Welcome to another post. Today, for English, we were given a task to watch the Ted Talk, "
The Danger of a Single Story", and then reflect on the questions in a blog post.
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| Chimamanda Ngoozi Adichie on the danger of a single story |
- How does Adichie describe herself at the beginning of her talk?
- She firstly described that she grew up on a university campus in eastern Nigeria.
- Her mother told her that she started reading at the age of two - but she deems that it was four.
- Adichie was an early reader, she read British and American children's books.
- She was also an early writer, she began to write at about the age of seven - stories in pencil with crayon illustrations.
- Later in the story, we learn how other people view her. How do those views differ from how she describes herself?
- According to Adichie, what dilemmas can arise when others view us differently than we view ourselves?
- What does Adichie mean by ‘the danger of a single story’?
- 'The Danger of a single story' means the perspective of one person, can be dangerous, this can be dangerous because you only know only one person's perspective and not the rest.
- One person's perspective is not the whole story.
- Adichie has also given some examples of what she meant by a single story;
- "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."
- "My roommate had a single story of Africa: a single story of catastrophe."
- Her single story about Mexico and "...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." She said, "I had brought into the single story of Mexicans and I could not have been more ashamed of myself."
- "The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story."
- "The consequence of the single story is this: It robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar."
- Literature of Africa was from
- How do you think this video might relate to the film The Power of One, based on the pre-viewing work and discussion we have done so far?
- Has someone ever made an assumption about you because of some aspect of your identity? Was it positive or negative? How did you respond?
