The Danger of a Single Story

Cards (54)

  • 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