Adichie

While listening to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie speak, I focused on the specific elements that Nosich discusses in his book in chapter two. I tried to identify what elements came out first and easily, and then searched for the harder ones. The difficult part of this is that many of the ideas run together as one which is her main argument and experiences she dicusses. When Adichie begins speaking, you can hear some anxiety within her voice, but it captures you in a way that keeps you listening. When sitting back and analyzing what she is saying and not just listening you realize that there are things that we all take for granted and that we don’t know of other’s stories without properly hearing them word for word.
Adichie’s purpose is to discuss

Her objectives are that one, she wants to get across that her stories represent how vulnerable and impressionable people are when they hear a story. And two, to explain that no matter how small scale or large scale the “single story” is, it can lead to complete misunderstandings that limit the view of people. She explains this through several stories that she experienced. On the smaller scale, she talks about another family in Nigeria that she was told had nothing, but she did not know that they actually had something. She expresses how her being told one thing made her view of this family just as they were poor, not that they could do other things. She explains that her view of others can be dangerous because she does not know what someone else is like beyond her “single story.” When she talks about going to a university and her roommate had her view of what someone from Nigeria was like she expresses that she did not, at the time, understand why her personal story did not line up with her roommate’s views. She later made the connection that this roommate’s view of her was the same view that she herself had for the family in Nigeria. On the larger scale, she discusses how her professor was not able to see that not all African people were

Adichie is questioning first, why do people have such selective views of things that they do not know? And second, how can this be changed? She delves into her explanations and answers to these questions throughout the TEDTalk. She beings up the point that her view of the family in Nigeria was selective because she had not seen anything of them until she saw them and had only heard about them being poor. Her roommates view was selective because she had never experienced knowing someone from Nigeria and had preconceived ideas of what people from Africa were like. Her professor’s selective view was from literature and how it explained African people and their cultures. The problem is how dangerous the idea of a “single story” can be and the point is to help people understand, through experience, why this is an