Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, speaking in a live YouTube talk, emphasizes the power of storytelling through personal anecdotes. She opens with a childhood story about discovering a bagel after reading about it in a book, uses the anecdote to illustrate how books expand imagination and normalize others, and states her belief that stories can change minds, take away dignity, or restore it. She also recounts a vivid childhood memory of recognizing many untold stories while growing up in an academic family in Nsoka, southeastern Nigeria.
Chapters
Thank you. I'm so excited to be here. I thought I would wear a top with a Star wars theme. So. Hello, inbound. I'm very happy to be here, and I thank you all for being here, and I thank you for that. Welcome. I do have one regret, though. I'm told that Michelle Obama was here last year, and I'm deeply certain that I wasn't here last year or that she's not here this year. So I would like to start by telling you a story about bagels. When I was growing up in Nigeria, I loved to read. I once read an American book in which a character had something called a bagel for breakfast. I had no idea what a bagel was, but I thought it sounded very elegant, and I pronounced it bagel. I desperately wanted to have a bagel. I was nine. That year, my family visited the US for the first time on vacation. And at the airport in New York, I told my mother that as a matter of the gravest urgency, she needed to buy me a bagel. And so she went to a cafe and bought one. Finally, I would have a bagel. Now you can imagine my disappointed surprise when I discovered that this bagel, this exotic confection from the book I had read, was really just a dense donut. I love to tell this story because of how wonderful books are at making our imaginations soar. But there was also something comforting and instructive about the discovery of a bagel in the demystifying ordinariness of a bagel, the realization that other people, like me, ate regular food. I believe in storytelling. I look at the world through the lens of stories. I believe that stories can change minds. I believe that stories can take away dignity. And I believe that stories can also restore dignity. I'm one of those people who always knew what they wanted to do. I've been writing since I was old enough to spell. I don't remember a time when I wasn't drawn to stories, to reading stories and writing stories and finding stories. I have this memory from childhood, very clear in my mind. I'm sitting in the backseat of my mother's car, looking out of the window, and suddenly I feel a melancholy pang, a kind of muted mourning. Because what I saw through the window as we drove were stories, so many stories waiting to be told. And I knew that I would not be able to tell them all. I was born into an academic family in Nsoka, in southeastern Nigeria. My father was a professor. My mother was a university administrator. I also did well in school. And like all children, who do well in school. In Nigeria, I was expected to become a doctor.
