Student Question
What is your personal connection to "The Danger of a Single Story"?
Quick answer:
To make a text-to-self connection to “The Danger of a Single Story,” consider if you’ve ever bought in to the single story of something presented in media or literature. Consider if someone ever treated you like Adichie’s roommate treated her. You could also connect to smaller details, like how Adichie’s mother would tell her to eat all of her food because some people don’t have any.
A text-to-self connection is a connection that you make between a text and your personal life. For example, maybe a character in the text takes a trip that reminds you of a trip you took when you were a child. Or on a deeper level, maybe a character suffers from stage fright and you have felt that yourself.
In Chimamanda Adichie’s “The Danger of a Single Story,” she talks about how the stories we consume as children can leave a lasting impression on our perception of the world. For instance, she explains that as a child growing up in Nigeria, all the books she read were American and British books about white characters, so all the stories she wrote were about white characters. She explains, “I did not know that people like me could exist in literature.”
Perhaps you have a similar experience in which you did not see a...
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part of your identity represented in books, movies, or television shows when you were younger. Or perhaps the information you consumed as a young child was so specific to a certain religion or cultural perspective that your interests and activities were shaped by it.
But Adichie then explains that she went through “a mental shift” when she began reading African literature, because African writers taught her that people like her could exist in literature. She says, “they saved me from having a single story of what books are.” She then relates this concept of a single story to other parts of life, like assuming all people in Africa are poor. To connect to this, consider if you have had an experience in which you assumed you knew everything about a person or place, but actually only had a single story. Or consider if anyone ever did that to you, like Adichie's college roommate.
Even if you do not relate to Adichie’s point about single stories, there are smaller details that you might also relate to. For instance, recall how she explains how her mother used to encourage her to eat all of her food because some people have nothing. It is quite common for parents to say things like that to their children and for children to have complicated feelings about it. Relating small details like that to your own experiences would also make for a strong text-to-self connection.
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