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I am a storyteller. Here, I would like to share some of my own stories with you. Some experiences with the so-called "dangers of a single story." I grew up on a university campus in eastern Nigeria. My mother always said that I started reading when I was two years old. But I think "from the age of four" is closer to the truth. So I started reading as a child, reading British and American children's books.

I have also been writing since I was a child. When I was seven years old, I began to force my poor mother to read the stories I had written in pencil and illustrated with crayons. Just like the stories I read, the characters in my stories were all white-skinned and blue-eyed. Often playing in the snow and eating apples. And they often talk about the weather and how beautiful everything is when the sun comes out. I kept writing this story even though I was living in Nigeria at the time and had never been abroad. Even though we never saw snow, even though we actually only had mangoes to eat, even though we never discussed the weather because there was no need.

The characters in my story also drink ginger beer because the characters in the British books I read often drink ginger beer. Although I had no idea what ginger beer was at the time. After all these years, I have harbored a deep desire to taste ginger beer. But that’s a different story.

What all this shows is how fragile and impressionable we are in the face of stories, especially when we are children, because all the books I read at that time There were only foreign characters, so I firmly believed that in order for a book to be called a book, there must be foreigners in it, and it must be about things that I could not personally experience. All this changed after I came into contact with African books. There weren’t many African books at the time, and they weren’t as easy to find as foreign books. But because! and! Writers like this have produced a qualitative change in my concept of literature. I realized that people like me—girls with chocolate skin and curly hair that could never be put into a ponytail—could appear in literature.

I started writing about things I knew well, but that’s not to say I didn’t love those American and British books. On the contrary, those books sparked my imagination and opened up new worlds for me. But the consequence was that I didn’t know that people like me could exist in literary works, and my association with African writers saved me from the single story of books.

I come from a traditional middle-class Nigerian family. My father is a professor and my mother is a university administrator. So we, like many other families, hire some helpers from nearby villages to take care of the house. When I was eight years old, our family got a new manservant. His name was FIDE. My father only told us that he came from a very poor family, and my mother would send potatoes, rice, and our old clothes to his home from time to time. Whenever I had leftovers from dinner, my mother would say: Eat all your food! Don't you know? People like the FIDE family have nothing. So I feel so much compassion for their family.

One Saturday later, we went to FIDE’s village to visit, and his mother showed us a beautiful and unique straw basket - made of dyed raffia leaves made by FIDE’s brother. . I was completely shocked. I never thought that FIDE’s family had the talent to make things with their own hands. Before that, the only thing I knew about the FIDE family was how poor they were. Because of this, their impression in my mind was just one word - "poor". Their poverty is a single story that I have given them.

Years later, when I left Nigeria to go to college in the United States, I thought about it again. I was 19 and my American roommate was completely surprised. He asked me where I learned to speak such fluent English, and when I told her that Nigeria happened to use English as its official language, her face was filled with confusion. She asked me if I could play her what she called "tribal music," and was understandably disappointed when I pulled out the Mariah Carey tape and concluded that I didn't know how to use a hotplate.

I suddenly realized that "before she saw me, she was already full of compassion for me. Her default mentality towards me, an African, was one of mercy full of kindness and kindness." My roommate had a single story in her mind about Africa. A single story full of disasters. In this single story, there was no possibility of an African being like her in any way; It was impossible to receive any emotion more complex than pity; it was impossible to communicate with her as an equal human being.

I have to emphasize that before I went to the United States, I never consciously considered myself one. I am an African. But when I was in the United States, whenever people mentioned "Africa", everyone would turn to me. Although I knew nothing about such places, I gradually began to accept this new identity, and now it is more common. I always regard myself as an African.

But I still find it disgusting when people discuss Africa as a country. The most recent example occurred just two days ago, when I took a flight from Lagos. The journey was pleasant until the radio started talking about philanthropic efforts in "India, Africa and other countries."

After a few years as an African studying in the United States, I began to understand my roommate’s reaction to me. If I had not grown up in Nigeria, and if all my knowledge of Africa came from popular images, I believe that the Africa in my eyes would also be full of beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals, and a group of people who are difficult to understand. Living in pointless wars, dying of AIDS and poverty, unable to defend myself, and waiting for redemption from a compassionate, white foreigner, I will see Africa the same way I saw the FIDE family as a child. It's the same.

I think this single story about Africa comes fundamentally from Western literature. This is a passage from London businessman John Locke. In 1561, he traveled to western Africa and made interesting records of his voyages. He first called the black Africans "beasts without houses," and then wrote: "They are also a group of mindless people, with their mouths and eyes growing on their chests."

Every time I read this paragraph, I can't help laughing. His imagination is truly admirable. But the most important thing about his work is that it points to a tradition in which Western society tells African stories, in which sub-Saharan Africa is full of negativity, difference and darkness, as described by the great poet Rudyard Kipling. A strange race of "half-demon, half-child".

Because of this, I began to realize that my American roommate must have seen and heard different versions of this single story when she was growing up, just like one of my previous critics. The novel lacks an "authentic sense of Africa" ??as does the professor. In other words, I am willing to admit that my novel has some bad writing and some flaws, but it is hard for me to imagine that my novel would lack a "real sense of Africa." In fact, I don’t even know what real Afrofeel is. The professor told me that the characters in my book were too similar to him, and that they were all educated, middle-class characters. My characters can drive, and they are not plagued by hunger. Because of this, they lack an authentic sense of Africa.

I have to point out here that I myself am often blinded by a single story. A few years ago, I visited Mexico from the United States, where the political climate was tense. The debate over immigration continues. In the United States, "immigrant" and "Mexican" are often used synonymously. There are endless stories about Mexicans defrauding the medical system, smuggling across the border, and getting caught at the border.

I still remember the first day I arrived in Guadalajara, watching people go to work, eating tacos, smoking cigarettes, laughing in the market, I remember I just I was so surprised when I saw all this, but then I was filled with shame. I realized that I had been so immersed in media coverage of Mexicans that they had become a single entity in my mind—the abject immigrant. I completely believed a single story about Mexicans, and I’m incredibly ashamed of it. It's the process of creating a single story, presenting a group of people over and over again as one thing and one thing only, and over time they become that thing.

When talking about a single story, it is natural to talk about the issue of power. Whenever I think about power structures in the world, I think of an Ifu word called "nkali," which is a noun that loosely translates to "more powerful than another person." Just like ours. In economics and politics alike, the stories we tell are founded on its principles. How these stories are told, by whom, when they are told, how many stories are told, all depends on power.