"Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories are being used to dispossess and to malign but stories can also be used to enpower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of people but stories can also repair that broken dignity.When we reject the single story. When we realize that there´s never a single story about any place, we´ll regain a kind of paradise".
Our lives are made of overlapping stories that sometimes are ignored or misunderstood. Sometimes we carry a one-dimensional view of reality and we have a biased vision of the world. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells aus a wonderful speech about the dangers of all this. About the dangers of denying ourselves the vast culture that sorrounds us, the different points of history, literature and so on.
This is a wonderful speech where she narrates for example how as a child she grew up reading American and British literature and could not connect it with the elements of her own stories, of the stories she heard around her. In a funny way she explains how the characters of her childhood were blue-eyed and white. Little by little her perception changed and she established contact with African writers and began writing about things she had personal connection with. She identified herself as African, something she was not conscious of when she was a child.Listen to the talk, take notes and focus on the main ideas she presents.
1. Identify some stereotypes about Africa. What´s the problem with stereotypes?
2. What do the following verbs in the speech mean: to patronize, to pity, to assume?
3. What was Adichie´s single story about books when she was a child? and How did it change?
4. What was her university room mate´s single story about Africa?
5. What´s your single story about Africa?
6. What are the consequences of a single story? How can we reject it, according to the writer?
