Question

what does Adichie mean when she talks about the need for several stories to emerge from a nation
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Answer 1

Answer:

About Chimamanda Adichie's TEDTalk

Our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice — and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding.

About Chimamanda Adichie

Inspired by Nigerian history and tragedies all but forgotten by recent generations of westerners, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's novels and stories are jewels in the crown of diasporan literature.

Adichie's book, The Thing Around Your Neck, is a collection of stories about Nigerians struggling to cope with a corrupted context in their home country, and about the Nigerian immigrant experience.

So after I had spent some years in the U.S. as an African, I begin to understand my roommates' 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. This single story of Africa ultimately comes, I think, from Western literature. Now here's 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 mouths 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.