TED | 单一故事的危险性

00:12

我是个说书之人。在这里，我想和大家分享一些我本人的故事，一些关于所谓的“单一故事的危险性”的经历。我成长在尼日利亚东部的一所大学校园里。我母亲常说我从两岁起就开始读书，不过我觉得“四岁起”比较接近事实。所以我从小就开始读书，读的是英国和美国的儿童书籍。

00:39

我也是从小就开始写作。当我在七岁那年开始强迫我可怜的母亲阅读我用铅笔写好的故事外加上蜡笔描绘的插图时，我所写的故事正如我所读到的故事那般。我故事里的人物们都是白皮肤、蓝眼睛的，常在雪中嬉戏，吃着苹果。（笑声）而且他们经常讨论天气，讨论太阳出来时，一切都多么美好。（笑声）我一直写着这样故事，虽然说我当时住在尼日利亚，并且从来没有出过国。虽然说我们从来没见过雪；虽然说我们实际上只能吃到芒果；虽然说我们从不讨论天气因为根本没这个必要。

01:26

我故事里的人物们也常喝姜汁啤酒，因为我所读的那些英国书中的人物们常喝姜汁啤酒，虽然说我当时完全不知道姜汁啤酒是什么东西。（笑声）事隔多年，我一直都怀揣着一个深切的渴望想尝尝姜汁啤酒的味道。不过这要另当别论了。

01:44

这一切所表明的正是在一个个的故事面前我们是何等得脆弱，何等得易受影响，尤其当我们还是孩子的时候。因为我当时读的所有书中只有外国人物，我因而坚信：书要想被称为书，就必须有外国人在里面，就必须是关于我无法亲身体验的事情。而这一切都在我接触了非洲书籍之后发生了改变。当时非洲书并不多，而且它们也不像国外书籍那样好找。

02:15

不过因为ChinuaAchebe和CamaraLaye之类的作家，我思维中对于文学的概念产生了质的改变。我意识到像我这样的人──有着巧克力般的肤色和永远无法梳成马尾辫的蜷曲头发的女孩子们──也可以出现在文学作品中的。我开始撰写我所熟知的事物。

02:36

但这并不是说我不喜爱那些美国和英国书籍，恰恰相反，那些书籍激发了我的想象力，为我开启了新的世界。但随之而来的后果就是我不知道原来像我这样的人也是可以存在于文学作品之中的。而与非洲作家的结缘则是将我从对于书籍的单一故事(认识)中拯救了出来。

02:59

我来自一个传统的尼日利亚中产家庭。我的父亲是一名教授，我的母亲是一名大学管理员。因此我们和很多其他家庭一样都会从附近的村庄中雇佣一些帮手来打理家事。在我八岁那一年，我们家招来了一位新的男仆。他的名字叫做Fide。我父亲只告诉我们说，Fide是来自一个非常穷苦的家庭。我的母亲会时不时地将山芋、大米还有我们穿旧的衣服送到他的家里。每当我剩下晚饭的时候，我的母亲就会说：“吃干净你的食物！难道你不知道嘛？像Fide家这样的人可是一无所有的。”因此我对Fide的家人充满了怜悯。

03:43

后来的一个星期六，我们去Fide的村庄拜访，她的母亲向我们展示了一个精美别致的草篮──是Fide的哥哥用染过色的酒椰叶编织的。我当时完全被震惊了。我从来没有想过Fide的家人居然有亲手制造东西的才能。在那之前，我对Fide家唯一的了解就是他们是何等的穷苦，正因为如此，他们在我脑中的印象只是一个字──“穷”。他们的贫穷是我赐予他们的单一故事。

04:13

多年之后，在我离开尼日利亚前往美国读大学的时候，我又想到了这件事。我那时19岁。我的美国室友当时完全对我感到十分惊讶了。她问我是从哪里学得讲一口如此流利的英语，而当我告知她尼日利亚刚巧是以英语作为官方语言的时候，她的脸上则是写满了茫然。她问我是否可以给她听听她所谓的“部落音乐”。可想而知，当我拿出玛丽亚凯莉的磁带时，她是何等的失望。（笑声）她断定我不知道如何使用电炉。

04:50

我猛然意识到：在她见到我之间，她就已经对我充满了怜悯之心。她对我这个非洲人的预设心态是一种充满施恩与好意的怜悯之情。我那位室友的脑中有一个关与非洲的单一故事。一个充满了灾难的单一故事。在这个单一故事中，非洲人是完全没有可能在任何方面和她有所相似的；没有可能接受到比怜悯更复杂的感情；没有可能以一个平等的人类的身份与她沟通。

05:21

我不得不强调，在我前往美国之前，我从来没有有意识地把自己当作个非洲人。但在美国的时候，每当人们提到“非洲”时，大家都回转向我，虽然说我对纳米比亚之类的地方一无所知。但我渐渐的开始接受这个新的身份。现在很多时候我都是把自己当作一个非洲人来看待。不过当人们把非洲当作一个国家来讨论的时候，我还是觉得挺反感的。最近的一次例子就发生在两天前，我从拉各斯搭乘航班。旅程原本相当愉快，直到广播里开始介绍在“印度、非洲以及其他国家”所进行的慈善事业。

05:56

当我以一名非洲人的身份在美国度过几年之后，我开始理解我那位室友当时对我的反应。如果我不是在尼日利亚长大，如果我对非洲的一切认识都来自于大众流行的影像，我相信我眼中的非洲也同样是充满了美丽的地貌、美丽的动物、以及一群难以理解的人们进行着毫无意义的战争、死于艾滋和贫穷、无法为自己辩护并且等待着一位慈悲的、白种的外国人的救赎。我看待非洲的方式将会和我儿时看待Fide一家的方式是一样的。

06:35

我认为，关于非洲的这个单一故事从根本上来自于西方的文学。这是来自伦敦商人JohnLocke的一段话。他在1561年的时候曾游历非洲西部，并且为他的航行做了番很有趣的记录。他先是把黑色的非洲人称为“没有房子的野兽”，随后又写到：“他们也是一群无头脑的人，他们的嘴和眼睛都长在了他们的胸口上。”

07:05

我每次读到这一段的时候，都不禁大笑起来。JohnLocke的想象力真的是让人敬佩。但关于他这段作品极其重要的一点是它昭示着西方社会讲述非洲故事的一个传统。在这个传统中，撒哈拉以南的非洲充满了消极、差异以及黑暗，是伟大的诗人RudyardKipling笔下所形容的“半恶魔、半孩童”的奇异人种。

07:32

正因此，我开始意识到我的那位美国室友一定在她成长的过程中看过并且听过关于这个单一故事的不同版本，就如同之前一位曾经批判我的小说缺乏“真实的非洲感”的教授一样。话说我倒是甘愿承认我的小说有几处写的不好的地方，有几处败笔。但我很难相像我的小说竟然会缺乏“真实的非洲感”。事实上，我甚至不知道“真实的非洲感”到底是个什么东西。那位教授跟我说我书中的人物都和他太接近了，都是受过教育的中产人物。我的人物会开车。他们没有受到饥饿的困扰。正因此，他们缺少了真实的非洲感。

08:21

我在这里不得不指出，我本人也常常被单一的故事蒙蔽双眼。几年前，我从美国探访墨西哥。当时美国的政治气候比较紧张。关于移民的辩论一直在进行着。而在美国，“移民”和“墨西哥人”常常被当作同义词来使用。关于墨西哥人的故事是源源不绝，讲的都是欺诈医疗系统、偷渡边境、在边境被捕之类的事情。

08:54

我还记得当我到达瓜达拉哈拉(墨西哥西部一城市)的第一天，看着人们前往工作，在市集上吃着墨西哥卷、抽着烟、大笑着。我记得我刚看到这一切时是何等的惊讶，但随后我的心中便充满了羞耻感。我意识到我当时完全被沉浸在媒体上关于墨西哥人的报道，以致于他们在我的脑中幻化成一个单一的个体──卑贱的移民。我完全相信了关于墨西哥人的单一故事，对此我感到无比的羞愧。这就是创造单一故事的经过，将一群人一遍又一遍地呈现为一个事物，并且只是一个事物，时间久了他们就变成了那个食物。

09:38

而说到单一的故事，就自然而然地要讲到权力这个问题。每当我想到这个世界的权力结构的时候，我都会想起一个伊博语中的单词，叫做“nkali”。它是一个名词，可以在大意上被翻译成“比另一个人强大”。就如同我们的经济和政治界一样，我们所讲的故事也是建立在nkali的原则上的。这些故事是怎样被讲述的、由谁来讲述、何时被讲述、有多少故事被讲述，这一切都取决于权力。

10:12

所谓的权力，不单单是讲述一个关于别人的故事的能力，而是将那个故事转变为关于那个人的决定性故事。巴勒斯坦诗人MouridBarghouti曾经写到：如果你想剥夺一群人的权利，最简单的办法就是讲述一个关于他们的故事，并且从“第二点”开始讲起。从印第安土著人的弓箭讲起，而不是英国人的侵占，整个故事将变得完全不同。讲述一个故事，从非洲国家的失败谈起，而不是殖民者瓜分创建这些非洲国家的过程，整个故事将变得完全不同。

10:52

我最近刚刚在一个大学做了一篇讲座，一个学生对我说：非常可悲，尼日利亚的男人都和我书中的父亲角色一样，都是施暴者。我告诉他我最近刚刚读了一本小说，叫做《美国精神狂魔》，（笑声）对此我也感到很惋惜，美国青年都是连环杀手。（笑声）（掌声）当然了，那是我一时的气话。（笑声）

11:30

我绝不会认为仅仅因为我对了一本以连环杀手为主角的小说，他便可以代表所有的美国人。这并不是因为我比那位学生出色，而是因为，美国的文化以及经济雄厚实力使得我有机会掌握了关于美国的多重故事。我读过泰勒、厄普代克、斯坦贝克以及盖茨克尔。因此，我对美国的了解并不是来自单一的故事。

11:55

当我多年前听说作家们必须有极其不幸的童年才能取得成功的时候，我开始思考如何捏造一些我父母对我做过的恶行。（笑声）但是事实，我的童年非常愉快，充满了欢笑和关爱，也有着一个非常亲密的家庭。

12:17

但我也有在难民营中死去的祖父。我的表兄Polle因为无法得到充足的医疗而去世。我最亲近的朋友之一Okoloma死于一场飞机失事因为我们的消防车中没有水。我在不重视教育、充满压迫性的军权政府下长大，以致于我的父母有时根本拿不到他们的工资。因此，年少的我目睹果酱从早餐桌上消失，随后黄油也消失了，面包变得无比昂贵，牛奶需要限量供应。最重要的是，政治恐惧成了我们生活中习以为常的一部分。

12:58

所有这些故事都塑造了我。但如果我仅仅关注这些悲观的故事，那么我就简化了我的生命历程，并且忽视了许多其他同样塑造了我的故事。单一的故事衍生单一的传统典型。而这些以偏概全的想法所存在的问题并不是在于它们不真实，而是在于它们不完整。它们将一个故事转变成了唯一的故事。

13:25

当然了，非洲大陆充满了灾难。有的灾难，比如刚果猖獗的强奸，是无比巨大的；而有的现实，比如尼日利亚5千人申请一个工作职位，则更让人无比的压抑。但与此同时，非洲大陆也有许多和灾难不相关的故事。谈论这些故事也是相当重要的，也是同等重要的。

13:45

我一直都觉得要想充分理解一个地区、一个民族，就必须充分理解和那个地区、那个民族相关的所有故事。而单一故事的结果就是：它夺走了人们的尊严。它使得我们难以意识到人与人之间的平等。它强调我们之间的不同，而不是我们之间的相同。

14:09

如果在我的墨西哥之行开始前，我去同时聆听移民辩论美墨两边的论点，结果会是怎样呢？如果我的母亲告诉我们Fide一家虽然穷，但是很努力，结果会是怎样呢？如果我们有一个非洲电视台在全世界播报关于非洲的不同故事，结果会是怎样呢？播报尼日利亚作家奇努阿·阿契贝所谓的“平衡的故事”。

14:34

我杰出的尼日利亚出版商MuktaBakaray是个让人难以置信的男人，他离弃了原本在银行的工作，去追逐自己的理想，成立了个出版社，如果我的室友听说过他，结果又会是怎样呢？世俗告诉MuktaBakaray：尼日利亚人是不读文学作品的。他不这样认为。他觉得尼日利亚人会读书、想读书，但前提是这些书价格不能太昂贵，并且要普及到人民大众。

14:56

在他发布了我的第一部小说的不久后，我前往拉各斯的一家电视台接受访问。期间一位在那里做通信员的女士走向我，并且说道：“我真的非常喜欢你的小说。但我不喜欢那个结尾。你必须写一个续集，并且要这么写...”（笑声）她滔滔不绝地告诉我在续集中要写些什么。她的言语不仅仅让我充满欢喜，也让我充满了感动。她只是一个平凡的女士，尼日利亚普罗大众中的一员，一个本不应该读书的分子。但她不仅仅是读了那本书，而且充满参与创作的欲望，并且觉得有足够的权力来告诉我在续集中要写些什么。

15:33

我的朋友FumiOnda是个无畏的女人，她在拉各斯主持一档电视节目，旨在揭露那些被掩埋的故事，如果的室友听说过她，一切会变得不同吗？如果我的室友听说过上周在拉各斯医院进行的心脏手术，一切会变得不同吗？如果我的室友听说过尼日利亚的当代音乐呢？极富才能的人们用英语、皮钦语、伊博语、约鲁巴语和伊乔语演唱，将杰斯、费拉、鲍勃·马利以及他们祖父们的音乐混杂在一起。最近有一名女律师在尼日利亚的法庭上挑战一条极其不可思议的法案──妇女必须经过她们老公的许可才可以更新她们的护照，如果我的室友听说过她，结果会怎样呢？如果我的室友听说过“尼莱坞”以及那些冲破技术上的缺陷，不断地创作影视作品的创新者呢？他们制作的电影在本地极其流行，是尼日利亚人自给自足的最佳例子。给我辫辫子的朋友最近刚刚成了自己的事业，开始售卖她的接发片，如果我的室友听说过她，结果会怎样呢？或者是其他数以百万的尼日利亚人，创办自己的产业，虽然难免失利，但却不曾放弃雄心，如果我的室友听说过他们，又会怎样呢？

16:47

我每次回家的时候，都会面临那些令众多尼日利亚人头疼的事情：失败的基础设施，失败的政府。但与此同时，我也看到了人们面对这个政府所展现出的坚韧不拔，而不是被它给击垮。每年夏天我都在拉各斯开办写作班。♪都会被申请的人数震惊到，有这么多的人想要学习写作，想要讲述他们的故事。

17:14

我的尼日利亚出版商和我刚刚成立了个非营利性的组织叫做Farafina信托。我们充满了伟大的梦想：我们想建造图书馆，并且重新装修已有的图书馆，对于那些图书馆内空空如也的政府学校我们会捐赠图书，我们也会组织大量的阅读班、写作班来帮助那些渴望讲述我们身上故事的人们。故事很重要。多重性的故事很重要。故事一直被用来剥夺、用来中伤。但故事也可以赋予力量与人性化。故事可以击毁一个民族的尊严，但也可以修补那被击毁的尊严。

17:56

美国作家AliceWalker曾写过她那些搬迁至北方的南方亲戚们。她为他们推荐了一本书，一本关于他们已挥别的南方生活的书。“他们团团坐在一起，读着这本书，或是听我给他们读这本书，一种天堂因此而被重拾。”我想以此来结束我的演讲：当我们拒绝单一的故事，当我们认识到任何地方都没有单一的故事时，我们将重拾一份天堂。谢谢。

00:12

I'm a storyteller. And I would like to tell you a few personal stories about what I like to call "the danger of the single story." I grew up on a university campus in eastern Nigeria. My mother says that I started reading at the age of two, although I think four is probably close to the truth. So I was an early reader, and what I read were British and American children's books. 

00:39

I was also an early writer, and when I began to write, at about the age of seven, stories in pencil with crayon illustrations that my poor mother was obligated to read, I wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was reading: All my characters were white and blue-eyed, they played in the snow, they ate apples, 

01:06

and they talked a lot about the weather, how lovely it was that the sun had come out. 

01:12

Now, this despite the fact that I lived in Nigeria. I had never been outside Nigeria. We didn't have snow, we ate mangoes, and we never talked about the weather, because there was no need to. 

01:26

My characters also drank a lot of ginger beer, because the characters in the British books I read drank ginger beer. Never mind that I had no idea what ginger beer was. 

01:37

And for many years afterwards, I would have a desperate desire to taste ginger beer. But that is another story. 

01:44

What this demonstrates, I think, is how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story, particularly as children. Because all I had read were books in which characters were foreign, I had become convinced that books by their very nature had to have foreigners in them and had to be about things with which I could not personally identify. Now, things changed when I discovered African books. There weren't many of them available, and they weren't quite as easy to find as the foreign books. 

02:15

But because of writers like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye, I went through a mental shift in my perception of literature. I realized that people like me, girls with skin the color of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in literature. I started to write about things I recognized. 

02:36

Now, I loved those American and British books I read. They stirred my imagination. They opened up new worlds for me. But the unintended consequence was that I did not know that people like me could exist in literature. So what the discovery of African writers did for me was this: It saved me from having a single story of what books are. 

02:59

I come from a conventional, middle-class Nigerian family. My father was a professor. My mother was an administrator. And so we had, as was the norm, live-in domestic help, who would often come from nearby rural villages. So, the year I turned eight, we got a new house boy. His name was Fide. The only thing my mother told us about him was that his family was very poor. My mother sent yams and rice, and our old clothes, to his family. And when I didn't finish my dinner, my mother would say, "Finish your food! Don't you know? People like Fide's family have nothing." So I felt enormous pity for Fide's family. 

03:43

Then one Saturday, we went to his village to visit, and his mother showed us a beautifully patterned basket made of dyed raffia that his brother had made. I was startled. It had not occurred to me that anybody in his family could actually make something. All I had heard about them was how poor they were, so that it had become impossible for me to see them as anything else but poor. Their poverty was my single story of them. 

04:13

Years later, I thought about this when I left Nigeria to go to university in the United States. I was 19. My American roommate was shocked by me. She asked where I had learned to speak English so well, and was confused when I said that Nigeria happened to have English as its official language. 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. 

04:45

She assumed that I did not know how to use a stove. 

04:49

What struck me was this: She had felt sorry for me even before she saw me. Her default position toward me, as an African, was a kind of patronizing, well-meaning pity. My roommate had a single story of Africa: a single story of catastrophe. In this single story, 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. 

05:21

I must say that before I went to the U.S., I didn't consciously identify as African. But in the U.S., whenever Africa came up, people turned to me. Never mind that I knew nothing about places like Namibia. But I did come to embrace this new identity, and in many ways I think of myself now as African. Although I still get quite irritable when Africa is referred to as a country, the most recent example being my otherwise wonderful flight from Lagos two days ago, in which there was an announcement on the Virgin flight about the charity work in "India, Africa and other countries." 

05:56

So, after I had spent some years in the U.S. as an African, I began to understand my roommate's response to me. If I had not grown up in Nigeria, and if all I knew about Africa were from popular images, I too would think that Africa was a place of beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals, and incomprehensible people, fighting senseless wars, dying of poverty and AIDS, unable to speak for themselves and waiting to be saved by a kind, white foreigner. I would see Africans in the same way that I, as a child, had seen Fide's family. 

06:35

This single story of Africa ultimately comes, I think, from Western literature. Now, here is a quote from the writing of a London merchant called John Lok, who sailed to west Africa in 1561 and kept a fascinating account of his voyage. After referring to the black Africans as "beasts who have no houses," he writes, "They are also people without heads, having their mouth and eyes in their breasts." 

07:05

Now, I've laughed every time I've read this. And one must admire the imagination of John Lok. But what is important about his writing is that it represents the beginning of a tradition of telling African stories in the West: A tradition of Sub-Saharan Africa as a place of negatives, of difference, of darkness, of people who, in the words of the wonderful poet Rudyard Kipling, are "half devil, half child." 

07:32

And so, I began to realize that my American roommate must have throughout her life seen and heard different versions of this single story, as had a professor, who once told me that my novel was not "authentically African." Now, I was quite willing to contend that there were a number of things wrong with the novel, that it had failed in a number of places, but I had not quite imagined that it had failed at achieving something called African authenticity. In fact, I did not know what African authenticity was. The professor told me that my characters were too much like him, an educated and middle-class man. My characters drove cars. They were not starving. Therefore they were not authentically African. 

08:21

But I must quickly add that I too am just as guilty in the question of the single story. A few years ago, I visited Mexico from the U.S. The political climate in the U.S. at the time was tense, and there were debates going on about immigration. And, as often happens in America, immigration became synonymous with Mexicans. There were endless stories of Mexicans as people who were fleecing the healthcare system, sneaking across the border, being arrested at the border, that sort of thing. 

08:54

I remember walking around on my first day in Guadalajara, watching the people going to work, rolling up tortillas in the marketplace, smoking, laughing. I remember first feeling slight surprise. And then, I was overwhelmed with shame. I realized that I had been so immersed in the media coverage of Mexicans that they had become one thing in my mind, the abject immigrant. I had bought into the single story of Mexicans and I could not have been more ashamed of myself. 

09:26

So that is how to create a single story, show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become. 

09:37

It is impossible to talk about the single story without talking about power. There is a word, an Igbo word, that I think about whenever I think about the power structures of the world, and it is "nkali." It's a noun that loosely translates to "to be greater than another." Like our economic and political worlds, stories too are defined by the principle of nkali: How they are told, who tells them, when they're told, how many stories are told, are really dependent on power. 

10:12

Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person. The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes that if you want to dispossess a people, the simplest way to do it is to tell their story and to start with, "secondly." Start the story with the arrows of the Native Americans, and not with the arrival of the British, and you have an entirely different story. Start the story with the failure of the African state, and not with the colonial creation of the African state, and you have an entirely different story. 

10:52

I recently spoke at a university where a student told me that it was such a shame that Nigerian men were physical abusers like the father character in my novel. I told him that I had just read a novel called "American Psycho".

11:10

-- and that it was such a shame that young Americans were serial murderers. 

11:25

Now, obviously I said this in a fit of mild irritation. 

11:30

But it would never have occurred to me to think that just because I had read a novel in which a character was a serial killer that he was somehow representative of all Americans. This is not because I am a better person than that student, but because of America's cultural and economic power, I had many stories of America. I had read Tyler and Updike and Steinbeck and Gaitskill. I did not have a single story of America. 

11:55

When I learned, some years ago, that writers were expected to have had really unhappy childhoods to be successful, I began to think about how I could invent horrible things my parents had done to me. 

12:10

But the truth is that I had a very happy childhood, full of laughter and love, in a very close-knit family. 

12:17

But I also had grandfathers who died in refugee camps. My cousin Polle died because he could not get adequate healthcare. One of my closest friends, Okoloma, died in a plane crash because our fire trucks did not have water. I grew up under repressive military governments that devalued education, so that sometimes, my parents were not paid their salaries. And so, as a child, I saw jam disappear from the breakfast table, then margarine disappeared, then bread became too expensive, then milk became rationed. And most of all, a kind of normalized political fear invaded our lives. 

12:57

All of these stories make me who I am. But to insist on only these negative stories is to flatten my experience and to overlook the many other stories that formed me. The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story. 

13:25

Of course, Africa is a continent full of catastrophes: There are immense ones, such as the horrific rapes in Congo and depressing ones, such as the fact that 5,000 people apply for one job vacancy in Nigeria. But there are other stories that are not about catastrophe, and it is very important, it is just as important, to talk about them. 

13:45

I've always felt that it is impossible to engage properly with a place or a person without engaging with all of the stories of that place and that person. The consequence of the single story is this: It robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar. 

14:09

So what if before my Mexican trip, I had followed the immigration debate from both sides, the U.S. and the Mexican? What if my mother had told us that Fide's family was poor and hardworking? What if we had an African television network that broadcast diverse African stories all over the world? What the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe calls "a balance of stories." 

14:33

What if my roommate knew about my Nigerian publisher, Muhtar Bakare, a remarkable man who left his job in a bank to follow his dream and start a publishing house? Now, the conventional wisdom was that Nigerians don't read literature. He disagreed. He felt that people who could read, would read, if you made literature affordable and available to them.

14:56

Shortly after he published my first novel, I went to a TV station in Lagos to do an interview, and a woman who worked there as a messenger came up to me and said, "I really liked your novel. I didn't like the ending. Now, you must write a sequel, and this is what will happen ..." 

15:14

And she went on to tell me what to write in the sequel. I was not only charmed, I was very moved. Here was a woman, part of the ordinary masses of Nigerians, who were not supposed to be readers. She had not only read the book, but she had taken ownership of it and felt justified in telling me what to write in the sequel. 

15:33

Now, what if my roommate knew about my friend Funmi Iyanda, a fearless woman who hosts a TV show in Lagos, and is determined to tell the stories that we prefer to forget? What if my roommate knew about the heart procedure that was performed in the Lagos hospital last week? What if my roommate knew about contemporary Nigerian music, talented people singing in English and Pidgin, and Igbo and Yoruba and Ijo, mixing influences from Jay-Z to Fela to Bob Marley to their grandfathers. 

16:06

What if my roommate knew about the female lawyer who recently went to court in Nigeria to challenge a ridiculous law that required women to get their husband's consent before renewing their passports? What if my roommate knew about Nollywood, full of innovative people making films despite great technical odds, films so popular that they really are the best example of Nigerians consuming what they produce? What if my roommate knew about my wonderfully ambitious hair braider, who has just started her own business selling hair extensions? Or about the millions of other Nigerians who start businesses and sometimes fail, but continue to nurse ambition? 

16:47

Every time I am home I am confronted with the usual sources of irritation for most Nigerians: our failed infrastructure, our failed government, but also by the incredible resilience of people who thrive despite the government, rather than because of it. I teach writing workshops in Lagos every summer, and it is amazing to me how many people apply, how many people are eager to write, to tell stories. 

17:14

My Nigerian publisher and I have just started a non-profit called Farafina Trust, and we have big dreams of building libraries and refurbishing libraries that already exist and providing books for state schools that don't have anything in their libraries, and also of organizing lots and lots of workshops, in reading and writing, for all the people who are eager to tell our many stories. 

17:36

Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity. 

17:56

The American writer Alice Walker wrote this about her Southern relatives who had moved to the North. She introduced them to a book about the Southern life that they had left behind. "They sat around, reading the book themselves, listening to me read the book, and a kind of paradise was regained." 

18:17

I would like to end with this thought: That when we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise. 

18:30

Thank you.