Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. The danger of a single story.
Pre-listening. 1 - What do you know of Chimamanda ? Find some data about her on the internet. Copy it. Do you know that life is made of stories? Sometimes , when I am in a big city where I can go unnoticed, I like sitting in cafés and watch people go by. Then I get stories out of their looks, the way they walk or how they speak. They are oversimplified stories. This old lady is going to collect her grandchildren from school, that young girl looks sad because she has had a row with her boyfriend. I like this experience of imagining stories for people. The problem is that by inventing a single story I am denying this old lady the possibility of being a writer, a lawyer, a teacher, or of going to meet her lover. Keeping somebody locked in a single story is depriving her complexity and thus of her humanity. It gets even worse when it happens to whole peoples or continents. What are the stories you have heard about Africa? See and hear how Chimamanda talks about it. While-liste