THE DANGER OF A SINGLE STORY Flashcards
What are the themes?
Stereotypes
Cultural identity
Narrowmindedness
‘…tell you a few personal stories about’
Personal anecdote for effect
‘…I read were British and American children’s books’
Sets the scene
In Nigeria but reading Western literature
‘writer…write’
Polyptoton
Shows her identity as a writer
‘…they ate apples, and they talked a lot about the weather’
Humorous
Listing
‘…we didn’t have snow, we ate mangoes’
Contrasts with earlier list
Shows difference between the life she is living and the life she was reading about in books
‘…I went through a mental shift… I realized’
Repetition of personal pronoun
Starting to find her own voice
‘…girls with skin the colour of chocolate’
Metaphor
Given us traditional western literature and then gave us an alternative
‘…it saved me from having a single story’
Connotations of danger and needing to be saved
Saving her identity
‘…they stirred my imagination’
Not being critical just it cannot suffice on its own
Metaphorical language
‘their poverty was my single story of them’
Structurally its her own personal experience of prejudice
Wants to get away from African victim narrative
‘shocked… when I said Nigeria happened to have English as its official language’
Strong emotive lang
Little exposure to African people only a signle story
‘she assumed that I did not know how to use a stove’
Manipulating tone
Structure one sentence paragraph
More serious example of prejudice
‘…patronizing, well-meaning pity’
Plosive alliteration
Shows bitterness to prejudice
Anger
‘…no possibility… no possibility of a connection as human equals’
Anaphora
Tricolon list
Emphasises the problems prejudice causes
Shows emotional response and how it can be damaging
‘Africa was a place of beauty… dying of poverty and AIDS’
Starts out positive then heavily contrasts
Shows multiple stories
Listing
‘…that I, as a child, had seen Fide’s family’
Structural call back
Shows anyone can be prejudiced and that she isn’t judging
‘stories matter. Many stories matter’
Repetition
Short sentence emphasises importance and impact of this idea
‘…but stories can also repair that broken dignity’
Repetition of powerful abstract noun
Balanced sentence
Problem and solution
Contrast
‘… a kind of paradise was regained’
Allusion to ‘paradise regained’ by John Milton
Like they lost something
‘…it had not occurred to me that anybody in his family could make anything’
Demonstrates through her own personal anecdote that we are all prone to prejudice others
‘…stories have been used to dispossess and malign… humanize’
Powerful emotive words
Contrast between malign and humanize
