write an summary of this transcript of an TedTalk and give a view examples that she tells about othering. write in het reported form in around 450 words:


0:12
I'm a storyteller.
0:14
And I would like to tell you a few personal stories
0:17
about what I like to call "the danger of the single story."
0:22
I grew up on a university campus in eastern Nigeria.
0:26
My mother says that I started reading at the age of two,
0:29
although I think four is probably close to the truth.
0:33
So I was an early reader,
0:35
and what I read were British and American children's books.
0:39
I was also an early writer,
0:42
and when I began to write, at about the age of seven,
0:46
stories in pencil with crayon illustrations
0:48
that my poor mother was obligated to read,
0:51
I wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was reading:
0:55
All my characters were white and blue-eyed,
1:00
they played in the snow,
1:02
they ate apples,
1:04
(Laughter)
1:06
and they talked a lot about the weather,
1:08
how lovely it was that the sun had come out.
1:10
(Laughter)
1:12
Now, this despite the fact that I lived in Nigeria.
1:15
I had never been outside Nigeria.
1:19
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.
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My characters also drank a lot of ginger beer,
1:29
because the characters in the British books I read
1:31
drank ginger beer.
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Never mind that I had no idea what ginger beer was.
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(Laughter)
1:37
And for many years afterwards,
1:39
I would have a desperate desire to taste ginger beer.
1:42
But that is another story.
1:44
What this demonstrates, I think,
1:46
is how impressionable and vulnerable we are
1:49
in the face of a story,
1:51
particularly as children.
1:53
Because all I had read were books in which characters were foreign,
1:57
I had become convinced that books
1:59
by their very nature had to have foreigners in them
2:02
and had to be about things with which I could not personally identify.
2:07
Now, things changed when I discovered African books.
2:11
There weren't many of them available,
2:13
and they weren't quite as easy to find as the foreign books.
2:16
But because of writers like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye,
2:19
I went through a mental shift in my perception of literature.
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I realized that people like me,
2:25
girls with skin the color of chocolate,
2:27
whose kinky hair could not form ponytails,
2:30
could also exist in literature.
2:32
I started to write about things I recognized.
2:36
Now, I loved those American and British books I read.
2:40
They stirred my imagination. They opened up new worlds for me.
2:44
But the unintended consequence
2:46
was that I did not know that people like me
2:48
could exist in literature.
2:50
So what the discovery of African writers did for me was this:
2:54
It saved me from having a single story of what books are.
2:59
I come from a conventional, middle-class Nigerian family.
3:02
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.
3:15
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.
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And when I didn't finish my dinner, my mother would say,
3:34
"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,
3:46
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
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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.
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Their poverty was my single story of them.
4:13
Years later, I thought about this when I left Nigeria
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to go to university in the United States.
4:18
I was 19.
4:20
My American roommate was shocked by me.
4:24
She asked where I had learned to speak English so well,
4:27
and was confused when I said that Nigeria
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happened to have English as its official language.
4:33
She asked if she could listen to what she called my "tribal music,"
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and was consequently very disappointed
4:40
when I produced my tape of Mariah Carey.
4:42
(Laughter)
4:45
She assumed that I did not know how to use a stove.
4:49
What struck me was this:
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She had felt sorry for me even before she saw me.
4:54
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,
5:14
no possibility of feelings more complex than pity,
5:17
no possibility of a connection as human equals.
5:21
I must say that before I went to the U.S.,
5:23
I didn't consciously identify as African.
5:26
But in the U.S., whenever Africa came up, people turned to me.
5:29
Never mind that I knew nothing about places like Namibia.
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But I did come to embrace this new identity,
5:35
and in many ways I think of myself now as African.
5:38
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
5:50
about the charity work in "India, Africa and other countries."
5:55
(Laughter)
5:56
So, after I had spent some years in the U.S. as an African,
6:00
I began to understand my roommate's response to me.
6:04
If I had not grown up in Nigeria,
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and if all I knew about Africa were from popular images,
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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
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and waiting to be saved by a kind, white foreigner.
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I would see Africans in the same way that I,
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as a child, had seen Fide's family.
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This single story of Africa ultimately comes, I think, from Western literature.
6:39
Now, here is a quote from the writing of a London merchant called John Lok,
6:44
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
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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,
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are "half devil, half child."
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And so, I began to realize that my American roommate
7:35
must have throughout her life
7:37
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
7:49
that there were a number of things wrong with the novel,
7:52
that it had failed in a number of places,
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but I had not quite imagined that it had failed
7:58
at achieving something called African authenticity.
8:01
In fact, I did not know what African authenticity was.
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The professor told me that my characters were too much like him,
8:10
an educated and middle-class man.
8:12
My characters drove cars.
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They were not starving.
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Therefore they were not authentically African.
8:21
But I must quickly add that I too am just as guilty
8:24
in the question of the single story.
8:27
A few years ago, I visited Mexico from the U.S.
8:31
The political climate in the U.S. at the time was tense,
8:33
and there were debates going on about immigration.
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And, as often happens in America,
8:39
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.
8:54
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,
9:18
the abject immigrant.
9:20
I had bought into the single story of Mexicans
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and I could not have been more ashamed of myself.
9:26
So that is how to create a single story,
9:28
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.
9:37
It is impossible to talk about the single story
9:40
without talking about power.
9:43
There is a word, an Igbo word,
9:45
that I think about whenever I think about the power structures of the world,
9:49
and it is "nkali."
9:50
It's a noun that loosely translates to "to be greater than another."
9:55
Like our economic and political worlds,
9:58
stories too are defined by the principle of nkali:
10:03
How they are told, who tells them,
10:05
when they're told, how many stories are told,
10:08
are really dependent on power.
10:12
Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person,
10:15
but to make it the definitive story of that person.
10:19
The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes
10:21
that if you want to dispossess a people,
10:24
the simplest way to do it is to tell their story
10:27
and to start with, "secondly."
10:30
Start the story with the arrows of the Native Americans,
10:34
and not with the arrival of the British,
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and you have an entirely different story.
10:40
Start the story with the failure of the African state,
10:44
and not with the colonial creation of the African state,
10:48
and you have an entirely different story.
10:52
I recently spoke at a university
10:54
where a student told me that it was such a shame
10:57
that Nigerian men were physical abusers
11:01
like the father character in my novel.
11:04
I told him that I had just read a novel called "American Psycho" --
11:08
(Laughter)
11:10
-- and that it was such a shame
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that young Americans were serial murderers.
11:15
(Laughter)
11:19
(Applause)
11:25
Now, obviously I said this in a fit of mild irritation.
11:28
(Laughter)
11:30
But it would never have occurred to me to think
11:32
that just because I had read a novel in which a character was a serial killer
11:36
that he was somehow representative of all Americans.
11:40
This is not because I am a better person than that student,
11:43
but because of America's cultural and economic power,
11:46
I had many stories of America.
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I had read Tyler and Updike and Steinbeck and Gaitskill.
11:52
I did not have a single story of America.
11:55
When I learned, some years ago,
11:57
that writers were expected to have had really unhappy childhoods
12:01
to be successful,
12:04
I began to think about how I could invent horrible things my parents had done to me.
12:08
(Laughter)
12:10
But the truth is that I had a very happy childhood,
12:14
full of laughter and love, in a very close-knit family.
12:17
But I also had grandfathers who died in refugee camps.
12:20
My cousin Polle died because he could not get adequate healthcare.
12:25
One of my closest friends, Okoloma, died in a plane crash
12:28
because our fire trucks did not have water.
12:31
I grew up under repressive military governments
12:34
that devalued education,
12:36
so that sometimes, my parents were not paid their salaries.
12:39
And so, as a child, I saw jam disappear from the breakfast table,
12:43
then margarine disappeared,
12:45
then bread became too expensive,
12:48
then milk became rationed.
12:51
And most of all, a kind of normalized political fear
12:54
invaded our lives.
12:57
All of these stories make me who I am.
13:00
But to insist on only these negative stories
13:04
is to flatten my experience
13:07
and to overlook the many other stories that formed me.
13:11
The single story creates stereotypes,
13:14
and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue,
13:19
but that they are incomplete.
13:21
They make one story become the only story.
13:25
Of course, Africa is a continent full of catastrophes:
13:27
There are immense ones, such as the horrific rapes in Congo
13:31
and depressing ones,
13:32
such as the fact that 5,000 people apply for one job vacancy in Nigeria.
13:38
But there are other stories that are not about catastrophe,
13:41
and it is very important, it is just as important, to talk about them.
13:45
I've always felt that it is impossible
13:47
to engage properly with a place or a person
13:50
without engaging with all of the stories of that place and that person.
13:54
The consequence of the single story is this:
13:57
It robs people of dignity.
14:00
It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult.
14:04
It emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar.
14:09
So what if before my Mexican trip,
14:11
I had followed the immigration debate from both sides,
14:15
the U.S. and the Mexican?
14:17
What if my mother had told us that Fide's family was poor
14:21
and hardworking?
14:23
What if we had an African television network
14:25
that broadcast diverse African stories all over the world?
14:29
What the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe calls "a balance of stories."
14:33
What if my roommate knew about my Nigerian publisher,
14:37
Muhtar Bakare,
14:39
a remarkable man who left his job in a bank
14:41
to follow his dream and start a publishing house?
14:44
Now, the conventional wisdom was that Nigerians don't read literature.
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He disagreed.
14:49
He felt that people who could read, would read,
14:52
if you made literature affordable and available to them.
14:56
Shortly after he published my first novel,
14:59
I went to a TV station in Lagos to do an interview,
15:02
and a woman who worked there as a messenger came up to me and said,
15:05
"I really liked your novel. I didn't like the ending.
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Now, you must write a sequel, and this is what will happen ..."
15:11
(Laughter)
15:14
And she went on to tell me what to write in the sequel.
15:17
I was not only charmed, I was very moved.
15:20
Here was a woman, part of the ordinary masses of Nigerians,
15:23
who were not supposed to be readers.
15:26
She had not only read the book,
15:27
but she had taken ownership of it
15:29
and felt justified in telling me what to write in the sequel.
15:33
Now, what if my roommate knew about my friend Funmi Iyanda,
15:37
a fearless woman who hosts a TV show in Lagos,
15:40
and is determined to tell the stories that we prefer to forget?
15:43
What if my roommate knew about the heart procedure
15:47
that was performed in the Lagos hospital last week?
15:50
What if my roommate knew about contemporary Nigerian music,
15:54
talented people singing in English and Pidgin,
15:57
and Igbo and Yoruba and Ijo,
15:59
mixing influences from Jay-Z to Fela
16:03
to Bob Marley to their grandfathers.
16:06
What if my roommate knew about the female lawyer
16:08
who recently went to court in Nigeria to challenge a ridiculous law
16:12
that required women to get their husband's consent
16:15
before renewing their passports?
16:18
What if my roommate knew about Nollywood,
16:21
full of innovative people making films despite great technical odds,
16:25
films so popular
16:27
that they really are the best example of Nigerians consuming what they produce?
16:32
What if my roommate knew about my wonderfully ambitious hair braider,
16:35
who has just started her own business selling hair extensions?
16:39
Or about the millions of other Nigerians who start businesses and sometimes fail,
16:43
but continue to nurse ambition?
16:47
Every time I am home I am confronted
16:49
with the usual sources of irritation for most Nigerians:
16:52
our failed infrastructure, our failed government,
16:55
but also by the incredible resilience
16:57
of people who thrive despite the government,
17:01
rather than because of it.
17:03
I teach writing workshops in Lagos every summer,
17:06
and it is amazing to me how many people apply,
17:09
how many people are eager to write,
17:12
to tell stories.
17:14
My Nigerian publisher and I have just started a non-profit
17:17
called Farafina Trust,
17:19
and we have big dreams of building libraries
17:22
and refurbishing libraries that already exist
17:24
and providing books for state schools
17:27
that don't have anything in their libraries,
17:29
and also of organizing lots and lots of workshops,
17:31
in reading and writing,
17:33
for all the people who are eager to tell our many stories.
17:36
Stories matter.
17:38
Many stories matter.
17:40
Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign,
17:44
but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize.
17:48
Stories can break the dignity of a people,
17:51
but stories can also repair that broken dignity.
17:56
The American writer Alice Walker wrote this
17:58
about her Southern relatives who had moved to the North.
18:02
She introduced them to a book about
18:04
the Southern life that they had left behind.
18:07
"They sat around, reading the book themselves,
18:11
listening to me read the book, and a kind of paradise was regained."
18:17
I would like to end with this thought:
18:20
That when we reject the single story,
18:23
when we realize that there is never a single story
18:26
about any place,
18:28
we regain a kind of paradise.
18:30
Thank you.
18:32
(Applause)