SHE IS A WRITER

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie grew up in Nigeria. Her work has been translated into thirty languages and has appeared in various publications, including The New Yorker, Granta, The O. Henry Prize Stories, the Financial Times, and Zoetrope. She is the author of the novels Purple Hibiscus, which won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and Half of a Yellow Sun, which won the Orange Prize and was a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist, a New York Times Notable Book, and a People and Black Issues Book Review Best Book of the Year; and the story collection The Thing Around Your Neck. Her new novel, Americanah, is being published around the world in April and May 2013.

A dangerous single story.

Knowing a single story about a person, a country or a culture could be very dangerous. Broadly speaking, when we are children, we are very vulnerable to incorporate things as unique; as a result, we create a single story. Firstly, the single story creates stereotypes which are not totally true due to the fact that they are incomplete. The single story emphasizes the differences between humans rather than their similarities. Secondly, the single story is related to power. Thus, powerful countries can manipulate the non-powerful ones because power is the ability to tell the story of a person, to make the definitive story of that person. However, stories can also be used to humanize, to repair the dignity of people because a person has many stories to be told. Finally, when humans realize that there is never a single story about any place or any person, they begin a kind of paradise, understanding that their differences make them valued persons. To conclude, it is important to be aware of the danger of having a single story and that we have to know the different stories of a place or person to understand and to know the truth.

The power of literature.

Books and literature have something in common: the ability to show us that we are not alone. To begin with, writing is not a private act, in fact, it is a public one. We always write to an audience. However, being creative implies being not entirely in control of the writing situation at all, the artist could forget about the audience because he is ruled by inspiration and emotion. In Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie words “logic can convince us but is in fact emotion that lead us to act; we are emotional beings”.  Secondly, literature is never just words. Literature gives a message, its role is to instruct and delight. Apart from this, literature helps us to see other people´s life style and opinions, as well as, helping us to realize how similar humans are, even though their differences. Thirdly, the realistic literature is not the real story itself, however, it is closed enough to the real world, as well as, transmitting the sensibility of citizenship.  The realistic literature helps us to realize that we share a common and equal humanity owing to the fact that humans always wanted to be valued. The reading of human stories makes us become alive in bodies that are not ours. To conclude, realistic literature remains ourselves that we are not alone mainly because we share our lives with people. Persons always have something in common, as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie mentions, “to be human is to be valued” and every person wants to be valued.

Sources:

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie´s website.

 Retrieved from:  http://chimamanda.com/  Accessed on May 21, 2013.