“I recently spoke at a university where a student told me that it was such a shame that Nigerian men were physical abusers like the father character in my novel. I told him that I had just read a novel called ‘American Psycho,’ and that it was such a shame that young Americans were serial murderers.”
-Chimamanda Adichie Ngozi, author of “Half of a Yellow Sun” and “That Thing around Your Neck,” in her TEDtalk “The Danger of a Single Story”
It’s amazing to think about the relative novelty of Internet procrastination, even to my own life. As it is for many students at Duke, it’s only been in the past couple of years that I’ve had access to a personal computer. But already I’ve become conditioned to expect content I read to be found online in easily digestible “Top 10” lists or 160-character chunks. There is no comparison between the volume of books I read as a middle schooler and those I’ve read as a college student. But this past summer, without Internet on demand, I re-discovered real novels. Hours spent in taxis and waking up to a desk that didn’t hold a laptop was a not-even-thinly veiled blessing, and I started looking for things to read outside of the one book I had brought with me.
Rediscovering how great books are was kind of a weird process to go through in Uganda; on an extremely superficial level, Uganda doesn’t seem to be a literature hub. It is true that bookstores are hard to come by, and I didn’t come across any libraries external to universities. On maybe my third week in the country I came across the only bookstore I ever ended up finding: Aristoc Booklex. It was a store in an upscale shopping mall in the capital that seemed to sell only imported books. There were books written by some Ugandan authors, but all the books I saw were produced by foreign, and mostly American, publishing companies.
Ugandan publishing companies are, in fact, a rarity. I discovered Fountain Publishing, a local publishing company, but only after leaving the country and trying to look for more literature. Moses Isegawa, a Ugandan author who is a global favorite for his epic “The Abyssinian Chronicles,” published his books with Random House in the United States and Canada. Hundreds of bookshops exist in the country, but they limit themselves to textbooks and school supplies, relying on the induced demand from the requirements set by schools. Aristoc, while posting comparable prices to those in American bookstores, is an expensive shop when you consider its prices in the context of the costs of other commercial goods in Uganda. In the absence of cheap distribution methods, many authors post their work online, which limits access to literature for individuals who don’t have consistent or any Internet access as well as the profitability of publication, which curbs the opportunities of literature as a livelihood.
I bought two books from Aristoc. The first was “White Teeth,” by a British author named Zadie Smith. The second I bought the day before I flew home, a collection of short stories called “That Thing around Your Neck” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a Nigerian author who both Duke and UNC had the privilege of hosting last semester. Adichie is a powerful writer and an inspiring woman, and the deliverer of the single-greatest TEDtalk I’ve ever seen, called “The Danger of a Single Story.”
Her thesis is that Americans, and the west at large, have a one-dimensional impression of “the African.” A proliferation of pity for the events that have plagued the continent (AIDs, colonialism, poverty, etc.) is accompanied by a misunderstanding of the people as nothing beyond disadvantaged. Literature that originates in the West often fails to provide complex characters. People are fed a single story which then forms the basis for their understanding of Africans, independent of their individual circumstances. Adichie asserts that people, knowing that she is African, look to her as a person for expertise on all of Africa, discounting that the stories you hear change between individuals, much less across borders.
In the literature produced and consumed by Americans, there’s a diversity of circumstance. If you used “The World According to Garp” as your basis for understanding the American man, you might consider him to be overprotective, assertive and intelligent. But then there’s Steinbeck’s story in “East of Eden” to show Americans as vindictive and cruel, as gullible and innocent, and as self-aware and guilty. So many American authors write and subsequently distribute their writing, sharing unique stories that highlight different people and different contexts in which Americans live.
There is a wealth of writing being produced in Uganda, writing which presents complex characters who invoke more than pity. Story telling is not divorced from Ugandan culture and history, and there is a collection of phenomenal writers who craft stories that occur with the hardships of Uganda’s recent history. They do not deny the AIDs epidemics or poverty, but they do not present hardship as the primary character. It is true that Uganda is not a hub of literature publication yet, but the talent and the multi-dimensional stories are there. If only we wouldn’t settle for a single story, we could see them.
Lydia Thurman is a Trinity junior. Her biweekly column will run every other Tuesday. Send Lydia a message on Twitter @ThurmanLydia.
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