The Danger of a Single Story Study Notes

Early Influences and the Vulnerability to Literature

Adichie describes growing up on a university campus in eastern Nigeria. She was an early reader, purportedly beginning to read at the age of $2$, though she admits that $4$ is likely more accurate. By the age of $7$, she was an early writer, composing stories in pencil with crayon illustrations. These early narratives were heavily influenced by the British and American children's books she read. Despite living in Nigeria and never having traveled abroad, her characters were white and blue-eyed. They engaged in activities such as playing in the snow, eating apples, and drinking ginger beer, and frequently discussed how lovely the weather was when the sun came out.

These details stood in stark contrast to her actual life in Nigeria, where people ate mangoes, never had snow, and did not discuss the weather because there was no practical need to. Adichie emphasizes that as a child, she had no idea what ginger beer was, yet her characters consumed it because the characters in her books did. This illustrates how impressionable and vulnerable people, especially children, are in the face of stories. Because the only books she had access to featured foreigners, she became convinced that books, by their very nature, were required to feature foreigners and deal with experiences she could not personally identify with.

The Discovery of African Literature and a Mental Shift

The landscape of Adichie’s literary understanding changed significantly when she discovered African books. While they were not as readily available or easy to find as Western literature, the works of writers such as Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye triggered a mental shift in her perception of literature. She realized that people like herself—girls with chocolate-colored skin and kinky hair that could not form ponytails—could exist as legitimate subjects in stories.

While Adichie maintains that she loved the American and British books and credited them with stirring her imagination and opening new worlds, she acknowledges the unintended consequence: she didn't know that people like her could exist in literature. The discovery of African writers saved her from having a "single story" of what books were. She began to write about things she recognized, moving away from the displaced Western narratives of her childhood.

The Single Story of Poverty: The Case of Fide

Adichie provides a personal example of how she succumbed to the "single story" regarding her family's domestic help. Growing up in a middle-class family with a professor father and an administrator mother, they had live-in domestic help from nearby rural villages. In the year she turned $8$, the family hired a new house boy named Fide. The primary information Adichie’s mother shared about Fide was that his family was extremely poor. Her mother would send yams, rice, and old clothes to his family, and would often reprimand Adichie for not finishing her dinner by saying, "People like Fide’s family have nothing."

As a result, Adichie felt enormous pity for them. However, during a visit to Fide's village on a Saturday, Adichie was startled when Fide's mother showed them a beautifully patterned basket made of dyed raffia, crafted by Fide's brother. She realized that it had never occurred to her that anyone in his family could actually create something. Because she had only heard that they were poor, poverty became her single story of them, making it impossible for her to see them as anything else.

Experiences of Misperception in the United States

At age $19$, Adichie left Nigeria to attend university in the United States. Her American roommate exhibited a default position of patronizing, well-meaning pity, based on a single story of Africa as a place of catastrophe. The roommate was shocked that Adichie spoke English so well and was confused to learn that English is the official language of Nigeria. The roommate also asked to listen to Adichie's "tribal music" and was disappointed when Adichie produced a tape of Mariah Carey. The roommate had further assumed that Adichie did not know how to use a stove.

Adichie reflects that in this single story, there was no possibility of Africans being similar to the roommate, no possibility of feelings more complex than pity, and no possibility of a connection as human equals. Before moving to the U.S., Adichie did not consciously identify as African, but she found that in the U.S., whenever Africa was mentioned, people turned to her as a representative, regardless of her lack of knowledge about specific countries like Namibia. She eventually embraced the identity, though she notes her irritation when Africa is referred to as a single country, citing a recent Virgin flight an.3nouncement where a charity was described as working in "India, Africa, and other countries."

Western Traditions and the Origins of the Single Story

Adichie traces the single story of Africa back to Western literature and historical accounts. She cites a $1561$ account by John Lok, a London merchant who sailed to West Africa. Lok referred to black Africans as "beasts who have no houses" and claimed they were people without heads, with mouths and eyes in their breasts. While Adichie finds the account imaginative and laughable, she notes that it represents the beginning of a Western tradition of depicting Sub-Saharan Africa as a place of negatives, difference, and darkness. She mentions the poet Rudyard Kipling, who described Africans as "half devil, half child."

This tradition continues into contemporary academic and literary circles. Adichie recounts a professor telling her that her novel was not "authentically African." According to the professor, the characters were too much like him—educated, middle-class, and driving cars—rather than being starving. This specific expectation of what is "authentic" illustrates how ingrained the single story of African tragedy has become.

Internalized Bias: Adichie's Visit to Mexico

Adichie admits that she is not immune to the single story. She recounts a visit to Mexico during a time of tense political debate in the U.S. regarding immigration. In the media, immigration had become synonymous with Mexicans, who were portrayed as people fleecing the healthcare system or being arrested at the border as "abject immigrants."

During her first day in Guadalajara, she observed people going to work, rolling up tortillas, smoking, and laughing. She felt a surge of shame as she realized she had been so immersed in the media coverage that she had bought into a single story of Mexicans. She defines the process of creating a single story as showing a people as only one thing, over and over again, until that is what they become in the public consciousness.

Nkali: The Intersection of Power and Narrative

To understand the single story, one must understand power. Adichie uses the Igbo word "nkali," which translates to "to be greater than another." Power defines how stories are told, who tells them, and how many are told. It is the ability to make one story the definitive story of a person or place.

She quotes the Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti, who notes that the simplest way to dispossess a people is to tell their story starting with "secondly." For example, starting a story with the arrows of Native Americans rather than the arrival of the British changes the narrative completely. Similarly, starting with the failure of the African state rather than the colonial creation of the African state produces an entirely different history.

The Limitations of Stereotypes vs. Complex Realities

Adichie argues that the problem with stereotypes is not necessarily that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They flatten experience and overlook the multiple stories that form a person. She shares a story from a university talk where a student suggested Nigerian men were physical abusers based on a character in her novel. In response, she noted that after reading "American Psycho," she didn't assume all young Americans were serial murderers. She explains that because of America's cultural and economic power, she had many stories of America—from writers like Tyler, Updike, Steinbeck, and Gaitskill—and thus was protected from a single story of the U.S.

Adichie acknowledges the negative realities of Nigeria, including grandfathers who died in refugee camps, the death of her cousin Polle due to poor healthcare, and the death of her friend Okoloma in a plane crash where fire trucks lacked water. She lived under repressive military governments that devalued education, causing her parents to go unpaid and basics like jam, margarine, and milk to disappear or be rationed. However, she insists that focusing only on these stories overlooks the resilience and other facets of Nigerian life.

A Balance of Stories: Reclaiming Dignity

Adichie emphasizes the importance of a "balance of stories," a phrase used by Chinua Achebe. She highlights various Nigerian figures and successes to provide a counter-narrative: Muhtar Bakare, who left a banking career to start a publishing house; a woman messenger in Lagos who took ownership of Adichie's book and suggested a sequel; Funmi Iyanda, a fearless TV host in Lagos; complex Nigerian music influenced by Jay-Z, Fela, and Bob Marley; a female lawyer challenging passport laws; the innovation of Nollywood; and ambitious entrepreneurs like her hair braider.

She mentions her non-profit, Farafina Trust, which aims to build and refurbish libraries and host writing workshops. Adichie concludes that while stories have been used to dispossess and malign, they can also be used to empower and humanize. Stories can break dignity, but they can also repair it. She quotes Alice Walker, who wrote about Northern relatives reading a book about the Southern life they left behind and finding that a "kind of paradise was regained." Adichie’s final message is that by rejecting the single story and realizing there is never a single narrative for any place, we can regain a kind of paradise.