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It is impossible to talk about the single story without talking about power.

There is a word, an Igbo word, that I think about whenever I think about the power structures of the world, and it is nkali.

It's a noun that loosely translates to "to be greater than another."

Like our economic and political worlds, stories too are defined by the principle of nkali: How they are told, who tells them, when they're 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 Mourid Barghouti 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 state, 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.

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.

This is not because I am a better person than that student, but because of America's cultural and economic power, I had many stories of America.

I had read Tyler and Updike and Steinbeck and Gaitskill. 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 Polle died because he could not get adequate healthcare.

One of my closest friends, Okoloma, 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.

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