2021年1月23日发(作者：反对)
Chimamanda Adichie The danger of a single story
I'm a storyteller.
And
I
would
like
to
tell
you
a
few
personal
stories
about
what I like to call
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 children's books.
I was also an early writer, and when I began to write,
at
about
the
age
of
seven,
stories
in
pencil
with
crayon
illustrations
that
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, and they talked a lot about
the weather, how lovely it was that the sun had come
out.
(Laughter)
Now, this despite the fact that 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 drank a lot of ginger beer because
the
characters
in
the
British
books
I
read
drank
ginger
beer.
Never mind that I had no idea what ginger beer was.
(Laughter)
And
for
many
years
afterwards,
I
would
have
a
desperate
desire to taste ginger beer.
But that is another story.
What
this
demonstrates,
I
think,
is
how
impressionable
and vulnerable we are in 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
books
by
their
very nature had to have foreigners in them and had to
be about things with which I could not personally
identify.
Things changed when I discovered African books.
There
weren't
many
of
them
available,
and
they
weren't
quite as easy to find as the foreign books.
But because of writers like Chinua Achebe and Camara
Laye 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 hair could not form
ponytails, could also exist in literature.
I started to write about things I recognized.
Now, I loved those American 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 know
that people like me could exist in literature.
So
what
the
discovery
of
African
writers
did
for
me
was
this: It saved me from having a single story of 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 often come 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
him
was
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,

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 us a beautifully patterned basket
made of dyed raffia that his brother had made.
I was startled.
It had not occurred to me that anybody in his family
could actually make something.
All I had heard about them was how poor they were, so
that it had become impossible for me to see them as
anything else but poor.
Their poverty was my single story of them.
Years later, I thought about this when 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
learned
to
speak
English
so
well,
and was confused when I said that Nigeria happened to
have English as its official language.
She asked if she could listen to what she called my

music,
and
was
consequently
very
disappointed
when I produced my tape of Mariah Carey.
(Laughter)
She assumed that I did not know how to use a stove.
What
struck
me
was
this:
She
had
felt
sorry
for
me
even
before she saw me.
Her default position toward 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
Africans
being
similar
to
her
in
any
way,
no
possibility
of feelings more complex than pity, no possibility of
a connection as 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 nothing about places like
Namibia.
But
I
did
come
to
embrace
this
new
identity,
and
in
many
ways I think of myself now as African.
Although I still get quite irritable when Africa is
referred
to
as
a
country,
the
most
recent
example
being
my
otherwise
wonderful
flight
from
Lagos
two
days
ago,
in
which
there
was
an
announcement
on
the
Virgin
flight
about the charity work in
countries.
(Laughter)
So
after
I
had
spent
some
years
in
the
U.S.
as
an
African,
I began to understand my roommate's response to me.
If
I
had
not
grown
up
in
Nigeria,
and
if
all
I
knew
about
Africa
were
from
popular
images,
I
too
would
think
that
Africa was 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
saved
by
a
kind,
white foreigner.
I
would
see
Africans
in
the
same
way
that
I,
as
a
child,
had seen Fide's family.
This
single
story
of
Africa
ultimately
comes,
I
think,
from Western literature.
Now, here is a quote from the writing of a London
merchant called John Locke, who sailed to west Africa
in 1561 and kept a fascinating account of his voyage.
After referring to the black Africans as
have no houses,
without heads, having their mouth and eyes in their
breasts.
Now, I've laughed every time I've read this.
And one must admire the imagination of John Locke.
But what is important about his writing is that it
represents the beginning of a tradition of telling
African
stories
in
the
West:
A
tradition
of
Sub- Saharan
Africa as a place of negatives, of difference, of
darkness, of people who, in the words of the wonderful
poet Rudyard Kipling, are
And
so
I
began
to
realize
that
my
American
roommate
must
have throughout her life seen and heard different
versions of this single story, as had a professor, who
once told me that my novel was not
African.
Now, I was quite willing to contend that there were a
number of things wrong with the novel, that it had
failed in a number of places, but I had not quite
imagined that it had failed at achieving something
called African authenticity.
In fact I did not know what African authenticity was.
The professor told me that my characters were too much
like him, an educated and middle-class man.
My characters drove cars.
They were not starving.
Therefore they were not authentically African.
But I must quickly add that 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 on about immigration.
And, as often happens in America, immigration became
synonymous with Mexicans.
There were endless stories of Mexicans as people who
were fleecing the healthcare system, sneaking across
the border, being arrested at the border, that sort of
thing.