficult it emphasizes
how we are different
rather than how we are similar so what
if before my mexican trip
i had followed the immigration debate
from both sides
the u.s and the mexican what if my
mother had told us that fide's family
was
poor and had walking what if we had an
african television network that
broadcast diverse african stories all
over the world
what the nigerian writer chino achebe
calls a balance of stories
what if my roommate knew about my
nigerian publisher
muktar bakari a remarkable man who left
his job in a bank to follow his dream
and start a publishing house
now the conventional wisdom was that
nigerians don't read literature
he disagreed he felt that people who
could read
would read if he made literature
affordable and available to them
shortly after he published my first
novel i went to a tv station in lagos to
do an interview
and a woman who walked there as a
messenger came up to me and said
i really liked your novel i didn't like
the ending now you must write a sequel
and this is what will happen
and she went on to tell me what to write
in the sequel
now i was not only charmed i was very
moved here was a woman
part of the ordinary masters of
nigerians who are not supposed to be
readers
she had not only read the book but she
had taken ownership of it and felt
justified in telling me what to write in
the sequel
now what if my roommate knew about my
friend for me yonder
a fearless woman who hosts a tv show in
lagos
and is determined to tell the stories
that we prefer to forget
what if my roommate knew about the heart
procedure that was performed in the
lagos hospital
last week what if my roommate knew about
contemporary nigerian music
talented people singing in english and
pidgin and igbo and yoruba and egypt
mixing influences from jay-z to fella
to bob marley to their grandfathers
what if my roommate knew about the
female lawyer who recently went to court
in nigeria to challenge a ridiculous law
that required women to get their
husbands consent
before renewing their passports what if
my roommate knew about nollywood
full of innovative people making films
despite great technical odds
films so popular that they really are
the best example of nigerians consuming
what they produce
what if my roommate knew about my
wonderfully ambitious hair braider who
has just started her own business
selling hair extensions
or about the millions of other nigerians
who start businesses and sometimes
fail but continue to nurse ambition
every time i am home i'm confronted with
the usual sources of irritation for most
nigerians
our field infrastructure our field
government
but also by the incredible resilience of
people who
thrive despite the government rather
than because of it
i teach writing workshops in lagos every
summer and it is amazing to me how many
people apply
how many people are eager to write to
tell stories
my nigerian publisher and i have just
started a non-profit called
farafinatrost and
we have big dreams of building libraries
and refurbishing libraries that already
exist
and providing books for state schools
that don't have anything in their
libraries
and also of organizing lots and lots of
workshops and reading and writing
for all the people who are eager to tell
our many stories
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 the people but stories
can also repair
that broken dignity the american writer
alice walker wrote
this about her southern relatives who
had moved to the north and
she introduced them to a book about the
southern life that they had left behind
they sat around reading the book
themselves
listening to me read the book and the
kind of paradise
was regained i would like to end with
this thought
that when we reject the single story
when we realize that there is
never a single story about any place
we regain a kind of paradise thank you
[Music]
you