In the story Out Of Nowhere, Marie Padian there is a lot of immigration occurring. So there is this highschool and they are taking in people who are struggling with war environments and bad conditions in African countries. These people that are taken in love soccer and that’s their place where they begin to fit in. The trouble is these characters who just were in horrible conditions coming to this brand new culture and they have to decide what they are going to do and how they are going to fit in with the new place. “You don’t like goat. Okay! Peoples all different! Maybe if you eat sambusas maybe you like goat! I don’t know. So now I ask : you eat pig? Somali peoples we say to that … ewww” (Padian 74-75). There are kids on the soccer team like Tom Bouchard who help integrate the new kids into the school and work with them on the soccer team and help them be more comfortable. He makes good friends with Saeed and he meets the family and learns a lot about the culture.
This Ted Talk shows a Nigerian Woman who began to read and write at a young age. The literature she read all had white people with blue eyes playing in the snow. This was new to her because she lived in Nigeria. This is where she was introduced to the Single story. When she came to America her college roommate asked her to play some “tribal music” and she played her Mariah Carey playlist “I recently spoke at a university where a student told me that it was such a shame that Nigerian men were physical abusers like the father character in my novel. I told him that I had just read a novel called ‘American Psycho" (Adichie 10:40). So people are automatically assuming the way she is and going of culture. But, Chimamanda realized she was doing it too. When she had to go to Mexico she expected a bunch of thugs fleeing the border and such but she then realized she was doing exactly what people did to her. This opens her eyes to the danger of a single-story.
How does your book deal with the community accepting new Americans / Immigrants? Are they allowing them to become a part of things or do they have to change in order to “fit in”? Are those from the dominant culture (in this case, those that have lived in America for generations) trying to bridge the gaps by trying the food of immigrants, visiting their homes, asking about their past, volunteering at community outreach programs, etc?
