The danger of a single story.docxVIP

ChimamandaNgoziAdichie: The danger of a single story Im a storyteller.And I would like to tell you a few personal storiesabout 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 childrens books.00:38 I was also an early writer,and when I began to write, at about the age of seven,stories in pencil with crayon illustrationsthat 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,01:05 and they talked a lot about the weather,how lovely it was that the sun had come out.01:11 Now, this despite the fact that I lived in Nigeria.I had never been outside Nigeria.We didnt have snow, we ate mangoes,and we never talked about the weather,because there was no need to.01:25 My characters also drank a lot of ginger beer,because the characters in the British books I readdrank ginger beer.Never mind that I had no idea what ginger beer was.01:36 And for many years afterwards,I would have a desperate desire to taste ginger beer.But that is another story.01:43 What this demonstrates, I think,is how impressionable and vulnerable we arein 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 booksby their very nature had to have foreigners in themand had to be about things with which I could not personally identify.Now, things changed when I discovered African books.There werent many of them available,and they werent quite as easy to find as the foreign books.02:14 But because of writers like Chinua Achebe and CamaraLaye,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 ha