Walimbe 1

Sanika Walimbe

Ms. Rae

Honors English 9

29 January 2016

Half Blind

Stories play a key role in our society today by providing information, entertainment or

ideas. But what if, for every story that a person reads, there were to be another side to that story?

With one story, we are only exposed to one perspective on a topic. Two or more sides to a story

can completely change the way an audience views a story. A point of reference for describing

one story might be different from another person’s reference point. Some cases of this are in

Ishmael Beah’s novel, ​A Long Way Gone or African immigrant stories and articles on different

tribal cultures. All of these stories have more than just a single point of view to them. The danger

that a single story has it that it can create false stereotypes, fabrications and prejudice.

Single stories are dangerous because they can lead to false stereotypes. An instance of the

creation of false stereotypes was in the TED talk with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie called ​The

Danger Of A Single Story.​ In Adichie’s speech, she described how she personally was affected

by single stories. Adichie recounts meeting her American roommate for the first time in college,

saying, “My American roommate was shocked by me... 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” (Adichie). Adichie felt that her roommate had a false image of Africa from the

impression of a single story. Therefore, her roommate was surprised to know that Adichie had in

fact, a much more normal childhood than what her roommate thought she had. Her roommate
 Walimbe 2

had expected that Adichie would have had a poor and deprived childhood. A false stereotype had

been created that all Africans were poor, not well-educated and lived in a tribe because of one

story. Another example was Adichie’s own false perception of Mexico. She set forth, “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...I had bought into the single story of Mexicans and I could not have been more ashamed

of myself” (Adichie). In this story, she is telling that because of her perceptions of Mexicans

from a single story, she thought that all of them were identical to a stereotypical immigrant.

Since she learned that there was more than one perspective to Mexico, she found out that

Mexicans are quite different from what she thought they were. Adiche helps to prove that single

stories are dangerous because they lead to false stereotypes that prevent people from knowing

both sides of a person or place.

Single stories can also lead to fabrications. An example of that is in Ishmael Beah’s

memoir, ​A Long Way Gone.​ ​A Long Way Gone ​is about Ishmael Beah’s journey against the

Revolutionary United Front (R.U.F) and how his personality evolved during the civil war in

Sierra Leone. In the novel, he describes gruesome war scenes and battles between the R.U.F and

the army of Sierra Leone. However, there is controversy regarding the authenticity of the story.

Gabriel Sherman published an article questioning Beah’s authenticity. Sherman declares, “​Beah

served as an orphaned child soldier for little more than two months, not the sweeping two years

his memoir chronicles...and the moment Beah witnessed six murders in a UNICEF refugee

camp—don't check out at all” (Sherman). Sherman also argues that “​t​he attack on the village of

Mattru Jong that Beah describes in the book occurred in January 1995, not 1993” (Sherman).
 Walimbe 3

Because of just one story, we thought that everything Beah was telling was true, but we realize

now based on Sherman’s article that there could’ve been several fabrications on the attacks and

timeline in Beah’s story. Baeh is now suspected lying about of the war and has caused

controversy regarding the authenticity of events he claimed have taken place. Furthermore,

single stories are dangerous because they can enable people to get fabricate events and paint a

dishonest portrayal of what actually happened.

Another reason why single stories are dangerous is that they can lead to prejudice. This is

shown in Ishmael Beah’s memoir, ​A Long Way Gone. In the memoir, Baeh is fighting against the

Revolutionary United Front, but in the memoir they are called Rebels. When the Rebels attack

Beah’s village and kill his family, he has a major hatred for them and fights against them when

he gets recruited to join the Army of Sierra Leone. He thinks that the rebels deserve to die and he

starts to have a prejudice against them. But when he is in the UNICEF rehabilitation center, one

of the rebels exclaims, “We fought for freedom, and the army killed my family and destroyed my

village” (Beah 134). In this quote, the reader finds out that what the rebels went through is the

same that Beah went through. The reader also finds out that the Army of Sierra Leone is fighting

for the same cause as the Rebels: freedom. It turns out that the Rebels and the Army of Sierra

Leone are not as different from each other as they thought they were. They both kill innocents

and attack villages. Therefore, Beah has a false prejudice against the rebels when really, the

rebels were not that different from him. The false prejudice was created because of a single

perspective that he developed from his own experience, not taking into account that of the rebels.

In the article “Body Rituals Among The Nacirema” by Horace Miller, a tribe is described that

has gruesomely unique traditional rituals performed on their inhabitants. One of the rituals
 Walimbe 4

performed “consists of inserting a small bundle of hog hairs along with certain magical powders

and then moving the bundle in a highly formalized series of gestures” (Miner). Another ritual

described is that,“women bake their heads in small ovens for about an hour” (Miner). At first, the

reader will think the Nacirema are an uncivilized tribe that practice harsh, pointless rituals, when

in fact, the “Nacirema” are actually American spelled backwards. All the body rituals performed

by the Nacirema were really activities that are common to Americans. The inserting of hog hairs

into the mouth is simply brushing teeth, and women baking their head in ovens is actually

women getting a perm. Miner was not lying; he just had a different viewpoint from what our

current society is today. In the article, people are prone to automatically create a prejudice

against the tribe and assume they are uncivilized, just because of a single story. Therefore,

people can create false prejudices that can make them blind to what is actually true and misjudge

them because of a single story.

Single stories negatively affect readers in multiple ways because they result in false

stereotypes, fabrications and negative prejudices. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Ishmael Beah,

Gabriel Sherman and Horace Miner showed us that if we buy into the single story, our society

will be half blind. To stop the danger of a single story from spreading, everyone must all strive to

learn about all aspects of a story.

Works Cited

Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. "The Danger Of A Single Story." TEDGlobal. 26 Jan. 2016.

Speech.

Beah, Ishmael. ​A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier.​ New York: Farrar, Straus and

Giroux, 2007. Print.

Miner, Horace. "Body Ritual among the Nacirema." ​American Anthropologist 58.​ 3 (1956):

503-07. Web. 25 Jan. 2016.

Sherman, Gabriel. "The Feud over Ishmael Beah's Child-Soldier Memoir." ​The Fog of

Memoir.​ Slate.com, n.d. Web. 23 Jan. 2016.

"The Danger of A Single Story." TEDGlobal. July 2009. ​Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie:.​ Web.

23 Jan. 2016.