The Danger of a Single Story

• I'm a storyteller - personal pronoun
• few personal stories - anecdotal
• "the danger of the single story" - juxtaposition, repetition, continuary
• I grew up on a university campus in eastern Nigeria - she had an education
• although I think four is probably close to the truth - ethos (sentiment)
• my poor mother was obligated to read - pathos (emotion)
• 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 - the norm of children's books, listing
• I had never been outside Nigeria - short sentence
• we ate mangoes - she had food
• impressionable, vulnerable - symbol of danger, emotive language
• 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 - disengagement
• Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye - ethos: credibility
• I went through a mental shift in my perception of literature - change of view
• could also exist in literature. I started to write about things I recognised - change of view, sense of hope
• I loved those American and British books I read - complementary
• stirred my imagination - metaphor
• opened up new worlds - metaphor
• unintended - language choice: empathetic tone
• My father was a professor. My mother was an administrator - short sentence
• conventional, middle-class Nigerian family - they weren't poor
• norm - informal
• His name was Fide - short sentence
• Finish your food! - exclamatory: pathos
• Don't you know? - rhetorical
• People like Fide's family have nothing - pathos
• Then one Saturday - time expressions
• we went to his village to visit - short sentence
• I was startled - short sentence
• Their poverty was my single story of them - critiques herself
• Years later - time expression
• I left Nigeria to go to university in the United States - she had money
• I was 19 - short sentence
• "tribal music" - racist humour
• Mariah Carey - contrast
• She assumed that I did not know how to use a stove - 1 sentence paragraph: emphasis
• she had felt sorry for me even before she saw me - systemic racism
• a single story of Africa - parallel structure
• a single story of catastrophe - parallel structure
• waiting to be saved by a kind, white foreigner - exclamatory for emphasis
• that I, as a child, had seen Fide's family - draws parallels: empathetic tone