While reading Andrew Lam’s Birds of Paradise Lost, I kept
thinking of novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED speech, back in
2009. It was titled “The Danger of the Single Story”; the subject echoed
the project of challenging master narratives from the previous century.
That challenge germinated revisions in university reading lists, back
in the late seventies, as the war in Vietnam approached its final phase.
Adichie underlines the role of power cultivated in a single story, and
how it insinuates, then calcifies, subterranean borderlines through
stereotypes. On a Virgin flight from Lagos before her talk, Adichie
heard an announcement about charity work in “India, Africa, and other
countries”; however unintentional this categorization of Africa as a
country was, the remark was not isolated. Adichie was clear about that,
that the comment signaled pernicious perceptions about Africa, the kind
that framed the continent in a stereotype: that its economic situation
is prime destination of numerous charities from the First World. On the
other hand, Adichie’s problem with stereotypes “is not that they are
untrue, but that they are incomplete[;] they make one story the only
story.” [ Read Full Review at NewPages.]
