Chimamanda Adichie · ひとつの物語の危険性

I'm a storyteller. And I would like to tell you a few personal stories about what I like to call "the danger of the single story." I grew up in Nigeria. When I began writing at age seven, I wrote stories about white children who played in the snow and ate apples. This is because all the books I had read were foreign. Later, a university professor told me my novel was not "authentically African." I had not written about poverty, starvation, or war. He hadn't accounted for the fact that I had a middle-class upbringing. So that is how to create a single story: show a people as one thing, over and over again. That is what they become. I recently spoke at a university. A well-meaning American student said to me, "It's such a shame that Nigerian men are physical abusers like the man in your novel." I had not accounted for the impact of my writing. 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. When we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place or person, we regain a kind of paradise. Give voice to the multiple stories. Because the single story creates stereotypes. Stereotypes reduce a whole person to one thing. They are stripped of their complexity and humanity. When you dismiss a culture as primitive, you have told only one story. And that is always dangerous.