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