Danger of a Single Story

“I’m a storyteller… I… you”

(first and second person pronouns) – creates intimacy and introduces the personal nature of the story

“when I began to write…my poor mother was obligated to read”

(humour) – builds rapport with audience

“all my characters were white and blue-eyed”

(imagery from western childhood stories) – generates a sense of nostalgia from western audience + builds rapport

“Nigeria… Nigeria… We… we… we”

(repetition) – repetition of ‘Nigeria’ and first person plural pronoun ‘we’ emphasizes the importance of personal stories and identities

“impressionable and vulnerable”

(emotive language) – evokes an emotional response from the audience

“I discovered African books. There weren’t many of them available, and they weren’t quite as easy to find as the foreign books”

(irony) – the local books were more difficult to access than the western books

“Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye”

(proper nouns) – builds credibility with the audience as a reader from a young age

“skin the color of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails”

(juxtaposition) – contrasts with earlier imagery of Western literature

“Now I loved those American and British books… it saved me from having a single story of what books are”

(emotive language) – maintains rapport with audience + helps build central metaphor

““Finish your food! Don’t you know? People like Fide’s family have nothing””

(anecdotal humor) – strengthens connection with audience

“Then one Saturday”

(temporal shifting) – conveys how stories continue to develop over time

(structural) “She assumed that I did not know how to use a stove”

1 sentence paragraph is largely monosyllabic as this is mimetic of the simplistic view

“What struck me was this: she had felt sorry for me even before she saw me”

(colons) – used to introduce key message, the key message her conveying the ignorance of the ‘she’

“no possibility… no possibility… no possibility”

anaphoric tricolon) – repetition to emphasize ignorance

“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”

(listing) – presenting a one dimensional and ignorant view of Africa that the author is challenging

“I must quickly add that I too am just as guilty in the question of the single story”

(anecdotal example) – maintains rapport with audience as the honest anecdote shows importance of personal growth and how we are all complicit in the danger

“fleecing… sneaking… being arrested”

(semantic field of dishonesty) – highlights the things you could be prone to believing by being limited to a single story

“watching people going to work, rolling up tortillas in the marketplace, smoking, laughing”

(asyndetic listing) – simple behavior that changed Adichie’s mind about Mexicans – reinforced by: “I was overwhelmed with shame. I realized that I had been so immersed in the media coverage of Mexicans”

“one thing… one thing… one thing, over and over again”

(repetition) – used to emphasize the danger of a single perspective – repetition of ‘one’ helps depict the narrow mindedness of such a view

“Stories… stories… Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity”

(repetition + juxtaposition) – underline the all-encompassing power of the story

“when we reject the single story… we regain a kind of paradise

John Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’ published in 1667 building further credibility – ‘paradise’ having positive connotations suggests that by not having a single minded viewpoint, you put yourself and your views in a good light