Coming to America

We recently watched a symposium in  my Enoisy 1010 class of an African writer, Chimanda Ngonzi Adichie, who spoke about the evolution of herself as a writer. She begun with a story of always wanting to be a writer but the only pieces that she could produce was ones who's characters were "foreign". They were white with blue eyes and always drank ginerbeer; as her young mind may have thought that the "white" race was the only ones deserving of a story. She had never read novels with characters other than caucasian at that age but discovering African novels changed her life as a writer.

She became fascinated with African books as if it was a "new world", ironically seeing that she was still living in Africa at the time, she became addicted with finding out more about the people around her. She now saw variety in literature and wanted to explore it.

The most interesting part of her presentation was the telling of her experiences in college concerning her background and how this negativity helped shape her mind as a writer. Her roommate was shocked to see an African similar to herself. The roommate had stereotypes of what an African should be like which did not include an African being clean, well educated such as herself and not having a poverty-stricken background.

Living with her college roommate was not the only stereotypical experiences that she encountered. Her english professor criticized her papers keeping in mind her culture. The stories that she created had characters much like himself and so he deemed them not being " African authentic ".

The problem with stereotypes is that they confine a certain type of people to one story which does not leave much room for variety. People of this society that interact with the influence of stereotypes such as her roommate and her English professor are ignorant to the richest of different cultires that they could be exposed to.

The general idea about Africans is that they are poor, dark ( soul) people who solely endures sufferage. Adichie found it suprising that the people in her field of work thought that writing about their struggles was the only way to be successful. The issue with this is that she had never experienced any " real" struggle.