Girl

Don’t be a slut, whatever you do don’t be a slut, you simply cannot be a slut. In “Girl” a mother tries her absolute best to make sure her daughter does not become a slut and tries to teach her how to behave as a woman via society’s standards. “Try to walk like a lady and not like the slut you are so bent on becoming.”, “This is how to hem a dress when you see the hem coming down and so to prevent yourself from looking like the slut I know you are so bent on becoming.”,” And this way they won’t recognize immediately the slut I have warned you against becoming.”  It is always the woman’s job to cook, clean, and take care of children… or at least that’s what society believes. Today women are doctors, lawyers, police officers, and basically whatever the heck they want to be. But we still haven’t overcome the stereotypes that woman belong in the kitchen, the man is supposed to make more money, and the woman is supposed to watch after the kids. “Girl” is a testament to that. It is essentially a mother teaching her daughter how to do everything to keep her man happy such as “This is how you iron your father’s khaki shirt so that it doesn’t have a crease; this is how you iron your father’s khaki pants so that they don’t have a crease.” and “This is how you sweep a corner; this is how you sweep a whole house; this is how you sweep a yard.” But what happens if she doesn’t keep her man happy, what if after all her mother teaches her she can’t keep her man, “but what if the baker won’t let me feel the bread?; you mean to say that after all you really are going to be the kind of woman who the baker won’t let near the bread?” Congratulations… you have become a slut.

The Danger of a Single Story

In “The Danger of a Single Story” author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie explains what a so called “single story” is and the effect it has on people. A single story is what you get when you use what information you have without looking furthermore into a person or topic and from that you decide that that is all there is to it. An example Adichie used to prove this is was when she reminisced about her single story about her live-in domestic helper whose name was Fide and his family in Line 42 claiming “All I heard about them how poor they were, so that it had become impossible for me to see them as anything else but poor. Their poverty was my single story of them.” Most often we as people create single stories of others but not by choice, just out of habit. A single story is a little bit different than an assumption because to make an assumption you must use more than just the information you have at hand and they are not misconceptions because for the most part they are usually true. Single stories are subtler than both of those altogether because single stories are what we get when we are given information but are too lazy to discover the rest. What was ever stopping the author from asking her mother about Fide’s family, what was stopping the author’s roommate from learning more about Africa rather than just believing what she had heard and had been portrayed by the media in Line 64, what made a story authentically African according to the authors professor in Line 83? I’ll tell you what it was. It was the inability to care. Do you think it’s possible to stop people from manifesting single stories or are single stories just apart of human nature?