Novelist, Chimamanda Adiche describes multiple situations in which a single story can misconstrue a person, a situation, a country heavily. She mentions that humans are easily “impressionable and vulnerable [in] the face of a story, particularly as children” we are easily swayed by stereotypes and perspectives that are offered to us by other members of our in-group. For example, she described her own childhood, and how she believed that books could only contain characters who were foreign and distinct from who she was. Her entire perspective on literature changed when she discovered books that wrote about people that were just like her. Her discovery of African literature allowed her to have multiple stories on books. These stories exist for everything on earth, and they have become the basis for many stereotypes that we create.
Adiche continues to elaborate on the importance of Power in tandem with stories. Adiche determines that “power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of the person”. The way that we frame an individual’s story, can entirely change the way that others receive the story, just like how the medium can change the message of the story.
Throughout the TED Talk Adiche uses her home country, Nigeria as a prime example of how a country can be misconstrued with just one story, how people can have a different perspective of her home country because of what they hear in the news, not what she personally experienced having grown up there. Stories are important because “[they] can be used to empower and to humanize. [They] can break the dignity of a people but [they] can also repair that broken dignity.” She encourages us to challenge each story that we encounter about a specific entity, and to look at it from different perspectives in order to gain a more holistic understanding of different aspects of our world.