Chimamanda Adichie addresses the danger of telling a single story in her TEDGlobal talk filmed in July 2009. She does a masterful job presenting her argument by using poignant storytelling, repetition and secondary references. Her talk is nuanced and sensitive, offering a powerful example of how to give a great presentation.
Adichie begins by telling us about her childhood growing up in Nigeria when she would read books by British and American authors. As she got older, she began to write her own stories, which were full of characters who were light skinned and drank lots of ginger beer. Her stories reflected the only stories she had been reading. As a child, reading only prose from Western countries, she didn’t realize that “girls with skin the color of chocolate whose kinky hair could not form ponytails could also exist in literature.” She goes on to relate how her mother would tell her how poor the boy who worked in their house was. Because she wasn’t told anything else about him or his family, it hadn’t occurred to her that they could be anything other than poor. She says, “their poverty was my single story of them.”
In telling these stories, Adichie does a great job of hooking her audience from the beginning and demonstrating how she’s personally connected to her argument. She uses this technique throughout her entire talk, transitioning from her childhood in Nigeria to attending university in the United States. She relates the awkward first encounter with her roommate who was shocked that she could speak English and assumed she’d spent her life in poverty. Her roommate “had a single story of Africa, a single story of catastrophe.” Adichie organizes her presentation chronologically, giving the presentation a story-like feel in itself, and she continually repeats her point, thereby emphasizing her argument against the single story.
She also uses repetition very effectively throughout the presentation. She continually repeats the beginning of sentences, frequently using the rule of three: “No possibility… no possibility… no possibility…”; “what if… what if… what if…”. She is very formulaic in her delivery as she continually refers again to people she’s already mentioned throughout the presentation. Circling back to people the audience has already been introduced to is an excellent way to reinforce her point. She does well to connect her ignorant roommate to herself, too, by how she thought of the boy who worked in her house when she was a child. She doesn’t see herself as superior to falling prey to the single story mindset, in fact, she gives multiple examples as to how she has fallen into the trap herself (“I, too, am guilty in the question of the single story…”), which is another very effective technique to strengthen your argument. Put your experiences with your subject matter in the presentation. Show where you’ve gone wrong, too. Your audience will appreciate your candor and relate more easily to your point.
Adichie goes on to make several other strong points in her talk, including that whoever or whatever has power is that which creates the story. If the story about the failure of the African state is started with the colonial creation of the African state, then it would be an entirely different story, she says. She quotes and refers to many secondary sources, nuancing and supporting her argument, further convincing the audience of her view. She finishes strongly by bringing her talk full circle and referring again to the boy and her college roommate. She asserts, “the single story creates stereotypes. The problem is not that they aren’t true, but that they are incomplete.” And she ends thoughtfully by referring to American writer Alice Walker when musing: “When we reject the single story, we regain a kind of paradise.”
Watch the entire talk here.
