• From Eastern Nigeria
• Read mostly British and American books
• When she started writing she started writing exactly the same type of stories she read (white)
• She’s entertaining a bit sarcastic
• We´re impressionable and vulnerable in the phase of a story, specially kids
• They had to be unidentifiable, the book, that’s what she thought
• Mentions Chinua Achebe
• She did not know people like her could exist in literature
• She comes from a conventional middle class family from Nigeria
• Father professor mother is administrator
• She turned 8 and got a new “house boy”, file
• His family was poor
• She felt pity for him
• She couldn’t believe his family made something, a basket
• She couldn’t believe someone “poor” could make something
• Her single story on poor people is what made her believe this
• Roommate confused when she spoke English so well at age of 19
• Roommate had pretty much felt sorry for her before she actually saw her, had default—positioned her, as an African, to a kind of patronizing, well-meant pity. Her roommate had a single story of Africa.
• In this single story there is no possibility of Africans being like her roommate, “no possibility of a connection as human equals”.
• If she would’ve been raised in America and had seen this popular media on Africa she would also believe that Africa is a place of “beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals, and incomprehensible people fighting senseless wars dying from poverty and aids, unable to speak by themselves and waiting to be saved by a kind, white, foreigner.”
• Shows how old Western literatures interpret African people, as beasts who have no houses, people without heads, having their eyes and mouths in their breasts. Represents the beginning of a tradition of telling African stories in the west, as a place of difference, darkness as a place of negatives.
• A professor said her novel was not “African authentic”
• Her characters were too much like him; therefore they were not authentically African.
• Tells a story on how she realizes how she was so emerged in the media coverage of Mexicans that they had become one thing in her mind, the abject immigrant. She had bought in to the single story.
• “Show people as one thing and one thing only over and over again and that is what they will become”.
• Explains how just one novel can create a story about an ethnicity.
• Talks about her past and some of the tragedies that occurred in her life.She grew up under repressive military government that devalued education therefore sometimes her parents were not paid their salaries. Political fear interfered with their lives.
• Says, “All of these stories make me who I am, but to insist on only these negative stories is to flatten my experiences 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 they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.” A summary of the presentation, the idea she wants to give to her audience.
• Single stories robs people of their dignity, it focuses on what people have different rather than similar.
• What if we had a African national television network that broadcasts diverse African stories all over the world, Chinua Achebe calls this “a balance of stories”.
• Uses a brilliant technique of repetition with the phrase, “what if my roommate knew” and then followed up with the true reality of Nigeria and how underrated it really is.
• Stories have been used to dispossess and malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of the people but stories can also repair that broken dignity.
This will be transformed into a reflection on the topic in which I will display the knowledge of the importance of organization in writing.
