Everyone has their own single story in life. A single story is where the same story gets told over and over and most of the time does not come out right at the end. Chimamanda tells the story of her life and her single stories. Her and her family lived as a middle class family in Nigeria. You wouldn’t think that a middle class family could live in a place such as Nigeria and have a father that is a professor and mother an administrator. Thinking that everyone who lived in Nigeria was poor and lived in poverty is a single story of life in Nigeria and as you can see it certainly wasn’t true. Chimamanda told many stories and which she had her own single story, but soon enough found it not to be true. She tells of how many other people also had their own single stories of Nigeria and their life style. Having a single story about a certain thing, idea, or place is dangerous because it can cause you to think something without trying to find out the truth.
Chimamanda was a story writer that many people probably did not know of until know. As a child she read many stories and she started to wonder and write her own. She had not been introduced to many other types of books so she only knew one type. As a child she took a liking into writing, and she started to form her own stories. She wrote of blue eyed, light skinned, blonde haired people who drank ginger beer almost all day and played in the snow. With the fact of her living in Africa they didn’t have a variety of authors, so the books she wrote weren’t completely her own because they were all based on the same thing and idea. She had brought in her single story of what a book contained. She stresses the fact that a single story is dangerous to have and you should find the truth before you think something else.
I think that the points that Chimamanda makes were important because everyone in life has a single story of something of some type. In the story she reaches points of the video where she tells us some of the single stories she had. The video is meant to teach people about single stories and how they can lead to stereotypes and this is exactly what was done. She tells us how they can lead people to think something when actually the truth includes a whole different story. I enjoyed this Ted Talk. The topic was interesting and she included some back round stories of herself. Like the stories when she talked about her single story of her new house boy. I liked that she didn’t act like she had never had a single story in her life. She showed us that once in a while she would jump to conclusion. Chimamanda reach some important points in the video.
Chimamanda also had a single story of her house boy. She had not heard much about his family only that he was poor. When she sometimes did not eat all her food her parents would start fussing about how people like him didn’t have a lot of money to afford different things. So when she went to visit him and his family in their town she saw it wasn’t like that at all. His mother showed her a colorful and pretty basket that was made by one of the other family members. She didn’t think that someone in their family could make something like that because all she was hearing was how poor they were. She saw that she was wrong about them. This was her single story of her house boy.
Like I have been saying throughout my whole story, single stories are dangerous to have. Even though everyone in life has a single story we should try not to. It’s like when she met a boy who had read one of her stories and he just all of a sudden jumped to conclusion and thought that all African men abuse women like in the book he had read. She felt bad and disappointed and replied by telling the boy she had just finish reading American psycho and she felt ashamed that most Americans were serial killers. She felt badly that he would jump to conclusion like that so she quickly responded with something she thought would hurt his feelings as well. As you can see single stories can hurt people even if you don’t think so. So listen to the dangers of a single story and try to avoid having one.
