Chimamande Ngozi Adichie's The Danger Of A Single Story

Today, the society’s lives and cultures are composed of many overlapping stories. A single story confines a corner of the world to a generalized stereotype. Chimamanda Adichie in TED talk, The Danger of a Single Story, addresses that “if you hear a single story about a person or a country we risk a critical understanding.” Adichie also states, “a single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not what they are untrue, but they are incomplete.” Adichie believes everyone is guilty in creating single stories and they are dangerous because they rob people from their identities and dignity. Diversity of stories and possibilities are things that should be read and discussed. Single stories are dangerous because they make the differences in people stand out and the single story an incomplete description.

In her essay, “Context” (1994), Dorothy Allison states that knowing a person well and deeply depends on and requires personal knowledge of their upbringing and social life. The essay was published as a memoir to reflect on people’s perception about others. Dorothy employs flashbacks and comparison in order to express her opinions on understanding, trusting and judging a person. She uses flashback and comparison to show that context provides a varied angle about a person. She further argues that, when not properly understood, it can easily breed rivalry between people from varied social backgrounds. Dorothy writes her essay to a general audience and expresses her opinions about context, upbringing environment, and a social group having a fundamental role in a person’s character.

Into Thin Air tells the story of the tragedy where in 1996, several climbers died on the slopes of Mt. Everest. This was all witnessed by Jon Krakauer, a journalist and one of the climbers who reached the summit that year. Krakauer and the team he climbs with becomes separated through a series of accidents and a change in weather resulting in five teammates dead. Scott Fischer leads an expedition as well, and in that expedition he also loses climbers on the storm, including himself. Krakauer narrates the affairs of the expeditions and attempts to explain how the climbers could have been caught on the mountain when they could have turned and remained safe. He also communicates how he played a role in the events.

As one drives up the California coast, they will begin to notice several things. First, the general atmosphere shifts. The further north they travel from Los Angeles palms and golden beaches, the cities begin to lose their positive, sunny vibes. They go from beach villas to industrial apartments to suburban neighborhoods to run down harbor towns. The positive emotional vibrations emitted from such architecture slowly surrenders its grip on its surroundings to a grim, hopeless one. As new, booming cities fade into sleepy and ancient villages only occupied by drunken sailors and lost tourists, the traveler will soon realize they are in a much less pleasant place as where they originated their journey.

She flew on. The rain beat at her wings and her eyes were blinded, but Marya Lechowicz knew she had to reach the house before dawn. This was it. The final stretch after months of preparation, training, test flying, goodbyes, disguises and hideouts.

In her 2009 TED talks presentation,” The Danger of a Single Story,” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie explains how a single story presented by the media and books can affect the way a person may perceive others, places, and cultures (Adichie). She goes into details explaining her point through personal experiences where she falsely misunderstood someone based on a single word she heard numerously, and how she was a victim of a common stereotype. According to Adichie, there is never a single story and that people can go through a mental shift of their perspective if they considered various alternatives that differ from the same story that is commonly told.

For two more weeks I remained in the hospital. Three times every day a nurse brought me a tray with a meal and medication. She watched as I swallowed the tablets, but never as I ate the meal. Compared to a normal sized portion of food, what I was given in hospital would be considered small, but my stomach was far too used to rations beyond small. Most days I was able to eat almost half a plate of pasta before my stomach rebelled and decided to throw it all back up again.

Stereotypes of people, places, or things leave a large gap between the truth and what is known as the truth. In the speech "The Danger of a Single Story" by Chimamanda Adichie, Adichie explains the dangers and importance of single stories. The use of her past experiences as evidence to explain the damage these stories can cause, both to the listener and the person, place, and/or topic of the stories gives power to her speech. The author’s

Since its initial distribution, The Wounded Storyteller by Arthur W. Frank, has utilized an exclusive place within the body of work on the disease. This book has reached an outsized and diverse audience or readers, including the sick, health professionals and scholars of literary theories of sickness. Both the collective portrait which was known as the “remission society” of those who experience some type of disease or disability and a compelling analysis of their stories within a larger framework of the narrative theory. This book presents sick people as wounded storytellers.

This Ted Talk served as a basis for all our essays. Chimamanda Adichie is an African writer who is from Nigeria, but studied in America. In this talk, there is a lot of information about, what she calls, the curse of a single story. This means that if you only have one story about a certain subject, then you have only a limited view of it. Adichie talks about how dangerous this can be, because you are perceiving something hat is most likely more complex and has more information to it, as something that is simple and has one view towards it. I used this to compare my main topic of gap years to. I used

As human beings, we tend to not understand that what we see or hear about social media, television, books, etc. can guide us towards this one piece of the puzzle. Not knowing the rest of the puzzle creates the assumption of a single story. In her TED talk, Chimamanda Adichie has spoken about the dangers of only knowing a story which leads to stereotyping. By this being said, to what extent do we as a society form a single story about others? To answer this question, there is a great extent when people create their single stories about others because we make these single stories without even realizing it. Chimamanda is a mere example, a representative of how our society thinks and is treated  when making a single

In Adichie’s remarks, she explains the effects of single stories through forms of racism. While racism is a huge issue, I wanted to bring in a different example of when single stories were used in my life. These were connected with my religion and the religion of others.

In July 2009, at a TED conference, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a Nigerian author, gave a stunning speech about “the Danger of a Single Story”. In her speech, she mentioned about negative consequences happening when people tend to form stereotypes based on a single story, the one-sided argument. The single story blindfolds our eyes and prevents us from seeing the complexity, diversity, and similarities that construct our world, just as Adichie says “these negative stories is to flatten my experience and overlook the many other stories that formed me” (12:56). Listening to all her own personal experience and argument, I have become fully convinced and also see myself reflected in her stories. The single story can cause underlying and harmful impacts not only on personal issues but also on the global scale.

In October 2009, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie shared stories about her transition from Nigeria to the United States in a TED talk entitled, “The Danger of a Single Story” (Adichie). In her talk, Adichie comments about the perception that others had of her when she immigrated to the States. This inherent cultural misunderstanding transcends time and ethnicities. Take for instance Brent Staples, a young black man tired of being profiled on the streets of Chicago. His 1968 essay, “Black Men and Public Space” (Staples), paints a bold picture of racial stereotyping at its core. In the essay, Staples remarks that the perception a young lady had of him was enough to send her “…running in earnest” (Staples 1). Staples’ and Adichie’s stories, though different in nature, share one thing in common: they both show the effects of uninformed perception.

Lacking a wider variety of stories on any given topic can lead to dangerous misconceptions and casual racism. In her TED Talk, The Danger of a Single Story, Ms. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, award winning Nigerian novelist and public speaker, uses personal encounters with the effects of a single story to normalize her experiences with her audiences so that they may internalize them and act upon them easier. Ms. Adichie's use of pathos, as well as her comedic tone and understanding of who her audience is makes it significantly easier for her to accomplish the aforementioned goal.