construction maison contemporaine 86

i'm a storyteller. and i would like to tell youa few personal stories about what i like to call"the danger of the single story." i grew up on a university campusin eastern nigeria. my mother says that i startedreading at the age of two, although i think fouris probably close to the truth. so i was an early reader, and what i read were britishand american children's books. i was also an early writer,

and when i began to write,at about the age of seven, stories in pencilwith crayon illustrations that my poor mother was obligated to read, i wrote exactly the kindsof stories i was reading: all my characters werewhite and blue-eyed, they played in the snow, they ate apples, (laughter) and they talked a lot about the weather,

how lovely it wasthat the sun had come out. now, this despite the factthat 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, because there was no need to. my characters also dranka lot of ginger beer, because the charactersin the british books i read drank ginger beer.

never mind that i had no ideawhat ginger beer was. and for many years afterwards, i would have a desperate desireto taste ginger beer. but that is another story. what this demonstrates, i think, is how impressionableand vulnerable we are in the face of a story, particularly as children. because all i had read were booksin which characters were foreign,

i had become convinced that books by their very naturehad to have foreigners in them and had to be about things with whichi could not personally identify. now, things changedwhen i discovered african books. there weren't many of them available, and they weren't quite as easy to findas the foreign books. but because of writers likechinua achebe and camara laye, i went through a mental shiftin my perception of literature. i realized that people like me,

girls with skin the color of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in literature. i started to writeabout things i recognized. now, i loved thoseamerican and british books i read. they stirred my imagination.they opened up new worlds for me. but the unintended consequence was that i did not knowthat people like me could exist in literature.

so what the discovery of african writersdid for me was this: it saved me from having a single storyof what books are. i come from a conventional,middle-class nigerian family. my father was a professor. my mother was an administrator. and so we had, as was the norm, live-in domestic help, who would oftencome from nearby rural villages. so, the year i turned eight,we got a new house boy. his name was fide.

the only thing my mother told us about himwas that his family was very poor. my mother sent yams and rice,and our old clothes, to his family. and when i didn't finish my dinner,my mother would say, "finish your food! don't you know?people like fide's family have nothing." so i felt enormous pity for fide's family. then one saturday,we went to his village to visit, and his mother showed usa beautifully patterned basket made of dyed raffiathat his brother had made. i was startled.

it had not occurred to methat anybody in his family could actually make something. all i had heard about themwas how poor they were, so that it had become impossible for meto see them as anything else but poor. their poverty was my single story of them. years later, i thought about thiswhen i left nigeria to go to university in the united states. i was 19. my american roommate was shocked by me.

she asked where i had learnedto speak english so well, and was confused when i said that nigeria happened to have englishas its official language. she asked if she could listento what she called my "tribal music," and was consequently very disappointed when i produced my tape of mariah carey. she assumed that i did not knowhow to use a stove. what struck me was this: she had felt sorry for meeven before she saw me.

her default positiontoward me, as an african, was a kind of patronizing,well-meaning pity. my roommate had a single story of africa: a single story of catastrophe. in this single story, there was no possibility of africansbeing similar to her in any way, no possibility of feelingsmore complex than pity, no possibility of a connectionas human equals. i must say that before i went to the u.s.,

i didn't consciously identify as african. but in the u.s., whenever africa came up,people turned to me. never mind that i knew nothingabout places like namibia. but i did come to embracethis new identity, and in many ways i thinkof myself now as african. although i still get quite irritablewhen africa is referred to as a country, the most recent example beingmy otherwise wonderful flight from lagos two days ago, in which there was an announcementon the virgin flight

about the charity work in "india,africa and other countries." so, after i had spent some yearsin the u.s. as an african, i began to understandmy roommate's response to me. if i had not grown up in nigeria, and if all i knew about africawere from popular images, i too would think that africawas a place of beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals, and incomprehensible people, fighting senseless wars,dying of poverty and aids,

unable to speak for themselves and waiting to be savedby a kind, white foreigner. i would see africansin the same way that i, as a child, had seen fide's family. this single story of africa ultimatelycomes, i think, from western literature. now, here is a quote from the writingof a london merchant called john lok, who sailed to west africa in 1561 and kept a fascinatingaccount of his voyage. after referring to the black africansas "beasts who have no houses,"

he writes, "they are alsopeople without heads, having their mouth and eyesin their breasts." now, i've laughedevery time i've read this. and one must admirethe imagination of john lok. but what is important about his writing is that it represents the beginning of a tradition of tellingafrican stories in the west: a tradition of sub-saharan africaas a place of negatives, of difference, of darkness,

of people who, in the wordsof the wonderful poet rudyard kipling, are "half devil, half child." and so, i began to realizethat my american roommate must have throughout her life seen and heard different versionsof this single story, as had a professor, who once told me that my novelwas not "authentically african." now, i was quite willing to contend that there were a number of thingswrong with the novel,

that it had failed in a number of places, but i had not quite imaginedthat it had failed at achieving somethingcalled african authenticity. in fact, i did not knowwhat african authenticity was. the professor told me that my characterswere too much like him, an educated and middle-class man. my characters drove cars. they were not starving. therefore they were notauthentically african.

but i must quickly addthat i too am just as guilty in the question of the single story. a few years ago,i visited mexico from the u.s. the political climate in the u.s.at the time was tense, and there were debates going onabout immigration. and, as often happens in america, immigration becamesynonymous with mexicans. there were endless stories of mexicans as people who werefleecing the healthcare system,

sneaking across the border, being arrested at the border,that sort of thing. i remember walking aroundon my first day in guadalajara, watching the people going to work, rolling up tortillas in the marketplace, smoking, laughing. i remember first feeling slight surprise. and then, i was overwhelmed with shame. i realized that i had been so immersedin the media coverage of mexicans

that they had become one thing in my mind, the abject immigrant. i had bought intothe single story of mexicans and i could not havebeen more ashamed of myself. so that is how to create a single story, show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.

it is impossible to talkabout the single story without talking about power. there is a word, an igbo word, that i think about whenever i think aboutthe power structures of the world, and it is "nkali." it's a noun that loosely translatesto "to be greater than another." like our economic and political worlds, stories too are definedby the principle of nkali: how they are told, who tells them,

when they're told,how many stories are told, are really dependent on power. power is the ability not just to tellthe story of another person, but to make it the definitivestory of that person. the palestinian poetmourid barghouti writes that if you want to dispossess a people, the simplest way to do itis to tell their story and to start with, "secondly." start the story with the arrowsof the native americans,

and not with the arrival of the british, and you have an entirely different story. start the story withthe failure of the african state, and not with the colonialcreation of the african state, i recently spoke at a university where a student told methat it was such a shame that nigerian men were physical abusers like the father character in my novel. i told him that i had just read a novelcalled "american psycho" --

-- and that it was such a shame that young americanswere serial murderers. (applause) now, obviously i said thisin a fit of mild irritation. but it would never haveoccurred to me to think that just because i had read a novelin which a character was a serial killer that he was somehowrepresentative of all americans. this is not because i ama better person than that student, but because of america's culturaland economic power,

i had many stories of america. i had read tyler and updikeand steinbeck and gaitskill. i did not have a single story of america. when i learned, some years ago, that writers were expectedto have had really unhappy childhoods to be successful, i began to think about how i could inventhorrible things my parents had done to me. but the truth is that i hada very happy childhood, full of laughter and love,in a very close-knit family.

but i also had grandfatherswho died in refugee camps. my cousin polle died becausehe could not get adequate healthcare. one of my closest friends,okoloma, died in a plane crash because our fire trucksdid not have water. i grew up under repressivemilitary governments that devalued education, so that sometimes, my parentswere not paid their salaries. and so, as a child, i saw jamdisappear from the breakfast table, then margarine disappeared,

then bread became too expensive, then milk became rationed. and most of all, a kindof normalized political fear invaded our lives. all of these stories make me who i am. but to insist on onlythese negative stories is to flatten my experience and to overlook the many otherstories that formed me. the single story creates stereotypes,

and the problem with stereotypesis not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. they make one story become the only story. of course, africa is a continentfull of catastrophes: there are immense ones,such as the horrific rapes in congo and depressing ones, such as the fact that 5,000 people applyfor one job vacancy in nigeria. but there are other storiesthat are not about catastrophe, and it is very important, it is justas important, to talk about them.

i've always felt that it is impossible to engage properlywith a place or a person without engaging with all of the storiesof that place and that person. the consequenceof the single story is this: it robs people of dignity. it makes our recognitionof our equal humanity difficult. it emphasizes how we are differentrather than how we are similar. so what if before my mexican trip, i had followed the immigrationdebate from both sides,

the u.s. and the mexican? what if my mother had told usthat fide's family was poor and hardworking? what if we had an africantelevision network that broadcast diverseafrican stories all over the world? what the nigerian writer chinua achebecalls "a balance of stories." what if my roommate knewabout my nigerian publisher, muhtar bakare, a remarkable man who lefthis job in a bank

to follow his dreamand start a publishing house? now, the conventional wisdomwas that nigerians don't read literature. he disagreed. he felt that peoplewho could read, would read, if you made literature affordableand available to them. shortly after he published my first novel, i went to a tv stationin lagos to do an interview, and a woman who worked thereas a messenger came up to me and said, "i really liked your novel.i didn't like the ending.

now, you must write a sequel,and this is what will happen ..." and she went on to tell mewhat to write in the sequel. i was not only charmed, i was very moved. here was a woman, part of the ordinarymasses of nigerians, who were not supposed to be readers. she had not only read the book, but she had taken ownership of it and felt justified in telling mewhat to write in the sequel. now, what if my roommate knewabout my friend funmi iyanda,

a fearless woman who hostsa tv show in lagos, and is determined to tell the storiesthat we prefer to forget? what if my roommate knewabout the heart procedure that was performed in the lagoshospital last week? what if my roommate knewabout contemporary nigerian music, talented people singingin english and pidgin, and igbo and yoruba and ijo, mixing influences from jay-z to fela to bob marley to their grandfathers.

what if my roommate knewabout the female lawyer who recently went to court in nigeriato challenge a ridiculous law that required women to gettheir husband's consent before renewing their passports? what if my roommate knew about nollywood, full of innovative people makingfilms despite great technical odds, films so popular that they really are the best exampleof nigerians consuming what they produce? what if my roommate knew aboutmy wonderfully ambitious hair braider,

who has just started her own businessselling hair extensions? or about the millions of other nigerianswho start businesses and sometimes fail, but continue to nurse ambition? every time i am home i am confronted with the usual sources of irritationfor most nigerians: our failed infrastructure,our failed government, but also by the incredible resilience of people who thrivedespite the government, rather than because of it.

i teach writing workshopsin lagos every summer, and it is amazing to mehow many people apply, how many people are eager to write, to tell stories. my nigerian publisher and ihave just started a non-profit called farafina trust, and we have big dreamsof building libraries and refurbishing librariesthat already exist and providing books for state schools

that don't have anythingin their libraries, and also of organizing lotsand lots of workshops, in reading and writing, for all the people who are eagerto tell our many stories. stories matter. many stories matter. stories have been usedto dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be usedto empower and to humanize. stories can break the dignity of a people,

but stories can also repairthat broken dignity. the american writeralice walker wrote this about her southern relativeswho had moved to the north. she introduced them to a book about the southern lifethat they had left behind. "they sat around,reading the book themselves, listening to me read the book,and a kind of paradise was regained." i would like to end with this thought: that when we reject the single story,

when we realize thatthere is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise. thank you.