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Review the revised Essay Three Assignment Sheet and produce an outline that includes the following in
bulleted format:
In two or more bullet points, explain the danger of a single story (citing Adichie) and the power of our
words to create our worlds (citing Postman). This will be the basis for your powerful essay introduction.
In one or more bullet points, identify the addiction and the community you will focus on.
In one bullet point: state your main claim, based on your more accurate new narrative about the addiction
and community you're focusing on. For your main claim, youu can either argue that we need to adopt this
new narrative as a society (if this is arguable) or propose how society and/or institutions should address
this problem.
In one bullet for each, identify a minimum of four subclaims that support your main claim.
For each subclaim bullet, include a minimum of two accurately cited pieces of evidence.
In one or more bullet points, identify a strong counterargument with an accurate citation.
In one or more bullet points, rebut this counterargument.
In one bullet point, share one further insight you can address in your conclusion.
Essay Three (Revised):
The Narratives We’re Told and the Narratives We Tell
We create the world around us, in part, by telling stories about it. These narratives can be fictional,
like the Harry Potter series or non-fictional like the articles and videos you’ve read and viewed in
this class. Fictional works include novels, short stories, plays, and comic books. Non-fictional works
include essays, histories, memoirs, biographies, newspaper articles, scientific studies, and journal
articles. Fictional texts are invented by writers; non-fictional texts are factual.
While the sources for fictional and non-fictional works are distinct, both interpret aspects of human
life and experience. Harry Potter novels help readers to explore the nature of friendship by
immersing them in a world where friendship is important. Sociologists or psychologists study
aspects of friendship, for example, through academic studies rather than novels. If insightful and
accurate, both inform our knowledge and understanding and contribute to our understanding of our
worlds.
The knowledge we gain, in part, from well written narratives help us to lead more informed lives. It’s
possible you’ve heard the expression, “knowledge is power.” Knowledge empowers us because it
helps us to understand more, to make sound decisions, and to be more effective. Education is valued
because we believe that the knowledge it provides empowers and improves our lives.
It’s also helpful to consider the inverse of this expression: “power is knowledge.” This means that
those in power have a tremendous ability to shape what we believe to be true, or what we consider to
be sound knowledge. Governments, businesses, the media, and institutions like schools have a great
deal of power to tell us what is “true” and they have the mechanisms to enforce this truth. In some
cases, this truth is insightful and accurate. In other cases, it serves ends like greed, benefiting only a
few through manipulation that takes advantage of our fears and short-term desires. In some cases,
it’s just poorly informed.
Careful and critical scholars and writers (like us) have the power to shape our worlds and help
readers think more clearly and form more accurate conclusions through the narratives we tell (like
the arguments we make). This means we play an important role in informing those around us. It
doesn’t necessarily mean that we’ll always arrive at the very best conclusion or that we’ll know more
than anyone in the world, but it does mean that if we strive to be ethical, remain open-minded, think
critically, research well, and work hard to be accurate, we will have done something important.
In our personal lives and in our academic and professional careers, when we make arguments –
when we explain our positions, back them up with evidence and reasoning, and consider
counterarguments - we’re telling narratives about ideas that help to shape what we (our readers and
ourselves) consider to be accurate and useful knowledge. These narratives take readers from a
starting place (the introduction of our essay where we provide some overarching context) and walk
them through our thinking and that of others, to arrive at thoughtful, non-obvious, and accurate
conclusions. After reading, our readers have hopefully learned something that contributes to their
knowledge, and we’ve learned something through thinking and writing.
For Essay Three, you’re going to consider the power of narratives (in this case, the arguments experts
make about addiction) to shape our world. You’ll consider common narratives about addiction,
question those narratives, and then work to arrive at truer and more accurate narrative that can
better help us address the problem of addiction in our society.
We’ll work through this process in four essay development stages, which are described beginning on
page three.
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Essay Three Details
Essay Three is a 4-5 page MLA formatted essay. In Essay Three, you will accomplish the following, using
the essays and video provided and at least two sound outside sources.
PART ONE:
Part One will provide very general context for your essay, drawing from Postman and Adichie. In Part
One, you will –
o Reflect on and explain the power of narratives (our words, our stories, and our arguments) to shape
our world.
o Explain the ethical responsibilities we have as writers and thinkers when creating narratives.
o Consider and explain why it is important for writers and thinkers to look below the surface – to look
carefully at the complexities of any problem to arrive at meaningful and useful conclusions.
o Explain the danger of a single story.
In Part One, you MUST use Postman and Adichie as sources and include at least ONE quote or
paraphrase from each source with a signal phrase, accurate in-text citation, and explanation. You may
also use other sources in this section.
PART TWO:
Part Two will provide context for your argument. In Part Two, you will o Identify a common narrative we hear about addiction that you found in our readings (for example,
that addicts lack will power, that they should be jailed, that medical treatment provides the best
answer).
o Introduce and explain the positions of at least two authors on at least two different sides of the
debate.
o Explain how one or more of these positions or parts of these positions may be faulty.
o Recommend how our society should think differently and more accurately about addiction.
o Recommend the most important factors we should consider when addressing addiction (for example,
economics, race, will power, the law).
o Draw a conclusion (your main claim) either defending your new narrative for the addiction and
community you’re focusing on OR indicating what societal response is most likely to be effective. As a
model for your own claim, ask yourself how each of our authors and those they report on would
respond to this question.
NOTE: Your goal is NOT to recommend treatment plans to addicts (Twelve Step programs, for example).
Instead, think about the larger societal narratives about addiction and make recommendations about how
US institutions, corporations, and/or the US legal system should think differently about addiction to
arrive at large-scale change.
PART THREE:
Part Three will form the remainder of the paper. In Part Three, you will o Fully defend your main claim, using evidence from the readings and at least two sound outside
sources.
o Include body paragraphs that lead with subclaims. These will support the main claim and be defended
by evidence and reasoning.
o Link each paragraph back to the main claim.
o Identify and explain specific factors from the readings (which may be medical, societal, racial,
economic) that we should consider when attempting to address addiction as a society.
o Identify facts, principles, circumstances, or reasoning should we take into account that we may
commonly fail to consider.
o Consider how a new narrative around addiction that is more accurate and insightful might improve
our outcomes.
o Include at least one counterargument from a specific, cited source and your rebuttal.
o Include a Works Cited list for outside sources.
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Conclude the essay with a new insight for your reader to consider, rather than simply recapping
what’s already been stated.
To support this section, which will be multiple paragraphs in length, you MUST –
§ Use Ross AND Duhigg AND Slater as sources and include at least ONE quote or paraphrase from
each with signal phrases, accurate in-text citations, and explanations.
§ Include at least THREE citations (total) from TWO sound outside sources, using with signal
phrases, accurate in-text citations, and explanations.
Essay Development Process
Stage One: The Word Weavers/The World Makers
Week Nine
INTRODUCTION TO ESSAY THREE/WEEK NINE WORK:
During Week Nine, we’ll reflect on how language shapes our worlds, consider our ethical obligations when
creating our narratives (our arguments), and evaluate the danger of looking at a subject with limited
information (through a “single story”).
KEY READING/VIEWING QUESTIONS:
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How do humans “use language to create the world” (Postman 2)?
Why is there an “inescapable moral dimension to how we use language” (Postman 2)?
Postman cites the following as immoral uses of the language (2). Can you think of an example of
each that you’ve recently seen in the news or encountered through social media?
o Using language to defend the indefensible.
o Using language to transform certain human beings into nonpersons.
o Using language to lie and blur distinctions.
o Using language to say more than one knows or can know.
Given the role of scholars as truth-tellers, what are our ethical obligations when developing our
arguments?
What is the “danger of a single story” (Adichie)?
Why should we look deeply at a subject and consider the complexities of an issue, rather than just
arriving at an easy conclusion?
o How do the discoveries of scientists and other experts help us form strong conclusions?
o How is our thinking enlarged and our judgments informed by learning about all sides of a
debate?
o What difference does the careful process of discovery make in the quality of our
narratives (our arguments) and to the world in which they are shared?
READING AND VIDEO:
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“The Word Weavers/The World Makers,” by Neil Postman
“The Danger of a Single Story,” by Chimamanda Adichie (18:46)
ASSIGNMENT: DUE FRIDAY, OCTOBER 20
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Reading and Analysis Exercise, including part one of Essay Two (20 points)
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Stage Two: The Narrative of Addiction: Finding My Position
Week Ten
ESSAY THREE/WEEK TEN WORK:
During Week Ten, we’ll consider one example of a narrative we often hear about: addiction. Think about
the position you currently hold about addiction. Are addicts merely those who lack will power or are there
other forces at work that contribute to their addiction? As a society, should we address addiction through
law enforcement primarily or are interventions like education or health care more likely to address the
significant problem of addiction in the US?
KEY READING QUESTIONS:
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What are the primary causes of addiction?
What are some unexpected causes of addiction?
What societal, economic, and mental health factors contribute to addiction?
What is the appropriate role of law enforcement in dealing with the problem of addiction?
READINGS:
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“Dr. Robert K. Ross at 2017 YMCA of San Diego MLK Breakfast” (36:22)
o Start this at the 1:53 minute mark to skip over the introductory remarks.
o When viewing, think about the common narratives (or ideas about) addiction that Ross
discusses, what he learned in his practice, the factors he thinks we should focus on in order to
address the addiction problem, the population he has served and describes and how factors
like poverty, the psychology of hopelessness, and institutional racism has contributed to the
problem he sees.
“The Neurology of Free Will,” by Charles Duhigg
o While reading Duhigg’s chapter, identify factors that contribute to addictive behavior,
consider who should be held accountable for the consequences of addictive behavior and
under what circumstances; and evaluate the role of free will.
“Rat Park,” Lauren Slater
o While reading Slater’s chapter, consider what environmental and physical factors contribute
addictive behaviors and, given these, what responsibilities individuals, governments,
companies, and economies bear in curbing addiction;
“Jeff Sessions ‘Appears Intent on Taking Us Back to the 1980s’ and the ‘War on Drugs’” by Jeremy
Berke
o While reading Berke’s article, consider the role of law enforcement in curbing addiction and
the position of Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Under what circumstances, if any, is law
enforcement the appropriate response to drug addiction? How might Ross respond to this
approach?
ASSIGNMENT: DUE FRIDAY, OCTOBER 27
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Reading and Analysis Exercise (20 points)
ASSIGNMENT: DUE SUNDAY, OCTOBER 29
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Essay Two: Finding My Position: Writing Parts One and Two (30 points)
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Stage Three: The Narrative of Addiction: Outlining the Essay
Week Eleven
REVISED: ESSAY THREE/WEEK ELEVEN WORK:
During Week Eleven, you’ll develop an outline for Essay Three, to include your main claim; the key
subclaims for your essay (a minimum of four subclaims); at least two key pieces of evidence for each
subclaim with correct in-text citations; a correctly cited counterargument; and your rebuttal.
ASSIGNMENT: DUE FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 3
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Exercise (20 points)
Peer Review of Finding My Position (10 points)
ASSIGNMENT: DUE SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 5
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Essay Three Outline (10 points)
Stage Four: The Narrative of Addiction: Drafting the Essay
Week Twelve
REVISED: ESSAY THREE/WEEK TWELVE WORK:
During Week Twelve, you’ll draft Essay Three, including the introduction, body, counterargument,
rebuttal, and conclusion.
ASSIGNMENT: DUE SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 12
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Essay Three Draft with Completed Checklist (40 points)
Stage Five: Peer Review
Week Thirteen
REVISED: ESSAY THREE/WORK FOR WEEK THIRTEEN:
During Week Thirteen, you’ll peer review the Essay Three Draft. You’ll also begin to work on Essay Four.
ASSIGNMENT: DUE WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 17
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Peer Review of Essay Three Draft (10 points)
Stage Five: Comments Returned and Final Revision Due
Week Fourteen
REVISED: ESSAY THREE/WORK FOR WEEK FOURTEEN:
During Week Fourteen, you’ll receive my comments on Essay Three and submit your final revision with
your completed checklist.
COMMENTS RETURNED:
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By Tuesday, November 23
ASSIGNMENT: DUE SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 26
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Final Essay Three Due with Checklist (50 points)
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The Word Weavers/The World Makers
Excerpt from the book “The End of Education” by Neil Postman
I once had the good fortune to attend a lecture by Elizabeth Eisenstein, author of a
monumental two-volume study of the printing press as an agent of cultural change. During the
question period, she was asked how she had come by her interest in the subject. She appeared to
welcome the question. She told the audience that when she was a sixth-grade student, her teacher
remarked that the invention of the printing press with movable type represented one of the great
advances of human civilization, almost the equal of the invention of speech itself. Young Elizabeth
took this remark to heart. But then a strange thing happened-in a word, nothing. The subject was
never mentioned again. It did not come up in junior high school, senior high school, or college.
Fortunately, it remained in her mind during all that time, and the result was that she eventually
devoted herself to a detailed explication of what her sixth-grade teacher must have meant.
That such a thing could happen is at once startling and yet unsurprising. School is notorious
for neglecting to mention, let alone study, some of the more important events in human history. In
fact, something quite similar to what happened to Elizabeth Eisenstein happened to me when I was
in Mrs. Soybel's fifth-grade class. In that class, considerable attention was paid to public speaking,
especially pronunciation, since the school was in Brooklyn, New York, and it was generally believed
(and still is) that people from Brooklyn do not pronounce their words correctly. One of my
classmates, Gerald Melnikoff, was whispering and mumbling his weekly oral presentation and
thereby aroused Mrs. Soybel's pedagogical wrath. She told Gerald that he was speaking as if he had
marbles in his mouth; then, addressing the rest of the class, she told us that language was God's
greatest gift to humanity. Our ability to speak, she said, was what made us human, and this we must
never forget. I took the remark seriously. (I recall that for some reason I was even frightened by it.)
But as with Elizabeth Eisenstein and the printing press, the matter was never mentioned again,
certainly not by Mrs. Soybel. She gave us excellent lessons in spelling, grammar, and writing and
taught us to remove the marbles from our mouths when we spoke. But the role of language in
making us human disappeared. I didn't hold this against her-after all, she did mention the idea-but I
waited for the subject to come up again in junior high, senior high, and college. I waited in vain.
Whenever language was discussed, it was done so within the context of its being a useful tooldefinitely not as a gift from God, and not even as a tool that makes us human.
Of course, one does not need to call on God, either literally or metaphorically, to tell the
story of language and humanness, of human beings as the word weavers of the planet. This does not
mean the story is without mystery. No one knows, for example, when we began to speak. Was it
50,000 years ago, or 100,000 years, or longer? No one even knows why we began to speak. The
usual answer is that speech arose exclusively as a functional mechanism; that is, without speech, the
species could not have survived. Someone absolutely had to learn to say, "The tiger is hiding behind
the tree!" But Susanne Langer thought otherwise. Something happened to our brains, she believed,
that created in us a need to transform the world through symbols. Perhaps to give us something
interesting to do in our spare time, or for the sheer aesthetic joy of it. We became symbol makers,
not to spare us from the teeth of the tiger but for some other reason, which remains mysterious. Of
course, we eventually discovered how speech could assist us in survival, but that was not the reason
we began to speak to ourselves and to others. I place speaking to ourselves first because we surely
spend more time, use more words, are affected more deeply in talking to ourselves than to others.
Each of us is, to borrow a phrase from Wendell Johnson, "our own most enchanted listener." Perhaps
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Langer was right. Why do we talk to ourselves? Does it enhance our survival? What is so important
that we are impelled to talk to ourselves so incessantly-indeed, not only when awake but when
sleeping as well?
One answer that can provide schooling with a profound organizing principle is that we use
language to create the world---which is to say, language is not only a vehicle of thought; it is, as
Wittgenstein said, also the driver. We go where it leads. We see the world as it permits us to see it.
There is, to be sure, a world of "notwords." But, unlike all the other creatures on the planet, we have
access to it only through the world of words, which we ourselves have created and continue to
create. Language allows us to name things, but, more than that, it also suggests what feelings we are
obliged to associate with the things we name. Even more, language controls what things shall be
named, what things we ought to pay attention to. Language even tells us what things are things. In
English, "lightning" is a thing, and so is a "wave," and an "explosion." Even ideas are made to
appear as things. English makes us believe, for example, that "time" is moving in a straight line from
"yesterday" to "today" to "tomorrow." If we ask ourselves, Where did yesterday go? Where is
tomorrow waiting?, we may get a sense of how much these words are ideas more than things and of
how much the world as we imagine it is a product of how we describe it. There is no escaping the
fact that when we form a sentence, we are creating a world. We are organizing it, making it pliable,
understandable, useful. In the beginning, there was the word, and in the end, as well. Is anyone in
our schools taking this seriously?
Perhaps Mrs. Soybel did, but thought we were too young to grasp the idea. If so, she was
mistaken. There are many ways to teach the young the connections between language and worldmaking. But she made still another mistake, one common enough, by giving her students the
impression that the important thing about language is to know the difference between "he don't" and
"he doesn't," to spell "recommendation" correctly, and never to pronounce the name of our city,
"Noo Yawk." Some might say that if she taught those lessons well, she did enough. But what, then,
of the junior high teachers, the high school teachers, the college teachers? By failing to reveal the
story of human beings as world-makers through language, they miss several profound opportunities.
They fail, for example, to convey the idea that there is an inescapable moral dimension to how we
use language. We are instructed in the Bible never to take the name of the Lord in vain. What other
names must we never take in vain? And why? A fair answer is that language distinguishes between
the sacred and the profane, and thereby provides organization to our moral sense. The profligate use
of language is not merely a social offense but a threat to the ways in which we have constructed our
notions of good and bad, permissible and impermissible. To use language to defend the indefensible
(as George Orwell claimed some of us habitually do), to use language to transform certain human
beings into nonpersons, to use language to lie and to blur distinctions, to say more than you know or
can know, to take the name of the truth in vain-these are offenses against a moral order, and they
can, incidentally, be committed with excellent pronunciation or with impeccable grammar and
spelling. Our engagement with language almost always has a moral dimension, a point that has been
emphasized by every great philosopher from Confucius and Socrates to Bertrand Russell and John
Dewey. How is it possible that a teacher, at any level, could miss it?
Of course, language also has a social dimension. Mrs. Soybel understood this well enough,
but only part of it. Her idea was that by abandoning homegrown dialects, her gaggle of Brooklyn
ragamuffins could become linguistically indistinguishable from Oxford dons, or at least American
corporate executives. What she may have missed is that in changing our speech, we would be
changing our politics, our taste, our passions, our sense of beauty, even our loyalties. Perhaps she did
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know this, but the matter was never explained or discussed, and no choice was offered. Would such
changes alienate us from our parents, relatives, and friends? Is there something wrong with being
from the "working class"? What new prejudices will become comfortable and what old ones
despicable? In seeing the world through the prism of new ways of speaking, would we be better or
worse? These are questions of large import, and they need to be raised these days in the context of
the effort to have us speak in "politically correct" ways. By changing our names for things, how do
we become different? What new social attitudes do we embrace? How powerful are our habitual
ways of naming?
These are matters that ought to be at the heart of education. They are not merely about how
we sound to others but about how we are sounding out the world. Of course, they are no more
important than how language controls the uses of our intellect-that is to say, how our ideas of ideas
are governed by language. Aristotle believed he had uncovered universal laws of thought, when, in
fact, all he had done was to explain the logical rules of Greek syntax. Perhaps if the Greeks had been
interested in other languages, he would have come to different conclusions. The medieval
churchmen thought that if their language contained a word, there must necessarily be something in
the world to which it corresponded, which sent them on a fruitless intellectual journey to discover
how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. The well-known German philosopher Martin
Heidegger believed that only the German language could express the subtlest and most profound
philosophical notions. Perhaps he meant incomprehensible notions. In any case, his claim is
weakened by the fact that he was an ardent supporter of Adolf Hitler and a member of the Nazi
party. Apparently, he was somewhat unclear about what constitutes subtlety and profundity. But to
the extent to which any of us is clear about anything, it will be through an awareness of how we use
language, how language uses us, and what measures are available to clarify our knowledge of the
world we make.
All of this is part of the great story of how humans use language to transform the world and
then, in turn, are transformed by their own invention. The story, of course, did not end with the
invention of speech. In fact, it begins there, which is what Mrs. Soybel may have meant in saying
speech made us human. The story continued to unfold with fantastic twists as human beings invented
surrogate languages to widen their scope: ideographs, phonetic writing, then printing, then
telegraphy, photography, radio, movies, television, and computers, each of which transformed the
world-sliced it, framed it, enlarged it, diminished it. To say of all this that we are merely toolmakers
is to miss the point of the story. We are the world makers, and the word weavers. That is what makes
us smart, and dumb; moral and immoral; tolerant and bigoted. That is what makes us human. Is it
possible to tell this story to our young in school, to have them investigate how we advance our
humanity by controlling the codes with which we address the world, to have them learn what
happens when we lose control of our own inventions? This may be the greatest story untold. In
school.
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The Danger of a Single Story - Transcript
Courtesy of TED
By Chimamanda Adichie
Transcript:
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 on a university campus in eastern Nigeria. My
mother says that I started reading at the age of two, although I think four is probably close
to the truth. So I was an early reader. And what I read were British and American children's
books.
I was also an early writer. And when I began to write, at about the age of seven, stories in
pencil with crayon illustrations that my poor mother was obligated to read, I wrote exactly
the kinds of stories I was reading. All my characters were white and blue-eyed. They played
in the snow. They ate apples. (Laughter) And they talked a lot about the weather, how
lovely it was that the sun had come out. (Laughter) Now, this despite the fact that I lived in
Nigeria. I had never been outside Nigeria. We didn't have snow. We ate mangoes. And we
never talked about the weather, because there was no need to.
My characters also drank a lot of ginger beer because the characters in the British books I
read drank ginger beer. Never mind that I had no idea what ginger beer was. (Laughter) And
for many years afterwards, I would have a desperate desire to taste ginger beer. But that is
another story.
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.
But because of writers like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye I went through a mental shift
in my perception of literature. I realized that people like me, girls with skin the color of
chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in literature. I started
to write about things I recognized.
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.
I come from a conventional, middle-class Nigerian family. My father was a professor. My
mother was an administrator. And so we had, as was the norm, live-in domestic help, who
would often come from nearby rural villages. So the year I turned eight we got a new house
boy. His name was Fide. The only thing my mother told us about him was that his family
was very poor. My mother sent yams and rice, and our old clothes, to his family. And when
I didn't finish my dinner my mother would say, "Finish your food! Don't you know? People
like Fide's family have nothing." So I felt enormous pity for Fide's family.
Then one Saturday we went to his village to visit. And his mother showed us a beautifully
patterned basket, made of dyed raffia, that his brother had made. I was startled. It had not
occurred to me that anybody in his family could actually make something. All I had heard
about them is 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.
Years later, I thought about this when I left Nigeria to go to university in the United States. I
was 19. My American roommate was shocked by me. She asked where I had learned to
speak English so well, and was confused when I said that Nigeria happened to have English
as its official language. She asked if she could listed to what she called my "tribal music,"
and was consequently very dissapointed when I produced my tape of Mariah Carey.
(Laughter) She assumed that I did not know how to use a stove.
What struck me was this: She had felt sorry for me even before she saw me. Her default
position toward me, as an African, was a kind of patronizing, well-meaning, pity. 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.
I must say that before I went to the U.S. I didn't consciously identify as African. But in the
U.S. whenever Africa came up people turned to me. Never mind that I knew nothing about
places like Namibia. But I did come to embrace this new identity. And in many ways I think
of myself now as African. Although I still get quite irritable when Africa is referred to as a
country. The most recent example being my otherwise wonderful flight from Lagos two
days ago, in which there was an announcement on the Virgin flight about the charity work
in "India, Africa and other countries." (Laughter)
So after I had spent some years in the U.S. as an African, I began to understand my
roommate's response to me. 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.
This single story of Africa ultimately comes, I think, from Western literature. Now, here is a
quote from the writing of a London merchant called John Locke, who sailed to west Africa
in 1561, and kept a fascinating account of his voyage. After referring to the black Africans
as "beasts who have no houses," he writes, "They are also people without heads, having
their mouth and eyes in their breasts."
Now, I've laughed every time I've read this. And one must admire the imagination of John
Locke. But what is important about his writing is that it represents the beginning of a
tradition of telling African stories in the West. A tradition of Sub-Saharan Africa as a place
of negatives, of difference, of darkness, of people who, in the words of the wonderful poet,
Rudyard Kipling, are "half devil, half child."
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, who once told me that
my novel was not "authentically African." Now, I was quite willing to contend that there
were a number of things wrong with the novel, that it had failed in a number of places. But I
had not quite imagined that it had failed at achieving something called African authenticity.
In fact I did not know what African authenticity was. 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.
But I must quickly add that I too am just as guilty in the question of the single story. A few
years ago, I visited Mexico from the U.S. The political climate in the U.S. at the time, was
tense. And there were debates going on about immigration. And, as often happens in
America, immigration became synonymous with Mexicans. There were 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.
I remember walking around on my first day in Guadalajara, watching the people going to
work, rolling up tortillas in the marketplace, smoking, laughing. I remember first feeling
slight surprise. And then I was overwhelmed with shame. 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. So that is how to create a single story, show a people as one
thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.
It is impossible to talk about the single story without talking about power. There is a word,
an Igbo word, that I think about whenever I think about the power structures of the world,
and it is "nkali." It's a noun that loosely translates to "to be greater than another." Like our
economic and political worlds, stories too are defined by the principle of nkali. How they
are told, who tells them, when they're told, how many stories are told, are really dependent
on power.
Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive
story of that person. The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes that if you want to
dispossess a people, the simplest way to do it is to tell their story, and to start with,
"secondly." Start the story with the arrows of the Native Americans, and not with the arrival
of the British, and you have and entirely different story. Start the story with the failure of
the African state, and not with the colonial creation of the African state, and you have an
entirely different story.
I recently spoke at a university where a student told me that it was such a shame that
Nigerian men were physical abusers like the father character in my novel. I told him that I
had just read a novel called "American Psycho" -- (Laughter) -- and that it was such a
shame that young Americans were serial murderers. (Laughter) (Applause) Now, obviously
I said this in a fit of mild irritation. (Laughter)
I would never have occurred to me to think that just because I had read a novel in which a
character was a serial killer that he was somehow representative of all Americans. And now,
this is not because I am a better person than that student, but, because of America's cultural
and economic power, I had many stories of America. I had read Tyler and Updike and
Steinbeck and Gaitskill. I did not have a single story of America.
When I learned, some years ago, that writers were expected to have had really unhappy
childhoods to be successful, I began to think about how I could invent horrible things my
parents had done to me. (Laughter) But the truth is that I had a very happy childhood, full of
laughter and love, in a very close-knit family.
But I also had grandfathers who died in refugee camps. My cousin Polle died because he
could not get adequate healthcare. One of my closest friends, Okoloma, died in a plane
crash because our firetrucks did not have water. I grew up under repressive military
governments that devalued education, so that sometimes my parents were not paid their
salaries. And so, as a child, I saw jam disappear from the breakfast table, then margarine
disappeared, then bread became too expensive, then milk became rationed. And most of all,
a kind of normalized political fear invaded our lives.
All of these stories make me who I am. But to insist on only these negative stories is to
flatten my experience, and to overlook the many other stories that formed me. 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.
Of course, Africa is a continent full of catastrophes. There are immense ones, such as the
horrific rapes in Congo. And depressing ones, such as the fact that 5,000 people apply for
one job vacancy in Nigeria. But there are other stories that are not about catastrophe. And it
is very important, it is just as important, to talk about them.
I've always felt that it is impossible to engage properly with a place or a person without
engaging with all of the stories of that place and that person. 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.
So what if before my Mexican trip I had followed the immigration debate from both sides,
the U.S. and the Mexican? What if my mother had told us that Fide's family was poor and
hardworking? What if we had an African television network that broadcast diverse African
stories all over the world? What the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe calls "a balance of
stories."
What if my roommate knew about my Nigerian publisher, Mukta Bakaray, a remarkable
man who left his job in a bank to follow his dream and start a publishing house? Now, the
conventional wisdom was that Nigerians don't read literature. He disagreed. He felt that
people who could read, would read, if you made literature affordable and available to them.
Shortly after he published my first novel I went to a TV station in Lagos to do an interview.
And a woman who worked there as a messenger came up to me and said, "I really liked
your novel. I didn't like the ending. Now you must write a sequel, and this is what will
happen ..." (Laughter) And she went on to tell me what to write in the sequel. Now I was not
only charmed, I was very moved. Here was a woman, part of the ordinary masses of
Nigerians, who were not supposed to be readers. She had not only read the book, but she
had taken ownership of it and felt justified in telling me what to write in the sequel.
Now, what if my roommate knew about my friend Fumi Onda, a fearless woman who hosts
a TV show in Lagos, and is determined to tell the stories that we prefer to forget? What if
my roommate knew about the heart procedure that was performed in the Lagos hospital last
week? What if my roommate knew about contemporary Nigerian music? Talented people
singing in English and Pidgin, and Igbo and Yoruba and Ijo, mixing influences from Jay-Z
to Fela to Bob Marley to their grandfathers. What if my roommate knew about the female
lawyer who recently went to court in Nigeria to challenge a ridiculous law that required
women to get their husband's consent before renewing their passports? What if my
roommate knew about Nollywood, full of innovative people making films despite great
technical odds? Films so popular that they really are the best example of Nigerians
consuming what they produce. What if my roommate knew about my wonderfully
ambitious hair braider, who has just started her own business selling hair extensions? Or
about the millions of other Nigerians who start businesses and sometimes fail, but continue
to nurse ambition?
Every time I am home I am confronted with the usual sources of irritation for most
Nigerians: our failed infrastructure, our failed government. But also by the incredible
resilience of people who thrive despite the government, rather than because of it. I teach
writing workshops in Lagos every summer. And it is amazing to me how many people
apply, how many people are eager to write, to tell stories.
My Nigerian publisher and I have just started a non-profit called Farafina Trust. And we
have big dreams of building libraries and refurbishing libraries that already exist, and
providing books for state schools that don't have anything in their libraries, and also of
organizing lots and lots of workshops, in reading and writing, for all the people who are
eager to tell our many stories. 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.
The American writer Alice Walker wrote this about her southern relatives who had moved
to the north. She introduced them to a book about the southern life that they had left behind.
"They sat around, reading the book themselves, listening to me read the book, and a kind of
paradise was regained." I would like to end with this thought: That when we reject the
single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a
kind of paradise. Thank you. (Applause)
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