Ted's wonderful and interesting speech

I am a storyteller. Here, I want to share some of my own stories with you. Some experiences about the so-called "danger of a single story" I grew up on a university campus in eastern Nigeria. My mother often says that I have been studying since I was two years old. But I think "from the age of four" is closer to the truth. So I started reading books and reading children's books in Britain and America since I was a child.

I have been writing since I was a child. When I was seven years old, I began to force my poor mother to read the stories I wrote in pencil and illustrated them with crayons. The stories I write are just like the stories I read. The characters in my story are all white-skinned and blue-eyed. I often play in the snow and eat apples. They often talk about the weather and how wonderful everything is when the sun comes out. I have been writing such a story, although I said that I lived in Nigeria at that time and had never been abroad. Although we have never seen snow, although we can only eat mangoes; Although we never discuss the weather, it is totally unnecessary.

The characters in my story often drink ginger beer because the characters in the English books I read often drink ginger beer. Although I didn't know what ginger beer was at that time. After many years, I have always had a deep desire to try ginger beer. But this is another matter.

All this shows how fragile and vulnerable we are in the face of one story after another, especially when I was a child. Because all the books I read at that time were in foreign languages, I firmly believe that if a book is to be called a book, it must be about something I can't experience personally, and all this has changed since I came into contact with African books. At that time, there were not many African books, and they were not as easy to find as foreign books. But because! And! As a writer like this, the literary concept in my mind has undergone a qualitative change. I realized that people like me-girls with chocolate skin and curly hair that can never be tied in a ponytail-can also appear in literary works.

I started writing what I was familiar with, but that doesn't mean I don't like those American and British books. On the contrary, those books inspired my imagination and opened a new world for me. But as a result, I didn't know that people like me could exist in literary works. My obsession with African writers freed me from a single story about books.

I come from a traditional middle-class family in Nigeria. My father is a professor and my mother is a university administrator. Therefore, like many other families, we will hire some helpers from nearby villages to handle housework. When I was eight years old, our family recruited a new footman. His name is FIDE. My father only told us that he came from a very poor family, and my mother would send him sweet potatoes, rice and our old clothes from time to time. Whenever I have supper left, my mother will say: Eat your meal! Don't you know? People like FIDE have nothing. So I am full of pity for their families.

Later, on a Saturday, we visited FIDE's village, and his mother showed us a beautiful and unique grass basket-woven by FIDE's brother with dyed coconut leaves. I was completely stunned. I never thought FIDE's family could make things by themselves. Before that, the only thing I knew about the FIDE family was how poor they were. Because of this, their impression in my mind is only one word-"poor". Their poverty is just a story I told them.

Many years later, when I left Nigeria to study in the United States, I thought about it again. I 19 years old, and my American roommate was completely surprised by me. He asked me where I learned English so fluently, but when I told her that Nigeria happened to use English as the official language, her face was full of blank words. She asked me if I could listen to what she called "tribal music". I can imagine how disappointed Maria Kelly was when I took out her tape. She concluded that I didn't know how to use the electric stove.

I suddenly realized that "before he met me, she was full of pity for me." Her preconceived attitude towards me, an African, is a kind of compassion full of goodwill and kindness. My roommate has only one story about Africa in his mind. A story full of disasters. In this single story, an African can't be similar to her in any way; It is impossible to receive feelings more complicated than pity; As an equal human, it is impossible to communicate with her.

I must emphasize that before I went to America, I never consciously regarded myself as an African. But when I was in America, whenever people mentioned "Africa", everyone turned to me, even though I knew nothing about such a place. But I gradually began to accept this new identity, and now many times I think of myself as an African. But when people talk about Africa as a country, I still feel quite disgusted. The most recent example happened two days ago. I flew from Lagos, and the journey was quite pleasant until the radio began to introduce the charities of "India, Africa and other countries".

After studying in America for several years as an African, I began to understand my roommate's reaction to me. If I didn't grow up in Nigeria, if all my knowledge about Africa comes from popular images, I believe that Africa in my eyes is also full of beautiful landforms, beautiful animals, and a group of incomprehensible people who are fighting meaningless wars, dying of AIDS and poverty, unable to defend themselves and waiting for the rescue of a compassionate white foreigner, I will look at Africa as I did when I was a child.

I think this story about Africa basically comes from western literature. This is a passage from John Locke, a London businessman. 156 1 year, he traveled to west Africa and made an interesting record of his voyage. He first called African blacks "beasts without houses", and then wrote: "They are also a group of brainless people with their mouths and eyes on their chests."

Every time I read this paragraph, I can't help laughing. His imagination is really admirable. But the most important thing about his works is that it shows the tradition of telling African stories in western society. In this tradition, sub-Saharan Africa is full of negativity, difference and darkness, and it is a strange race described by the great poet Rudyard Kipling as "half demon and half child".

Because of this, I began to realize that my American roommate must have seen and heard different versions of this single story when he was growing up, just like a professor who once criticized my novel for its lack of "true African sense". In other words, I am willing to admit that my novel has several shortcomings and failures, but it is hard for me to imagine that my novel will lack a kind of "real Africa". In fact, I don't even know what Africa really is. The professor told me that all the characters in my book are too close to him, and they are all educated middle class. My characters can drive and are not bothered by hunger. Therefore, they lack a real understanding of Africa.

I have to point out here that I am often blinded by a single story myself. A few years ago, I visited Mexico from the United States, when the political climate in the United States was tense. The debate about immigration has been going on. In the United States, "immigrants" and "Mexicans" are often used as synonyms. Stories about Mexicans are endless, all about cheating the medical system, crossing the border, being caught at the border and so on.

I still remember the first day when I first arrived in Guadalajara, watching people go to work, eating tacos, smoking cigarettes and laughing at the market. I remember how surprised I was when I first saw all this, but then my heart was full of shame. I realized that I was completely immersed in the media reports about Mexicans, so that they became a single individual in my mind-humble immigrants. I totally believe in a single story about Mexicans, and I am extremely ashamed of it. This is the process of creating a single story, presenting a group of people as one thing over and over again, and only one thing. After a long time, they become that thing.

When it comes to a single story, it is natural to talk about power. Whenever I think about the power structure of this world, I always think of a word in the Ifu language called "nkali", which is a noun and can be translated as "stronger than another person" in the theme. Just like our economic and political circles, the stories we tell are based on its principles. How these stories are told, by whom, when and how many stories are told all depend on power.