If you want to know about Africa, read our literature—and not just Things Fall Apart.
—Chris Abani
Chimamandaadichie summarizes the current dilemma of the peripheral writer in thetitle of her recent ted talk: “The danger of a Single Story.” The talk's masterly braiding of ethos, pathos, and humor epitomizes the winning formula of this distinctively metropolitan media genre. But Adichie's rhetorical ingenuity interests us not as a cultural spectacle—the scene of a young African writer's anointment by metropolitan brokers as an upcoming “world writer”—but for what it structurally illuminates about the kind of minoritarian literary consciousness that gave birth to the concept of world literature. The speech begins by taking the audience down a well-trodden path, the story of Adichie's beginnings as a young writer in Nigeria—specifically, the naïveté of her childhood compositions: “All my characters were white and blue-eyed, they played in the snow, they ate apples, and they talked a lot about the weather, how lovely it was that the sun had come out.” How deluded and childish it now seemed to Adichie, this business of putting cloudy skies and sumptuous apples in an African story. Luckily, African novelists like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye already existed to dispel her original disorientation, so that she learned to replace the landscapes of British and American fiction with familiar settings where “people like me, girls with skin the color of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in literature.”
