Chimamanda Adichie: O perigo da história única

[Music] 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 wied they played in the snow they ate apples and they talked a lot about the weather how lovely it was that the sun had come out now this despite the fact that I lived in Nigeria 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 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 chinoa and Kamara L 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 walls 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 living 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 FID 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 F's family have nothing so I felt enormous pity for F's family then one Saturday we went to his village to visit and his mother showed us a beautifully patterned basket made of died Rafia 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 was 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 English so well and was confused when I said that Nigeria happened to have English as its official language she asked if she could listen to

what she called my tribal music and was consequently very disappointed when I produced my tape of Mariah carry 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 US I didn't consciously identify as African but in the US whenever Africa came out 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 um there was an

announcement on the Virgin Flight about the Charity Walk in India Africa and other countries so after I had spent some years in the US 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 fed's family this single story of Africa ultimately comes I think from Western literature now here's a quote from the writing of a London Merchant called John Lock 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 right they are also people without heads having their mouths and eyes in their breasts now I've laughed every time I've read this and one must admire the imagination of John lock 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 subsaharan Africa as a place of negatives of difference of Darkness of people who in the Ws of the wonderful poet rette Kipling a 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 US the political climate in the us 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 Health Care System sneaking across the border being arrested at the border that sort of thing I remember walking around on my first day in guadalahara watching the people going to walk rolling up to tears 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 EO word that I think about

whenever I think about the past structures of the world and it isali it's a noun that Loosely translates to to be greater than another like our economic and political walls stories too are defined by the principle of anali how they are told who tells them when they are 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 mored bouti writes that if you want to dispossess a people the simplest

way to do it is to 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 an 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 was were physical abusers like the father character in my novel I told

him that I had just read a novel called American Psycho and and that it was such a shame that Young Americans were serial murderers now now now now obviously I said this in a fit of mild irritation but it 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'm 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 OBD and Steinbeck and Gat skill I did not have a single story of America when I 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 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 Polly died because he could not get adequate Health Care

one of my closest friends friend uloma died in a plane crash because our fire trucks did not have water I grew up under repressive military governments that devalued education so that sometimes my parents would not pay their salaries and so as a child I saw Jam disappear from The Breakfast Table then maerin 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 the 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 US and the Mexican what if my mother had told us that F's family was poor and had working what if

we had an African television network that brought diverse African stories all over the world what the Nigerian writer Chino Achebe calls a balance of stories what if my roommate knew about my Nigerian publisher MTAR bakari 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 walked 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 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 SE now what if my roommate knew about my friend fumi y 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 pigeon and IO and Yuba and E mixing influences from JayZ to fella to Bob marlei 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 f 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'm 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 nonprofit 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 and 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 um her Southern relatives who had moved to the north and 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 the 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