...During a 2009 TED talk titled “The Danger of a Single Story,” Nigerian immigrant Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie spoke about her perception of the world as a child and how the world perceived her as she grew older. Adichie recalls her intellectual curiosity and how it drew her to literature. This curiosity resulted in her learning to read and write at an early age. The books she read were set in Britain and America, cultures far different from what she was accustomed to. The only information Adichie had about the West sat between two covers of a book. This constrained look gave her a stereotypical perspective of life in America. When she moved to the United States, the perception that the American people had of Nigerians surprised her. As she develops her contention, Adichie walks listeners through her childhood in Nigeria, her move to the United States, and how both offered her a unique perspective on how two vastly different cultures perceived each other....
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...Adichie interview Literature means a lot for our common understanding of things. Literature goes beyond gender, race and class as Adichie points out in the interview. She’s reflecting how literature influences human life and takes root in her own life. She grew up reading Russian books, without fully understanding the many little details, but with a general understanding of the main things and themes. She was able to put the emotion of it in context to her everyday life. Adichie tells us how she felt as a kid, always wanting to become a storyteller, always observant and never really there as a whole person – even though it must be annoying for the people around her, she continues with a smile. She’s trying to deal with the assumptions about writers and their choices, which aren’t always deliberate choices, but often come suddenly, from the inside or maybe even the outside or with inspiration from the spirits, as she declares in the interview. Literature creates opinions and binds people together, no matter where you come from, as we can see with “The Thing Around Your Neck”. It’s simply easy to relate to. When we read “The Thing Around Your Neck”, I also pondered whether it was a story from her life or not? In this interview she discloses that none of the stories are from her personal life, but somehow they all are. Her personal life affects her writing, as on the other hand her writing affects the life of other people and their outlook on life. Adichie wants us...
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...“Cell One” is a short fictional story written by Chimamanda Adichie published in the New Yorker. It is about a young girl who is growing up in an area full of crime. Her home is broken into multiple times, once be her own brother, cults roam the streets and dominate the school campus. In this story, the narrator’s brother gets into trouble many times. He steals, lies, and cheats, and ends up getting arrested for being in the same area as some of the cult members. There’s a particular cell in the prison where her brother is being held and it is called “Cell One.” Many of the inmates who occupy this cell lose their lives. At the end of the story there is a bit of suspense. The narrator and the narrator’s parents travel to the jail to free the brother, when they get there they find out the brother had been taken to Cell One and then transferred to another facility because he acted out against the police men. The mother and father are in a bit of a panic because they do not know if the son is dead or alive. This story was very well written but I have to say I was not a fan of this work. I did not like how the narrator was rather emotionless through out the whole story, only showing emotion one of two times. I also felt like the story was anti-climactic and lacked an engaging element. Through out the story I was waiting for something to happen, something to really draw me in and make the story worth reading. “I wanted him to stop talking. He seemed to enjoy his new role as the...
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...“The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become …” (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie) the only story, the standard story, and the “normal” story. Everyone has their own tale and position on life. People have different races, opinions, genders, outward appearances, likings, and personalities. Though this is a great thing, we are judged and told who to be according to the communal stereotypes. We are all labeled according to all of these things creating a cage for us to live in. Our society may seem like a place of equality, but is it enough to think that? Everyone has different viewpoints and nobody completely agrees. As an Asian-teenage female...
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...Eugene from Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda I. Adichie, is a complex character. It is made clear that Eugene is very religious, and looked up upon as a role model in the community. This leads him to doing deeds that someone else might not do if their public image is an after thought. He is a completely different person when we is in private. He also is an impulse thinker. Not always thinking through what he does before he does it. One example of this is at the end of his description is “Nothing but mortal sin would keep a person away from communion two sundays in a row” (Adichie 6). He had no knowledge of the person, but just immediately thought is was sin. These are a few captivating characteristics of him that make him so elaborate. One...
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...Lateesha Baquet Joshua Phillip SPCM 301i 11/5/2014 Pop Culture I am of voice, courage and strength. I bow to no man other than God himself. If I allowed my faith to be tested, I will be of strong belief and value. I am worth more than riches and wealth. I walk with grace and poise; I take no sympathy for I strive to be of movement each day. I am Feminism, the advocacy aiming to define and defend equal rights for women. In addition, I am seeking to establish equal opportunities for women in education and employment. Over decades, there have been movements for women to have the same rights as men. Many advocates say feminism is important, because it is equal across all spectrums of race, class, sex, and sexuality. It will always be a movement for particularly women, but it seems to expand across time. In this present day in age, society has evolved across time, and media has made some differences in advertisements, TV shows and films. On the contrary, there are events that still appear on the web, social media and within music, specifically. For example, I was surfing the web, and ran across different artist. Some statements made were about women empowerment, body image/politics and sexual objectification, specifically the artist Beyoncé. The purpose of this essay is to discuss how Beyoncé’s song Flawless depicts feminism as well as redefining beauty. To accomplish this purpose, first I will discuss Beyoncé’s song flawless. Second, I will compare feminism to...
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...Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie warn us about the single story in “The Danger of The Single Story”. Everyone has many complex stories in their life. These stories can be about their culture, religion, race, gender, economic background or talents, but people these days are just ruining these incredible stories with stereotypes and view others with a single story. The single story is not a wrong observation about someone but is just an unfinished story that we didn’t know about that person. I still remember the “single story” that I had to deal with when my family moved to America from Vietnam in 2010. I attended a good quality middle school in Oakland, where a lot of middle school students thought an Asian immigrant student like myself was bad at English in learning and communication. Therefore, they made fun of my accent, and the way I pronounced words in English. I was motived to show them that I could get better at communication. There was more to...
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...The women show courage and intelligence even though they are culturally suppressed. Discuss. The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie highlights the often challenging lives of Nigerian women living in Africa, but also abroad in the United States. It is however, not the difficulties which Adichie is ultimately focusing on, but the courage and intelligence of women who are able to make ‘small victories’, overcoming various attempts of cultural oppression. Adichie’s characters are subject to cultural suppression in several of the short stories. This is most pronounced in ‘The Arrangers of Marriage’ where Chinaza is forced by her husband to assimilate to her new surroundings by ridding herself of all signs of being Nigerian, as ‘to get anywhere you have to be as mainstream as possible’. This included giving up her native dress, language and food in order to fit into American culture. Furthermore, Dave’s request that she change her name, is perhaps the most significant sacrifice, as she became Agatha Bell, while ironically, her neighbor, Nia, had taken on an African name. This essentially makes her disappear in much the same way as Akunna in ‘The Thing Around Your Neck’. Akunna is striped of her Nigerian family through winning the ‘Visa Lottery’ and is then forced from her ‘uncles’ home due to his inappropriate actions. This lands her at the ‘last stop of the Greyhound bus’ in Connecticut and working in a café. The patrons regularly mistake her for Jamaica, as she...
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...Adichie accidently made a mistake of creating a single story for the world outside of Nigeria. One of her main stories were, judging a boy based on what she had heard about him, or based her beliefs on the amount of money his family had. There were some different elements that changed the way she viewed people, one of them was a little boy that came to live with her when she was a child, and the other, how her roommate treated her when she travelled to USA. She lived with a middle class family who brought in a young boy from a rural area to live with them. later on, while visiting the family of the little boy. She was astonished as his older brother made a nice basket. She asked herself how could family with such little money make such a thing?....
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...Discovery Essay Discovery inhibits the ability to embrace new beginnings and accept a sense of change whether it is found or forced upon an individual. The places you travel and the people you meet can emotionally revolutionize a self-discovery through unexpected but anticipated terms evoked from curiosity. ‘Swallow The Air’ written by Tara June Winch and ‘The Thing Around Your Neck’ written by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie break the inhibitions of vulnerability, as their ideas represented through cultural contexts and values, lead to an overall self-discovery. Tara June Winch’s ‘Swallow The Air’, explores the idea of vulnerability as a barrier to self-discovery. The protagonist, May Gibson, of mixed descent, lives in a dysfunctional and low socioeconomic family with her brother and mother. The sudden suicide of May’s mother ultimately shook her to the core, “When mum left I stopped being Aboriginal, I stopped feeling like I belonged. Anywhere” May’s stream of consciousness expresses her immediate loss of security present in both her culture and identity. Winch correlates May’s inner turmoil through the recurring motif of the Mingi turtle, whose hard exterior is displayed to protect the interior. The symbolic nature represents the vulnerability of youth, something May herself finds all too familiar within her lifestyle. A pivotal moment in the novel was the sexual violation of May from an indecent white man, leaving her inferior to the whites and unsure of her acceptance in...
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...liked it too little were the same—condescending.” The story’s cross-cultural romance yields moments of affirmation and challenge, including a bravura conversation in which the heroine debunks her lover’s use of the phrase “real Indians.” Race provides the surface tension in this story, but in the end it is the characters’ class and family attitudes that create the story’s deepest conflict. Anger. Defensiveness. The feeling of being unloved, unwanted, undesired. Above all, the nagging sensation that your story - your truth - is being stifled by flashier, louder tales. “The Thing Around Your Neck,’’ pointedly, is not relegated to an impersonal, unspecific other; it’s closing ever tighter around your neck, too, buster, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is intent that you don’t forget it. The title story, told in the second person, exemplifies her prevailing theme of homesickness as a physical, as well as a metaphorical, malaise. The unnamed 22-year-old narrator gains a longed-for American...
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...The collection of short stories ‘The Thing Around Your Neck’ written by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie demonstrates that in Nigeria, men women, boys and girls are treated differently, and these relationship in which gender inequality exists leads to family conflict. And corruption exists in Nigeria and also the violence. These issues have lasting impacts on the characters. Many of the characters experience violence, some due to civil war and conflict between religious groups, and others due to corruption. In the story ‘Cell One’ Nnamabia both witnesses and experiences violence in the Nigerian jail. When Nnamabia has been caught and put in jail, his family bribed police and guard to see Nnamabia. Also Nnamabia paid police to treat him better. These actions demonstrate that corruption is common thing in Nigeria. In addition, it shows the violence in jail. An old man is arrested because the police couldn’t find his son. ‘if they don’t find the person they are looking for, they will lock up his father or mother or his relative’. This shows how the violence exists in Nigerian society. Also Nnamabia is severely beaten when he tries to protect him. At this point, the writer uses the symbolism to highlight Nnamabia’s decline. ‘…he looked oddly sobre, an expression I had not seen before’. And author also highlights that the violence can change the identity of the person. At the end of story, Namabia has changed that no longer tells stories in a cheerful way and feels great compassion for old...
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...In her New York launch of Americanah, Adichie states that she wanted to write a good love story. In your response, write about the journey the love story takes between Ifemelu and Obinze. Consider the journey that they each take separately and discuss your feelings about the end of the novel. Make sure to cite the novel to support your points. Love, can last a life time that is what some people say. The novel Americanah is a love story written by, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Adichie stretches the love story over three continents and include many characters that assist, build and sometimes tear down the hero; Obinze and heroin Ifemelu. The novel is mainly about two people who feel in love in their teens, and were separated because of financial difficulties which they were faced with in their country. Obinze journeyed to England to seek a better future, with the intention to come back to his love ifemelu. Likewise, Ifemelu also went away. She traveled to America to further her studies on an academic scholarship. In the process of trying to make a better life they had to make choices that were not in the best interest of their relationship. They had to for a time lay dormant their feelings for each other in order to navigate the rough terrain of life. Even as they struggle to make ends meet, earn degrees, form new relationships and discover themselves they were never far from each other’s heart. They occasionally called and wrote emails to each other, even though those correspondences...
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...Lead with respect, not with power. Throughout my Global Lead experience, I learned a lot about what a global citizen is and how to become a better one. I also learned a lot about myself and who I am as a person and leader and also how I lead my life. I believe a global citizen is one who is aware of what is happening around the world; one who genuinely cares and is curious, and one who has the desire to help in any way possible. When I first arrived in Greece and we talked about being a mindful traveler, I realized that I had never even thought about that. I realized that even when people visit America, I am not mindful of their culture. My Global Lead experience really made me realize that I never really took the time to learn other cultures and what was happening outside the United States. The only things I really ever knew about other countries were the things that affected America. I wasn’t even aware that I was not being a global citizen. Being a global citizen means to be aware of things going on outside your country and to try and help in any way possible, even if it is something simple like supporting another countries product. The Greece culture is so beautiful and full of history. The people are so nice and courteous to visitors, especially us when we visited. Almost everyone there knew English, which really surprised me because I am not fluent in any other languages. The fact that pretty much everyone spoke our language showed me a good example of global citizenship...
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...Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie The Thing around your Neck Essay: Analysis and acknowledgement The main theme in the text ”The Thing around your Neck” must be that outstanding culture clash a lot of hope full immigrants in America are exposed to. Just from the very beginning we experience that the main character Akunna from Nigeria has very high thoughts of going to America. Her family is also very convinced that it is going to be a huge thing for her, they are expecting her to send them presents and they tell her; “In a month, you will have a big car. Soon, a big house. But don’t buy a gun like those Americans” (p. 57 l. 3-4) And this trip she won did turn into a huge thing, - but it resulted in an acknowledgement of not belonging to America and a home journey. The first thing Akunna realizes when she arrives at her uncle’s house is that black and white people do not have the same rights, because they for instance not aloud to use the same hairdresser. The uncle also tells that; “The trick was to understand America, to know that America was give -and- tak. You gave up a lot but you gained a lot too” (p. 58 l. 14-16) You have to put up a lot to obtain something, - maybe even less than you gave up. The uncle, who explains this, is a black man, so it shows that he has just accepted the conditions and the way it is. The inequality between blacks and whites is deep-rooted and universally accepted. When the uncle starts to abuse Akunna we learn that she is a strong person, -...
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