Research Paper On Chimamanda Adichie

1136 Words5 Pages

Do you ever wonder why your parents blame themselves when you make a mistake? This is because you are what your parents have molded you to become. Your parents teach you what they know from their experiences, so when you fail, it is like they failed as well. Thinking in this mindset, do you have your own personality and thoughts, or are you a piece of everyone who you’ve ever known? Chuck Palahniuk said “Nothing of me is original, I am the combined effort of everyone I’ve ever known.” This is applicable and very true to anyone. We are not one of a kind, we have been molded little by little by everyone we have met and ever will meet, and by the elements surrounding us as well. In a Ted Talk session with Chimamanda Adichie, Adichie shared her …show more content…

Our parents have an enormous hand in contributing to our thoughts and personality, such as in the case of Chimamanda Adichie. Adichie’s mother had told her “Finish your dinner! Don’t you know? People like Fide’s family have nothing.”1 This caused Adichie to believe that Fide’s family was just poor, the only piece of knowledge that she had of them. One Saturday, Adichie and her family went to visit Fide’s family, Fide’s mother showed them a quite beautiful basket that Fide’s brother had made. At this point, Adichie realized that someone in Fide’s family could actually make something, she had thought that they were only poor. This strongly portrays how much of us is actually a piece of someone else; Adichie was a reflection of her mother. This was not an original thought that Adichie had come up with, it with the combined effort of her mother that caused her to think like her mother. When Adichie went to the United States to study, her roommate was surprised that she could speak English clearly and also that she listed to Mariah Carey rather than “tribal music”. Her roommate had been shaped by Western literature and popular images. This caused Adichie’s roommate to think that way about her, with the effort of surrounding elements, her roommate had become a piece of the people that published the literature and