00:00:00
[Applause]
00:00:01
I'm a Storyteller and I would like to
00:00:04
tell you a few personal stories about
00:00:06
what I like to call the danger of the
00:00:08
single
00:00:09
story I grew up on a University campus
00:00:12
in eastern Nigeria my mother says that I
00:00:15
started reading at the age of two
00:00:17
although I think four is probably close
00:00:19
to the
00:00:20
truth so I was an early reader and what
00:00:24
I read were British and American
00:00:25
children's books I was also an early
00:00:29
writer and when I began to write at
00:00:31
about the age of seven stories in pencil
00:00:35
with crayon illustrations that my poor
00:00:37
mother was obligated to read I wrote
00:00:40
exactly the kinds of stories I was
00:00:42
reading all my characters were white and
00:00:46
blue-eyed they played in the
00:00:49
snow they ate
00:00:53
apples and they talked a lot about the
00:00:55
weather how lovely it was that the sun
00:00:57
had come out
00:01:00
now this despite the fact that I lived
00:01:02
in Nigeria had never been outside
00:01:06
Nigeria we didn't have snow we ate
00:01:09
mangoes and we never talked about the
00:01:11
weather because there was no need to my
00:01:14
characters also drank a lot of ginger
00:01:16
beer because the characters in the
00:01:18
British books I read drank ginger beer
00:01:21
never mind that I had no idea what
00:01:23
ginger beer
00:01:24
was and for many years afterwards I
00:01:26
would have a desperate desire to taste
00:01:29
ginger beer
00:01:30
but that is another story what this
00:01:32
demonstrates I think is how
00:01:35
impressionable and vulnerable we are in
00:01:37
the face of a story particularly as
00:01:40
children because all I had read were
00:01:42
books in which characters were foreign I
00:01:45
had become convinced that books by their
00:01:48
very nature had to have foreigners in
00:01:50
them and had to be about things with
00:01:52
which I could not personally
00:01:54
identify now things changed when I
00:01:57
discovered African books there weren't
00:01:59
many of them available and they weren't
00:02:01
quite as easy to find as the foreign
00:02:02
books but because of writers like Chino
00:02:05
a and Kamar L I went through a mental
00:02:08
shift in my perception of literature I
00:02:11
realized that people like me girls with
00:02:13
skin the color of chocolate whose kinky
00:02:16
hair could not form ponytails could also
00:02:19
exist in literature I started to write
00:02:21
about things I
00:02:23
recognized now I loved those American
00:02:26
and British books I read they stirred my
00:02:29
imagination the opened up new walls for
00:02:31
me but the unintended consequence was
00:02:34
that I did not know that people like me
00:02:36
could exist in
00:02:37
literature so what the discovery of
00:02:39
African writers did for me was this it
00:02:42
saved me from having a single story of
00:02:45
what books
00:02:46
are I come from a conventional
00:02:48
middleclass Nigerian family my father
00:02:51
was a professor my mother was an
00:02:54
administrator and so we had as was the
00:02:57
norm living domestic help who would
00:02:59
often come from nearby rural Villages so
00:03:03
the year I turned eight we got a new
00:03:05
house boy his name was
00:03:08
FID the only thing my mother told us
00:03:11
about him was that his family was very
00:03:14
poor my mother sent yams and rice and
00:03:17
our old clothes to his family and when I
00:03:20
didn't finish my dinner my mother would
00:03:22
say finish your food don't you know
00:03:24
people like F's family have nothing so I
00:03:27
felt enormous pity for
00:03:30
family then one Saturday we went to his
00:03:33
village to visit and his mother showed
00:03:35
us a beautifully patterned basket made
00:03:38
of died Rafia that his brother had made
00:03:41
I was
00:03:42
startled it had not occurred to me that
00:03:45
anybody in his family could actually
00:03:46
make something all I had heard about
00:03:50
them was how poor they were so that it
00:03:52
had become impossible for me to see them
00:03:54
as anything else but poor their poverty
00:03:57
was my single story of them
00:04:01
years later I thought about this when I
00:04:02
left Nigeria to go to university in the
00:04:05
United States I was
00:04:07
19 my American roommate was shocked by
00:04:11
me she asked where I had learned to
00:04:13
speak English so well and was confused
00:04:16
when I said that Nigeria happened to
00:04:18
have English as its official
00:04:20
language she asked if she could listen
00:04:22
to what she called my tribal music and
00:04:26
was consequently very disappointed when
00:04:28
I produced my tape of Mariah car
00:04:32
sry she assumed that I did not know how
00:04:35
to use a
00:04:36
stove what struck me was this she had
00:04:39
felt sorry for me even before she saw me
00:04:42
her default position toward me as an
00:04:45
African was a kind of patronizing
00:04:47
well-meaning
00:04:49
pity my roommate had a single story of
00:04:52
Africa a single story of
00:04:55
catastrophe in this single story there
00:04:57
was no possibility of Africans being
00:05:00
similar to her in any way no possibility
00:05:02
of feelings more complex than pity no
00:05:05
possibility of a connection as human
00:05:08
equals I must say that before I went to
00:05:10
the US I didn't consciously identify as
00:05:13
African but in the US whenever Africa
00:05:15
came up people turned to me never mind
00:05:17
that I knew nothing about places like
00:05:20
namia but I did come to embrace this new
00:05:22
identity and in many ways I think of
00:05:24
myself now as African although I still
00:05:26
get quite irritable when Africa is
00:05:29
referred to as a country the most recent
00:05:30
example being my otherwise wonderful
00:05:33
flight from Lagos two days ago in which
00:05:35
um there was an announcement on the
00:05:37
Virgin Flight about the Charity Walk in
00:05:40
India Africa and other
00:05:43
countries so after I had spent some
00:05:45
years in the US as an African I began to
00:05:49
understand my roommate's response to me
00:05:52
if I had not grown up in Nigeria and if
00:05:54
all I knew about Africa were from
00:05:56
popular images I too would think that
00:05:59
Africa was a place of beautiful
00:06:01
landscapes beautiful animals and
00:06:04
incomprehensible people fighting
00:06:06
senseless Wars dying of poverty and AIDS
00:06:09
unable to speak for themselves and
00:06:12
waiting to be saved by a kind white
00:06:16
Foreigner I would see Africans in the
00:06:18
same way that I as a child had seen
00:06:20
fed's
00:06:22
family this single story of Africa
00:06:24
ultimately comes I think from Western
00:06:26
literature now here's a quote from the
00:06:29
writer of a London Merchant called John
00:06:31
Lock who sailed to West Africa in
00:06:34
1561 and kept a fascinating account of
00:06:38
his
00:06:39
voyage after referring to the black
00:06:41
Africans as beasts who have no houses he
00:06:44
writes they are also people without
00:06:47
heads having their mouths and eyes in
00:06:50
their
00:06:52
breasts now I've laughed every time I've
00:06:54
read this and one must admire the
00:06:57
imagination of John lock but what is
00:06:59
important about his writing is that it
00:07:01
represents the beginning of a tradition
00:07:03
of telling African stories in the west a
00:07:06
tradition of subsaharan Africa as a
00:07:08
place of negatives of difference of
00:07:10
Darkness of people who in the words of
00:07:13
the wonderful poet rad Kipling a half
00:07:17
devil half
00:07:19
child and so I began to realize that my
00:07:22
American roommate must have throughout
00:07:24
her life seen and heard different
00:07:27
versions of this single story as had a
00:07:30
professor who once told me that my novel
00:07:32
was not authentically
00:07:34
African now I was quite willing to
00:07:37
contend that there were a number of
00:07:38
things wrong with the novel that it had
00:07:41
failed in a number of places but I had
00:07:44
not quite imagined that it had failed at
00:07:46
achieving something called African
00:07:48
authenticity in fact I did not know what
00:07:51
African authenticity
00:07:53
was the professor told me that my
00:07:55
characters were too much like him an
00:07:58
educated and middle class man my
00:08:00
characters drove cars they were not
00:08:03
starving therefore they were not
00:08:06
authentically
00:08:08
African but I must quickly add that I
00:08:10
too am just as guilty in the question of
00:08:13
the single story a few years ago I
00:08:16
visited Mexico from the
00:08:18
US the political climate in the us at
00:08:20
the time was tense and there were
00:08:22
debates going on about
00:08:24
immigration and as often happens in
00:08:26
America immigration became synonymous
00:08:28
with Mexican
00:08:30
there were endless stories of Mexicans
00:08:32
as people who were fleecing the Health
00:08:35
Care System sneaking across the border
00:08:38
being arrested at the border that sort
00:08:40
of
00:08:41
thing I remember walking around on my
00:08:43
first day in
00:08:45
guadalahara watching the people going to
00:08:47
walk rolling up to tears in the
00:08:49
marketplace smoking
00:08:52
laughing I remember first feeling slight
00:08:55
surprise and then I was overwhelmed with
00:08:58
shame I realized that I had been so
00:09:01
immersed in the media coverage of
00:09:03
Mexicans that they had become one thing
00:09:05
in my mind the abject
00:09:07
immigrant I had bought into the single
00:09:10
story of Mexicans and I could not have
00:09:11
been more ashamed of myself so that is
00:09:14
how to create a single story show a
00:09:17
people as one thing as only one thing
00:09:21
over and over again and that is what
00:09:23
they
00:09:24
become it is impossible to talk about
00:09:27
the single story without talking about
00:09:30
power there is a word an EO word that I
00:09:33
think about whenever I think about the
00:09:35
power structures of the world and it is
00:09:37
inali it's a noun that Loosely
00:09:40
translates to to be greater than another
00:09:43
like our economic and political worlds
00:09:46
stories too are defined by the principle
00:09:49
of anali how they are told who tells
00:09:52
them when they are told how many stories
00:09:55
are told are really dependent on power
00:10:00
power is the ability not just to tell
00:10:01
the story of another person but to make
00:10:03
it the definitive story of that person
00:10:07
the Palestinian poet mid bouti writes
00:10:09
that if you want to dispossess a people
00:10:12
the simplest way to do it is to tell
00:10:14
their story and to start with
00:10:17
secondly start the story with the arrows
00:10:21
of the Native Americans and not with the
00:10:23
arrival of the British and you have an
00:10:25
entirely different story start the story
00:10:29
with with the failure of the African
00:10:31
State and not with the colonial creation
00:10:34
of the African State and you have an
00:10:36
entirely different
00:10:39
story I recently spoke at a university
00:10:41
where a student told me that it was such
00:10:44
a shame that Nigerian men were were
00:10:48
physical abusers like the father
00:10:49
character in my
00:10:51
novel I told him that I had just read a
00:10:53
novel called American
00:10:55
Psycho
00:10:57
and and that it was such a shame that
00:11:00
Young Americans were serial
00:11:03
murderers now
00:11:10
now now now obviously I said this in a
00:11:14
fit of mild irritation
00:11:16
but it would never have occurred to me
00:11:19
to think that just because I had read a
00:11:21
novel in which a character was a serial
00:11:23
killer that he was somehow
00:11:24
representative of all Americans and now
00:11:28
this is not because I'm a better person
00:11:30
than that student but because of
00:11:32
America's cultural and economic power I
00:11:34
had many stories of America I had read
00:11:37
thaan opdik and steinber and Gat skill I
00:11:40
did not have a single story of
00:11:42
America when I learned some years ago
00:11:45
that writers were expected to have had
00:11:48
really unhappy childhoods to be
00:11:50
successful I began to think about how I
00:11:53
could invent horrible things my parents
00:11:55
had done to
00:11:57
me but the truth truth is that I had a
00:12:00
very happy childhood full of laughter
00:12:02
and love in a very close-nit family but
00:12:05
I also had grandfathers who died in
00:12:07
refugee camps my cousin Polly died
00:12:10
because he could not get adequate Health
00:12:12
Care one of my closest friends okoma
00:12:15
died in a plane crash because our fired
00:12:17
trucks did not have
00:12:18
water I grew up under repressive
00:12:21
military governments that devalued
00:12:23
education so that sometimes my parents
00:12:25
would not pay their salaries and so as a
00:12:27
child I saw Jam dis appear from The
00:12:29
Breakfast Table then maerin
00:12:32
disappeared then bread became too
00:12:34
expensive then milk became
00:12:37
rationed and most of all a kind of
00:12:40
normalized political fear invaded Our
00:12:44
Lives all of these stories make me who I
00:12:47
am but to insist on only these negative
00:12:51
stories is to flatten my
00:12:54
experience and to overlook the many
00:12:56
other stories that formed me the single
00:12:59
story creates stereotypes and the
00:13:02
problem with stereotypes is not that
00:13:05
they are untrue but that they are
00:13:08
incomplete they make one story become
00:13:10
the only
00:13:11
story of course Africa is a continent
00:13:14
full of catastrophes the immense ones
00:13:17
such as the horrific rapes in Congo and
00:13:19
depressing ones such as the fact that
00:13:21
5,000 people apply for one job vacancy
00:13:24
in
00:13:25
Nigeria but there are other stories that
00:13:28
are not about catastrophe
00:13:29
and it is very important it is just as
00:13:31
important to talk about them I've always
00:13:34
felt that it is impossible to engage
00:13:36
properly with a place or a person
00:13:38
without engaging with all of the stories
00:13:40
of that place and that person the
00:13:42
consequence of the single story is this
00:13:45
it robs people of dignity it makes our
00:13:49
recognition of our equal Humanity
00:13:51
difficult it emphasizes how we are
00:13:53
different rather than how we are similar
00:13:57
so what if before my Mexican trip
00:13:59
I had followed the immigration debate
00:14:01
from both sides the US and the Mexican
00:14:05
what if my mother had told us that fed's
00:14:07
family was poor and had
00:14:10
working what if we had an African
00:14:12
television network that broadcast
00:14:14
diverse African stories all over the
00:14:16
world what the Nigerian writer Chino
00:14:18
Achebe calls a balance of stories what
00:14:22
if my roommate knew about my Nigerian
00:14:24
publisher MTAR bakari a remarkable man
00:14:27
who left his job in a bank to follow his
00:14:29
dream and start a publishing house now
00:14:32
the conventional wisdom was that
00:14:33
Nigerians don't read literature he
00:14:36
disagreed he felt that people who could
00:14:39
read would read if you made literature
00:14:41
affordable and available to them shortly
00:14:45
after he published my first novel I went
00:14:47
to a TV station in Lagos to do an
00:14:49
interview and a woman who walked there
00:14:51
as a messenger came up to me and said I
00:14:53
really liked your novel I didn't like
00:14:55
the ending now you must write a sequel
00:14:58
and this is what will happen
00:15:02
and she went on to tell me what to write
00:15:04
in the sequel now I was not only Charmed
00:15:06
I was very moved here was a woman part
00:15:09
of the ordinary masses of Nigerians who
00:15:11
were not supposed to be
00:15:12
readers she had not only read the book
00:15:15
but she had taken ownership of it and
00:15:16
felt justified in telling me what to
00:15:19
write in the
00:15:20
SE now what if my roommate knew about my
00:15:23
friend fumi y a Fearless woman who hosts
00:15:26
a TV show in Lagos and is deter to tell
00:15:29
the stories that we prefer to forget
00:15:31
what if my roommate knew about the heart
00:15:34
procedure that was performed in the
00:15:36
Lagos hospital last week what if my
00:15:38
roommate knew about contemporary
00:15:40
Nigerian music talented people singing
00:15:43
in English and pigeon and IO and Yuba
00:15:46
and E mixing influences from JayZ to
00:15:50
fella to Bob Marley to their
00:15:53
grandfathers what if my roommate knew
00:15:55
about the female lawyer who recently
00:15:57
went to court in Nigeria to challenge a
00:15:59
ridiculous law that required women to
00:16:01
get their husband's consent before
00:16:04
renewing their passports what if my
00:16:06
roommate knew about Nollywood full of
00:16:09
innovative people making films despite
00:16:11
great technical odds films so popular
00:16:15
that they really are the best example of
00:16:17
Nigerians consuming what they produce
00:16:20
what if my roommate knew about my
00:16:21
wonderfully ambitious hair braider who
00:16:23
has just started her own business
00:16:25
selling hair
00:16:26
extensions or about the millions of
00:16:28
other Nigerians Who start businesses
00:16:30
and sometimes fail but continue to nurse
00:16:34
ambition every time I am home I'm
00:16:36
confronted with the usual sources of
00:16:38
irritation for most Nigerians our failed
00:16:40
infrastructure our failed government but
00:16:43
also by the incredible resilience of
00:16:45
people who Thrive despite the government
00:16:48
rather than because of
00:16:50
it I teach writing workshops in Lagos
00:16:53
every summer and it is amazing to me how
00:16:55
many people apply how many people are
00:16:58
eager to write to tell
00:17:01
stories my Nigerian publisher and I have
00:17:03
just started a nonprofit called farafina
00:17:06
trust and we have big dreams of building
00:17:09
libraries and refurbishing libraries
00:17:11
that already exist and providing books
00:17:14
for State schools that don't have
00:17:15
anything in their libraries and also of
00:17:17
organizing lots and lots of workshops
00:17:19
and reading and writing for all the
00:17:21
people who are eager to tell our many
00:17:23
stories stories matter many stories
00:17:27
matter stories have been used to
00:17:29
dispossess and to malign but stories can
00:17:33
also be used to empower and to humanize
00:17:36
stories can break the Dignity of a
00:17:39
people but stories can also repair that
00:17:41
broken
00:17:43
dignity the American writer Alice Walker
00:17:45
wrote this about um her Southern
00:17:47
relatives who had moved to the north and
00:17:49
she introduced them to a book about the
00:17:52
southern life that they had left
00:17:54
behind they sat around reading the book
00:17:58
themselves listening to me read the book
00:18:01
and the kind of paradise was
00:18:04
regained I would like to end with this
00:18:07
thought that when we reject the single
00:18:10
story when we realize that there is
00:18:12
never a single story about any
00:18:15
place we regain a kind of paradise thank
00:18:19
you
00:18:20
[Applause]
