Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.
Stories can express hardships, but should also lift people up.
But there are other stories that are not about catastrophe, and it is very important, it is just as important, to talk about them.
The importance of people's strengths gives people another way to look at them, in a better way.
I realized that I had been so immersed in the media coverage of Mexicans that they had become one thing in my mind, the abject immigrant. I had bought into the single story of Mexicans and I could not have been more ashamed of myself.
She started realizing the dangers of believing one single story
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.
Growing up, she didn't know much about her own world, and that was expressed through her writing, creating the same characters over and over again.
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,
Impressions are made by what little information a person knows
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.
Only being exposed to certain information about a person or place makes your brain think that that is what it is instead of actually exploring what it truly is.
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.
The author saw how people in America believed one story of people like her, as she did with the family in her country that she saw as just poor.
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.
Learning more about the world around you will broaden your perspective of people.
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. Now, 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.
Being influenced by books doesn't give you the the story of the real world, and can often lead you to believe one single thing instead of seeing the full perspective.
We didn’t have snow, we ate mangoes, and we never talked about the weather, because there was no need to.
She often started writing about things she didn't have in Nigeria.