Analysis of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Ted Talk

In this essay I will analyze the July 2009 TED talk “The Danger of a Single Story” by the novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, which expresses the idea of how people should not perceive something by only taking a single perspective to form a conclusion, because they are incomplete and therefore dangerous. She portrays the power of stories on how they can forge a huge impact on the perception of people towards something in particular and warns the audience that hearing only one side of a story will lead to ignorance. She delivers the speech in a storytelling style engaging with the audience by providing numerous insertion of anecdotes. Many of these anecdotes come from her own life experiences, for example, she only read European literature growing up, prompting her earliest writings to be heavily European influenced rather than of her own origin and how her college roommate expected her not to speak English and also expected her to listen to tribal music simply because of her name and the way she looked. In addition, some rhetorical strategies she uses are pathos and ethos. Throughout the whole speech, she looked engaged and spoke in a powerful yet not forceful manner. Also, since this speech mostly consists of anecdotes from her life, she is able to add her emotions into it as she speaks, and the audience is able to feel what she feels. Next, she uses ethos by informing us that she is the author of “The Danger of a Single Story”. This makes her a published writer, and it tells us, the audience that she is credible because she has an established background in writing and speaking. Her talk was also presented in a chronological manner.

Catching Attention of the Audience With the Help of Humor

One of the interesting parts in this talk is when she illustrates how she grew up learning American and British literature but somehow could not relate the content of the stories as they were all out of her experience such as the ginger beer and the weather. Despite those unusual things, she just accepted and wrote stories because that was just how she understood the elements of literature. This appealing anecdote somehow tries to illustrate how vulnerable we are in the face of stories. We tend to believe in whatever is given to us.

Adichie also uses several examples of wit and humor to capture her audience’s attention in order to keep them engaged. For example, Adichie joking about her college roommate’s reaction to her African origin, how she “asked if she could listen to what she called my ‘tribal music’ and was consequently very disappointed when I produced my tape of Mariah Carey”. By joking about her roommate’s assumption about every Nigerian listening to tribal music, Adichie has her audience agreeing with her that something as simple as her music preference can result in a misconception. To further prove her point, Adichie describes another personal encounter with one of her students, who after reading her novel, assumed that all Nigerian men are physical abusers. Adichie then declares in response to the student, telling them that after reading the novel, American Psycho, “it was such a shame that all young Americans were serial murderers”. She uses slight sarcasm to parallel the student’s assumption by pushing a double standard to display just how ridiculous single-story perceptions can be to the audience, how the assumption that all Nigerian men are abusive correlates to assuming that all American teenagers are serial killers. Adichie is able to clarify how damaging the effect might be to an audience that does not immediately recognize the limitations of this point of view. The laughter from the audience following both recounts is an indication of the audience’s support to Adichie’s already valid viewpoint, demonstrating her fine use of humor as a persuasive device.

However, Adichie does not only call upon humor to prove her point. Adichie also appeals to the audience’s sense of sympathy and pity by exposing her own single-story assumptions that she had made in the past towards Mexicans. She describes her shame in assuming that all Mexicans were “the abject immigrant” as she walks down Guadalajara and notices that Mexicans are happy, normal and working people just like the rest of us. As racism towards Mexicans has already been extremely prevalent in the United States, every member of the audience has the ability to recall the oversimplified and offensive assumptions about Mexicans that Adichie refers to, extending Adichie’s sense of shame to the audience and silencing them as she speaks. Adichie exhibits a similar, humbling tone at an earlier point in the speech when she analyzes exactly why her university roommate had so many pre-existing convictions regarding Africans. She describes how, in the context of her roommate’s single-story towards her, “there was no possibility of Africans being similar to her in any way, no possibility of feelings more complex than pity, no possibility of a connection as human equals”. Adichie uses her roommate’s obviously flawed perception to extend her own fault of a “single story” to the general population; evidently everyone is responsible for reducing such groups of people to very basic assumptions. This prompts the necessity for a new way of thinking about such ethnic groups, such as her own multifaceted perspective which she is professing throughout her talk. As a Nigerian born writer who has experienced the effects of stereotyping and prejudice moving to the United States, she more than anyone would be able to escape the bounds of a “single story” and be able to see people more completely. Adichie begins to establish this credibility with her audience, a credibility which drives the audience to trust her argument by telling of her experience when she wrote as a child. After she explains her European literature influences, the ironic contrast between the literature she wrote with apples and snows and the environment she actually lived in with mangos and no snow, Adichie proceeds to say, “What this demonstrates, I think, is how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story, particularly as children”. Adichie essentially uses some of her earliest memories as a writer to point out that she too was prone to adhere to a single narrative and that, shattering those single-story prejudices can only happen if access to other narratives is provided. Adichie also further establishes her credibility by challenging the notion that all writers must come from troubled backgrounds to write meaningful literature. She admits that she herself did not have much of a troubled childhood at all and was quite happy, confessing only a few troubling events such as the death of her grandparents in refugee camps, of her cousin in a plane crash, and her own upbringing under a repressive military government. However, she insists that she chooses not to forget about all of the positive aspects of her childhood or to let these negative events define who she is.

Conclusion

Her simple honesty and humility in The Danger of a Single Story makes her seem more like a transparent person who can be listened to and who gives trustworthy information. By appealing to the audience’s sense of humor, sympathy, pity, and even shame, as well as establishing herself as a credible speaker, Adichie is successful in persuading her audience that we should pay more attention to the whole story of a person, and not just the generalized stereotype. With speakers like Adichie, we are hopeful that the world can be more inclusive and less ignorant.

Works Cited

1. Adichie, C. N. (2009). The danger of a single story [Video file]. TED. https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story
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