The Danger of a Single Story
Chimamanda Adichie
I'm a storyteller.
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And I would like to tell you a few personal stories about what I like to call "the danger of the single story."
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I grew up on a university campus in eastern Nigeria.
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My mother says that I started reading at the age of two, although I think four is probably close to the truth.
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So I was an early reader, and what I read were British and American children's books.
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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:
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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.
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Now, this despite the fact that I lived in Nigeria. I had never been outside Nigeria.
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We didn't have snow, we ate mangoes, and we never talked about the weather, because there was no need to.
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My characters also drank a lot of ginger beer, because the characters in the British books I read drank ginger beer.
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Never mind that I had no idea what ginger beer was.
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And for many years afterwards, I would have a desperate desire to taste ginger beer. But that is another story.
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What this demonstrates, I think, is how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story, particularly as children.
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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.
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Now, things changed when I discovered African books.
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There weren't many of them available, and they weren't quite as easy to find as the foreign books.
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But because of writers like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye, I went through a mental shift in my perception of literature.
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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.
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I started to write about things I recognized.
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Now, I loved those American and British books I read.
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They stirred my imagination. They opened up new worlds for me.
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But the unintended consequence was that I did not know that people like me could exist in literature.
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So what the discovery of African writers did for me was this: It saved me from having a single story of what books are.
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I come from a conventional, middle-class Nigerian family.
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