Danger Of A Single Story Flashcards
“I’m a storyteller. And I would like to tell you a few personal stories…”
- first person voice
- creates a relationship with the audience
- the opening declarative sentence gives her credibility
“All my characters were white and blue-eyes, they played in the snow, they ate apples, and they talked a lot about the weather”
- listing of westernized images of childhood
- western ideas dominating literature
- shows that she negates her own culture (invisible, worthless, illegitimate)
“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”
- proper pronoun and collective pronoun emphasizes her identity and her community
- juxtaposes western lives with her own highlighting the striking differences
“how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story”
- emotive adjectives suggest that children are in danger of damage and stripping of innocence
- wants to make her audience concerned
“but because of writers like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye, I went through a mental shift in my perception of literature”
- conjunction indicates change in circumstances and perspective
- uses proper pronouns of African writers who taught her
“finish your food! Don’t you know? People like Fide’s family have nothing.” So i felt enormous pity for Fide’s family”
- direct speech
- well intended but illustrate how a single story limits our understanding
“and his mother showed us a beautifully patterned basket made of dyed raffia that his brother had made. I was startled”
- confounds her expectations of them
- Adichie had falsely concluded
- tells us this anecdote to make us think about how we think or define people though limiting terms
“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 Carey.”
- This anecdote adds humor
- the inverted commas are used to sarcastically mock her roommates preconceptions
I too would think that Africa was a place of beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals, and incomprehensible people, fighting senseless wars… waiting to be saved by a kind white foreigner”
- views by the west deeply embedded in its culture
- adjectives create juxtaposition to the land and the people
- colonial discourse
“There were endless stories of Mexicans as people who were fleecing the healthcare system, sneaking across the border being arrested at the border”
- media identified as a a source of negative cultural stereotyping
“stories matter. Many stories matter”
- short sentences and repetitions draw attention to this message
- the adverb ‘many’ highlights the different forms statues can take
“Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize”
- parallel syntax balances the negative and positive, dangerous and strengthening ways in which stories can be used
- optimistic message
“we regain a kind of paradise”
- metaphor conveys a vision of a global community who understand and value each other as individuals
