00:00:12
I'm a storyteller.
00:00:14
And I would like to tell you
a few personal stories
00:00:17
about what I like to call
"the danger of the single story."
00:00:22
I grew up on a university campus
in eastern Nigeria.
00:00:26
My mother says that I started
reading at the age of two,
00:00:29
although I think four
is probably close to the truth.
00:00:33
So I was an early reader,
00:00:35
and what I read were British
and American children's books.
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I was also an early writer,
00:00:42
and when I began to write,
at about the age of seven,
00:00:46
stories in pencil
with crayon illustrations
00:00:48
that my poor mother was obligated to read,
00:00:51
I wrote exactly the kinds
of stories I was reading:
00:00:55
All my characters were
white and blue-eyed,
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they played in the snow,
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they ate apples,
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(Laughter)
00:01:06
and they talked a lot about the weather,
00:01:08
how lovely it was
that the sun had come out.
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(Laughter)
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Now, this despite the fact
that I lived in Nigeria.
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I had never been outside Nigeria.
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We didn't have snow, we ate mangoes,
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and we never talked about the weather,
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because there was no need to.
00:01:26
My characters also drank
a lot of ginger beer,
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because the characters
in the British books I read
00:01:31
drank ginger beer.
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Never mind that I had no idea
what ginger beer was.
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(Laughter)
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And for many years afterwards,
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I would have a desperate desire
to taste ginger beer.
00:01:42
But that is another story.
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What this demonstrates, I think,
00:01:46
is how impressionable
and vulnerable we are
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in the face of a story,
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particularly as children.
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Because all I had read were books
in which characters were foreign,
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I had become convinced that books
00:01:59
by their very nature
had to have foreigners in them
00:02:02
and had to be about things with which
I could not personally identify.
00:02:07
Now, things changed
when I discovered African books.
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There weren't many of them available,
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and they weren't quite as easy to find
as the foreign books.
00:02:16
But because of writers like
Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye,
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I went through a mental shift
in my perception of literature.
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I realized that people like me,
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girls with skin the color of chocolate,
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whose kinky hair could not form ponytails,
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could also exist in literature.
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I started to write
about things I recognized.
00:02:36
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
00:02:46
was that I did not know
that people like me
00:02:48
could exist in literature.
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So what the discovery of African writers
did for me was this:
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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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My father was a professor.
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My mother was an administrator.
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And so we had, as was the norm,
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live-in domestic help, who would often
come from nearby rural villages.
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So, the year I turned eight,
we got a new house boy.
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His name was Fide.
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The only thing my mother told us about him
was that his family was very poor.
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My mother sent yams and rice,
and our old clothes, to his family.
00:03:32
And when I didn't finish my dinner,
my mother would say,
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"Finish your food! Don't you know?
People like Fide's family have nothing."
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So I felt enormous pity for Fide's family.
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Then one Saturday,
we went to his village to visit,
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and his mother showed us
a beautifully patterned basket
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made of dyed raffia
that his brother had made.
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I was startled.
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It had not occurred to me
that anybody in his family
00:03:58
could actually make something.
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All I had heard about them
was how poor they were,
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so that it had become impossible for me
to see them as anything else but poor.
00:04:09
Their poverty was my single story of them.
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Years later, I thought about this
when I left Nigeria
00:04:15
to go to university in the United States.
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I was 19.
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My American roommate was shocked by me.
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She asked where I had learned
to speak English so well,
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and was confused when I said that Nigeria
00:04:29
happened to have English
as its official language.
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She asked if she could listen
to what she called my "tribal music,"
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and was consequently very disappointed
00:04:40
when I produced my tape of Mariah Carey.
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(Laughter)
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She assumed that I did not know
how to use a stove.
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What struck me was this:
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She had felt sorry for me
even before she saw me.
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Her default position
toward me, as an African,
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was a kind of patronizing,
well-meaning pity.
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My roommate had a single story of Africa:
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a single story of catastrophe.
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In this single story,
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there was no possibility of Africans
being similar to her in any way,
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no possibility of feelings
more complex than pity,
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no possibility of a connection
as human equals.
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I must say that before I went to the U.S.,
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I didn't consciously identify as African.
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But in the U.S., whenever Africa came up,
people turned to me.
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Never mind that I knew nothing
about places like Namibia.
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But I did come to embrace
this new identity,
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and in many ways I think
of myself now as African.
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Although I still get quite irritable
when Africa is referred to as a country,
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the most recent example being
my otherwise wonderful flight
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from Lagos two days ago,
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in which there was an announcement
on the Virgin flight
00:05:50
about the charity work in "India,
Africa and other countries."
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(Laughter)
00:05:56
So, after I had spent some years
in the U.S. as an African,
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I began to understand
my roommate's response to me.
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If I had not grown up in Nigeria,
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and if all I knew about Africa
were from popular images,
00:06:09
I too would think that Africa
was a place of beautiful landscapes,
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beautiful animals,
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and incomprehensible people,
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fighting senseless wars,
dying of poverty and AIDS,
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unable to speak for themselves
00:06:24
and waiting to be saved
by a kind, white foreigner.
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I would see Africans
in the same way that I,
00:06:31
as a child, had seen Fide's family.
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This single story of Africa ultimately
comes, I think, from Western literature.
00:06:39
Now, here is a quote from the writing
of a London merchant called John Lok,
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who sailed to west Africa in 1561
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and kept a fascinating
account of his voyage.
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After referring to the black Africans
as "beasts who have no houses,"
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he writes, "They are also
people without heads,
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having their mouth and eyes
in their breasts."
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Now, I've laughed
every time I've read this.
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And one must admire
the imagination of John Lok.
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But what is important about his writing
00:07:13
is that it represents the beginning
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of a tradition of telling
African stories in the West:
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A tradition of Sub-Saharan Africa
as a place of negatives,
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of difference, of darkness,
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of people who, in the words
of the wonderful poet Rudyard Kipling,
00:07:29
are "half devil, half child."
00:07:32
And so, I began to realize
that my American roommate
00:07:35
must have throughout her life
00:07:37
seen and heard different versions
of this single story,
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as had a professor,
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who once told me that my novel
was not "authentically African."
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Now, I was quite willing to contend
00:07:49
that there were a number of things
wrong with the novel,
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that it had failed in a number of places,
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but I had not quite imagined
that it had failed
00:07:58
at achieving something
called African authenticity.
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In fact, I did not know
what African authenticity was.
00:08:06
The professor told me that my characters
were too much like him,
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an educated and middle-class man.
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My characters drove cars.
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They were not starving.
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Therefore they were not
authentically African.
00:08:21
But I must quickly add
that I too am just as guilty
00:08:24
in the question of the single story.
00:08:27
A few years ago,
I visited Mexico from the U.S.
00:08:31
The political climate in the U.S.
at the time was tense,
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and there were debates going on
about immigration.
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And, as often happens in America,
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immigration became
synonymous with Mexicans.
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There were endless stories of Mexicans
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as people who were
fleecing the healthcare system,
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sneaking across the border,
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being arrested at the border,
that sort of thing.
00:08:54
I remember walking around
on my first day in Guadalajara,
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watching the people going to work,
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rolling up tortillas in the marketplace,
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smoking, laughing.
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I remember first feeling slight surprise.
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And then, I was overwhelmed with shame.
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I realized that I had been so immersed
in the media coverage of Mexicans
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that they had become one thing in my mind,
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the abject immigrant.
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I had bought into
the single story of Mexicans
00:09:23
and I could not have
been more ashamed of myself.
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So that is how to create a single story,
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show a people as one thing,
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as only one thing,
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over and over again,
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and that is what they become.
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It is impossible to talk
about the single story
00:09:40
without talking about power.
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There is a word, an Igbo word,
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that I think about whenever I think about
the power structures of the world,
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and it is "nkali."
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It's a noun that loosely translates
to "to be greater than another."
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Like our economic and political worlds,
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stories too are defined
by the principle of nkali:
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How they are told, who tells them,
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when they're told,
how many stories are told,
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are really dependent on power.
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Power is the ability not just to tell
the story of another person,
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but to make it the definitive
story of that person.
00:10:19
The Palestinian poet
Mourid Barghouti writes
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that if you want to dispossess a people,
00:10:24
the simplest way to do it
is to tell their story
00:10:27
and to start with, "secondly."
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Start the story with the arrows
of the Native Americans,
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and not with the arrival of the British,
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and you have an entirely different story.
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Start the story with
the failure of the African state,
00:10:44
and not with the colonial
creation of the African state,
00:10:48
and you have an entirely different story.
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I recently spoke at a university
00:10:54
where a student told me
that it was such a shame
00:10:57
that Nigerian men were physical abusers
00:11:01
like the father character in my novel.
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I told him that I had just read a novel
called "American Psycho" --
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(Laughter)
00:11:10
-- and that it was such a shame
00:11:12
that young Americans
were serial murderers.
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(Laughter)
00:11:19
(Applause)
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Now, obviously I said this
in a fit of mild irritation.
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(Laughter)
00:11:30
But it would never have
occurred to me to think
00:11:32
that just because I had read a novel
in which a character was a serial killer
00:11:36
that he was somehow
representative of all Americans.
00:11:40
This is not because I am
a better person than that student,
00:11:43
but because of America's cultural
and economic power,
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I had many stories of America.
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I had read Tyler and Updike
and Steinbeck and Gaitskill.
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I did not have a single story of America.
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When I learned, some years ago,
00:11:57
that writers were expected
to have had really unhappy childhoods
00:12:01
to be successful,
00:12:04
I began to think about how I could invent
horrible things my parents had done to me.
00:12:08
(Laughter)
00:12:10
But the truth is that I had
a very happy childhood,
00:12:14
full of laughter and love,
in a very close-knit family.
00:12:17
But I also had grandfathers
who died in refugee camps.
00:12:20
My cousin Polle died because
he could not get adequate healthcare.
00:12:25
One of my closest friends,
Okoloma, died in a plane crash
00:12:28
because our fire trucks
did not have water.
00:12:31
I grew up under repressive
military governments
00:12:34
that devalued education,
00:12:36
so that sometimes, my parents
were not paid their salaries.
00:12:39
And so, as a child, I saw jam
disappear from the breakfast table,
00:12:43
then margarine disappeared,
00:12:45
then bread became too expensive,
00:12:48
then milk became rationed.
00:12:51
And most of all, a kind
of normalized political fear
00:12:54
invaded our lives.
00:12:57
All of these stories make me who I am.
00:13:00
But to insist on only
these negative stories
00:13:04
is to flatten my experience
00:13:07
and to overlook the many other
stories that formed me.
00:13:11
The single story creates stereotypes,
00:13:14
and the problem with stereotypes
is not that they are untrue,
00:13:19
but that they are incomplete.
00:13:21
They make one story become the only story.
00:13:25
Of course, Africa is a continent
full of catastrophes:
00:13:27
There are immense ones,
such as the horrific rapes in Congo
00:13:31
and depressing ones,
00:13:32
such as the fact that 5,000 people apply
for one job vacancy in Nigeria.
00:13:38
But there are other stories
that are not about catastrophe,
00:13:41
and it is very important, it is just
as important, to talk about them.
00:13:45
I've always felt that it is impossible
00:13:47
to engage properly
with a place or a person
00:13:50
without engaging with all of the stories
of that place and that person.
00:13:54
The consequence
of the single story is this:
00:13:57
It robs people of dignity.
00:14:00
It makes our recognition
of our equal humanity difficult.
00:14:04
It emphasizes how we are different
rather than how we are similar.
00:14:09
So what if before my Mexican trip,
00:14:11
I had followed the immigration
debate from both sides,
00:14:15
the U.S. and the Mexican?
00:14:17
What if my mother had told us
that Fide's family was poor
00:14:21
and hardworking?
00:14:23
What if we had an African
television network
00:14:25
that broadcast diverse
African stories all over the world?
00:14:29
What the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe
calls "a balance of stories."
00:14:33
What if my roommate knew
about my Nigerian publisher,
00:14:37
Muhtar Bakare,
00:14:39
a remarkable man who left
his job in a bank
00:14:41
to follow his dream
and start a publishing house?
00:14:44
Now, the conventional wisdom
was that Nigerians don't read literature.
00:14:47
He disagreed.
00:14:49
He felt that people
who could read, would read,
00:14:52
if you made literature affordable
and available to them.
00:14:56
Shortly after he published my first novel,
00:14:59
I went to a TV station
in Lagos to do an interview,
00:15:02
and a woman who worked there
as a messenger came up to me and said,
00:15:05
"I really liked your novel.
I didn't like the ending.
00:15:08
Now, you must write a sequel,
and this is what will happen ..."
00:15:11
(Laughter)
00:15:14
And she went on to tell me
what to write in the sequel.
00:15:17
I was not only charmed, I was very moved.
00:15:20
Here was a woman, part of the ordinary
masses of Nigerians,
00:15:23
who were not supposed to be readers.
00:15:26
She had not only read the book,
00:15:27
but she had taken ownership of it
00:15:29
and felt justified in telling me
what to write in the sequel.
00:15:33
Now, what if my roommate knew
about my friend Funmi Iyanda,
00:15:37
a fearless woman who hosts
a TV show in Lagos,
00:15:40
and is determined to tell the stories
that we prefer to forget?
00:15:43
What if my roommate knew
about the heart procedure
00:15:47
that was performed in the Lagos
hospital last week?
00:15:50
What if my roommate knew
about contemporary Nigerian music,
00:15:54
talented people singing
in English and Pidgin,
00:15:57
and Igbo and Yoruba and Ijo,
00:15:59
mixing influences from Jay-Z to Fela
00:16:03
to Bob Marley to their grandfathers.
00:16:06
What if my roommate knew
about the female lawyer
00:16:08
who recently went to court in Nigeria
to challenge a ridiculous law
00:16:12
that required women to get
their husband's consent
00:16:15
before renewing their passports?
00:16:18
What if my roommate knew about Nollywood,
00:16:21
full of innovative people making
films despite great technical odds,
00:16:25
films so popular
00:16:27
that they really are the best example
of Nigerians consuming what they produce?
00:16:32
What if my roommate knew about
my wonderfully ambitious hair braider,
00:16:35
who has just started her own business
selling hair extensions?
00:16:39
Or about the millions of other Nigerians
who start businesses and sometimes fail,
00:16:43
but continue to nurse ambition?
00:16:47
Every time I am home I am confronted
00:16:49
with the usual sources of irritation
for most Nigerians:
00:16:52
our failed infrastructure,
our failed government,
00:16:55
but also by the incredible resilience
00:16:57
of people who thrive
despite the government,
00:17:01
rather than because of it.
00:17:03
I teach writing workshops
in Lagos every summer,
00:17:06
and it is amazing to me
how many people apply,
00:17:09
how many people are eager to write,
00:17:12
to tell stories.
00:17:14
My Nigerian publisher and I
have just started a non-profit
00:17:17
called Farafina Trust,
00:17:19
and we have big dreams
of building libraries
00:17:22
and refurbishing libraries
that already exist
00:17:24
and providing books for state schools
00:17:27
that don't have anything
in their libraries,
00:17:29
and also of organizing lots
and lots of workshops,
00:17:31
in reading and writing,
00:17:33
for all the people who are eager
to tell our many stories.
00:17:36
Stories matter.
00:17:38
Many stories matter.
00:17:40
Stories have been used
to dispossess and to malign,
00:17:44
but stories can also be used
to empower and to humanize.
00:17:48
Stories can break the dignity of a people,
00:17:51
but stories can also repair
that broken dignity.
00:17:56
The American writer
Alice Walker wrote this
00:17:58
about her Southern relatives
who had moved to the North.
00:18:02
She introduced them to a book about
00:18:04
the Southern life
that they had left behind.
00:18:07
"They sat around,
reading the book themselves,
00:18:11
listening to me read the book,
and a kind of paradise was regained."
00:18:17
I would like to end with this thought:
00:18:20
That when we reject the single story,
00:18:23
when we realize that
there is never a single story
00:18:26
about any place,
00:18:28
we regain a kind of paradise.
00:18:30
Thank you.
00:18:32
(Applause)
