Sign in with Facebook
Darren Chetty’s Followers (1)
Darren Chetty
More books by Darren Chetty…
“Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie recalls that the stories she wrote as a seven year old in Nigeria were based on the kinds of stories she read, featuring characters who were white and blue eyed, they played in the snow, the ate apples. According to Adichie, this wasn´t just about experimentation or an active imagination, because all I had read were books in which characters were foreign, I had become convinced that books by their very nature had to have foreigners in them and had to be about things with which I could not personally identify.
We learn so many things from reading stories, including the conventions of stories such as good versus evil, confronting our fears and that danger often lurks in the woods. The problem is that, when one of these conventions is that children in stories are white, english and middle class, than you may come to learn that your own life does not qualify as subject material.
Adichie describes this as "The danger of a single story" a danger that extends to stories which, whilst appearing to be diverse, rely on stereotypes and thus limit the imagination”
― The Good Immigrant
We learn so many things from reading stories, including the conventions of stories such as good versus evil, confronting our fears and that danger often lurks in the woods. The problem is that, when one of these conventions is that children in stories are white, english and middle class, than you may come to learn that your own life does not qualify as subject material.
Adichie describes this as "The danger of a single story" a danger that extends to stories which, whilst appearing to be diverse, rely on stereotypes and thus limit the imagination”
― The Good Immigrant
“Whilst acknowledging that 'good literature reaches across cultural and ethnic borders to touch us all as human', she (Rudine Sims Biship) argues that books can act as both mirrors and windows for children. 'Windows' offer us a chance to look closely at a view of the world we may not have previously seen. Those windows might take us out to escapist fantasy or provide a view of lives we have not previously seen. These are notions familiar and vital to writers, teachers and those of us who care about stories. But Sims Bishop adds that books might also mirror our lives in some aspects and that children from the dominant culture tend to have books as mirrors whilst children who have been historically 'ignored - or worse ridiculed' do not, and this communicates important messages about the extent in which they are growing up'. Recognising that a window can be a barrier, Sims Bishop later added the idea of the sliding glass door as 'a way to suggest that a book can offer.. a lived experience for a reader'.”
― The Good Immigrant
― The Good Immigrant
Is this you? Let us know. If not, help out and invite Darren to Goodreads.
