A Rhetorical Analysis Of Chimamanda Adichie

Many people fall victim to stereotypes regarding different people and religions. The intent is not to judge others, but exposure and stories unfortunately compel one to do so. News coverage, articles, and even music brainwash the public, forcing people to think a certain way about specific subjects. This leads to assumptions, half-truths, and stereotypes when a story is passed on from one to another. The power of stories is strong, and hearing only one concerning people or a nation leads to ignorance. Therefore, one should open his mind and expand his horizons to have an all-round understanding before making a final judgment.
The speaker, Chimamanda Adichie, begins by telling a story about what she would write about as a child. She would write similar stories to the foreign, westernized ones she read which contained white skinned children with blue eyes. She was confined

to a single story of stereotypical and personifications of the literatures she read as a child. Once she found African stories, she realized that people like her could also be in stories.
When we hear or read stories about a part of the world we tend to perceive that part of the world as the stories describe that place.

Those stories we receive shape certain emotions towards the people that live in those places. Adichie gives an experience of her own about the single story of the debates about immigration in the United States. Immigration in America translated in people’s minds to Mexicans sneaking across the border. When Adichie visited Guadalajara she was a bit surprised to see Mexicans differently than the stereotypical immigrants she expected them to be. She goes to say, “show people as one thing and one thing only over and over again and that is what they become.” That is the consequence of the single story about a person, place, or issue. A single story robs people of dignity and emphasizes how different people are. By engaging with all the stories of a person, place, or issue, the trap of a single story can be avoided. Adichie eventually looked at the Mexican and the U.S. side of the immigration issue, balancing the stories and not falling into the trap of the single

story.
In Mona Van Duyn’s poem “Into Mexico”, the reader finds a speaker expressing an early euphoria of a multicultural experience. The way she describes the odd aspects of this society highlights the uniqueness of being “behind the eyes at last”. The reader witnesses her curiosity about and revulsion at a “skinned, outrageous body of some animal” hanging “from a line.” The people, the places, the noises, the tastes, and the things she feels as she walks through the streets are all unfamiliar aspects of the Mexican culture that draw her in. As the speaker wanders “through the restless / yellow of bananas,” she comes to realize that “all the time I have lived as if you were like me. / Now, here, I am released from that stratagem.” Standing apart from those around her, she arrives at new understandings of others, herself, and the distances between. Now, the speaker feels she could “by-pass / love…when eyes glaze and minds are more private than ever.” The sense of alienation provoked by travel paradoxically gives the speaker the opportunity to experience her life and the world more fully.
By placing oneself into a diverse point of view and exploring an aspect from “a visit behind the eyes/where the map bulges into belief, relief…” one notices the difference between everyday life and the lives of others. Hence, one possess qualities that distinguish and define that person.