128 quotes found
"Throughout the Caribbean, under different names, you'll find stories about people who aren't what they seem. Skin gives these skin folk their human shape. When the skin comes off, their true selves emerge. They may be owls. They may be vampiric balls of fire. And always, whatever the burden their skins bear, once they remove them once they get under their own skins-they can fly. It seemed an apt metaphor to use for these stories collectively."
"I was nodding off on the streetcar home from work when I saw the woman getting on. She was wearing the body I used to have! The shock woke me right up: It was my original, the body I had replaced two years before, same full, tarty-looking lips; same fat thighs, rubbing together with every step; same outsize ass; same narrow torso that seemed grafted onto a lower body a good three sizes bigger, as though God had glued leftover parts together."
"I've learned I can trust that humans in general will strive to make things better for themselves and their communities. Not all of us. Not always in principled, loving, or respectful ways. Often the direst opposite, in fact. But we're all on the same spinning ball of dirt, trying to live as best we can."
"“Mami,” Ti-Jeanne said, “I should go and get Baby. He ain’t take to Tony.” “Hmph. Child got some sense, then. More than some I could name. But leave he there. He have to learn that he can’t always have what he want.”"
"“I can’t keep giving my will into other people hands no more, ain’t? I have to decide what I want to do for myself.” No answer. It wasn’t going to tell her."
"She had a yearning to lose herself in this noisy throng of people going about the business of staying alive."
"Since Baby’s birth, she had learned that the first few months of motherhood were about fatigue and leakiness."
"This was a thing she’d not seen before, how the meat that fed her was a living being one minute and then violently dead. The smell of it was personal, inescapable, like the scent that rose in the steam from her own self when she stepped into a hot bath. They had broken open the animal’s secret body just to eat it."
"Come in peace to my home, Tan-Tan. And when you go, go in friendship."
"She just wanted to be somewhere safe, somewhere familiar, where people looked and spoke like her and she could stand to eat the food."
"She curled up on the pallet and stared into the dark, praying for a peaceful sleep. Prayers didn’t do no good, oui. Antonio chased her all night. (In the book Antonio, her father, beats and sexually abuses her long-term; she eventually kills him)"
"She was hiding in the best possible way, masquerading as herself!"
"Just being Tan-Tan, sometimes good, sometimes bad, mostly just getting by like everybody else."
"Lasirèn, pray you a quick death for Hopping John. Pray you no more of this life for him. Even though no gods answer black people’s prayers here in this place."
"All the people sick and dead on the ships, and the ones sick and dead on this soil. What are gods for, then, if they let things like this to happen to their people?"
"Desire makes us all babies again."
"It is ugly in this world, and when the killing starts, the same stick will beat the black dog and the white."
"I don’t pay much mind to politricks. Never met a politician who wouldn’t try to convince you that salt was sugar."
"It was time to be honest with myself. To survive all the shame this world will throw at you, you have to hold yourself tall, look your accuser straight in the eye. Even if it’s your own face looking back at you."
"Children were pack animals; let any one of them act different from the group, and the rest would bring him down."
"“Children,” I said to her. “For the first little while, they not exactly human, you don’t find?”"
"Suck all the juice this life will give! (p33)"
"Beauty and ingenuity beat perfection hands down, every time. (p179)"
"(Are you consciously taking a new look at the future?) NH: No. I'm drawing pretty heavily on the science fiction and fantasy I read growing up. I also come out of a very strong Caribbean literary tradition. In that sense I'm kind of marrying the two, but not in a way of "trying to go out there and do something new." I'm like any other writer. There are a handful of us, if we're talking about solely Caribbean writers -- there's Claude Michel Prevost…Tobias Buckell. I've found that science fiction reviewers tend to react most strongly to the Caribbean-flavored stuff, and some of them identify that as being new and over-focus on it. I'm starting to feel I might be getting typecast. (with Indiebound)"
"for me to exist in this world I have to have a radical agenda because the world has got to change in order for people like me to be able to exist...I need to have a radical agenda. I need to make a world where it is perfectly okay that I'm attracted to people who live inbetween genders. I think that should not be a problem. I can't change. The world has to change."
"In the fantastical genres there is an idea that the world can change. And that to me is immensely hopeful."
"The metaphors we use in the west come from Greek and European mythology. Aishu in West African religious mythology is the deity I use in Midnight Robber. Aishu said: "I would like to go everywhere and see everything." a perfect metaphor for artificial intelligence. Black people have a rich spiritual heritage, as well as a rich imaginative life-stories handed down over centuries-that inform our ideas of the future. They need to be on the table like everybody else's."
"When people ask me to define science fiction and fantasy I say they are the literatures that explore the fact that we are toolmakers and users, and are always changing our environment."
"Writers have to live in more than two worlds. The intellectual life of the Caribbean was available to me when I was growing up, through my parents, but being a science fiction and fantasy reader was strange. (There are still very few people in the Caribbean writing SF.) But I think being Caribbean, you're aware of being a multiplicity. Pretty much all of us who come from there are of mixed-race backgrounds, no matter what we look like. And they are really pluralist societies -- have been for centuries, though of course there are similar issues of systemic racism."
"Every so often I come up with a different definition of what science fiction and fantasy do, and I'm always looking for one that describes what they both do, rather than separating them. Currently I'm saying that one of the things they do is look at the effects of large-scale social change on both populations and individuals. Fantasy tends to look to the past, and science fiction to the future, but what is common to many of the stories is change: huge societal upheaval."
"…Even though we talk about race a lot in the literature, there’s still this idea of “Well, if we make this person blue and give them pointy ears, then we don’t have to actually talk about what’s happening in the real world.” And those of us who live in racialized bodies feel that lack, we feel that erasure, so yes, there was something quite deliberate in my doing half the speech as an alien."
"…There’s still this notion that you are somehow morally superior if you don’t know anything about the background of the writers you read, and I maintain that writers have every right to not talk their backgrounds, that’s fine, but when people do and it’s important to their work, to not know doesn’t mean you’re morally superior, it means you are indifferent…"
"It’s the beautiful thing about being a fiction writer; you can write the world you want to see."
"They say that writing is a solitary sport, but it isn’t, really. It doesn’t have to be. Some people are really happy about writing alone, but some people actually suffer from the isolation. (2024)"
"I enjoy exploring my connection to Caribbean vernacular – or, any vernacular. I love how people actually speak. There is an art and a poetry and a beauty and a logic to it that, to me, is undeniable. There’s no such thing as bad language, in my mind. (2024)"
"I’ve learned, don’t fight too hard when readers say, ‘You got this wrong.’ There’s a very good chance you got it wrong. I’ve started to think of it as them being helpful – that’s what’s best for my psyche. (2024)"
"I know how reality goes. I’m already caught up in an interesting life. I don’t need to write about it...I prefer fantasy and science fiction. They’re genres that actively say that change is possible."
"Labels are very important to me. They’re a way of finding community and a way of community finding you. If people are looking for my work because they’re looking for the work of another woman or the work of a science fiction writer or a black writer, it helps if they know that I am that. For me, identity is kind of a mailbox."
"Science fiction is a literature that explores the fact that human beings are part of social systems and that social systems change. It explores social change and the human change that both drives it and is affected by it. Fantasy, which I write more than I write science fiction, is a literature that explores the stories we tell to explain the inexplicable. It also explores human nature. Fantasy pays homage to folklore and folklore talks a lot about archetypes. Fantasy explores those archetypes and also explores the way we tell stories to explain things like why there’s a moon in the sky or things that we have no explanation for, but we believe. Fantasy explores what we believe."
"We live in a racist world, and there’s no less racism [in the science fiction community] than anywhere else. But the nice thing about the science fiction community is that it’s very accepting of a challenge, of something new. We’re all a community of eggheads. We like knowing stuff. For the most part, [sci-fi readers] open the book and...get very interested in the language and the world and culture I’m talking about."
"Reading people like James Baldwin [made me realise] that, if you’re an artist, there’s no reason not to make art out of anything. Sex is a big part of the human experience. It’s something that we’re hardwired to think about. Why would you avoid making art about something that is so all-encompassingly important to human beings?"
"The other challenge I see is that of the diversity of expression in speculative fiction. The readers seem to come from all over the place, but the writing that gets published (or that gets marketed as SF) still comes from a fairly narrow range of experience. The imaginative worlds that we're creating still draw heavily on Greek and Roman mythology and on Euro-Celtic folktales, and the futures we imagine still feel pretty Western middle class. And that's fair enough, because it's the primary cultural context in which many of the writers are situated. Some excellent writing has come and is coming out of those experiences. However, I also want to see more writing from the vast range of cultural contexts which makes up the world. (2000)"
"I think inserting yourself into a place where you are told you don't belong, when you know quite well you do, is important work. (2017)"
"There is so much vibrant work coming out, and more and more of it beginning to come out from, and depicting, a broader range of humanity. (2017)"
"why have things shifted a little? I think that at root it's the vocal, persistent activism of the ones most affected; the people who need positive change. (2021)"
"there are aspects of it [teaching] that are not at all enjoyable. But that "lively exchange of ideas" thing? That satisfaction you feel when a student's world expands a bit? Those are real. (2021)"
"What's needed instead is to state up front at submission time that you want to see submissions from authors of color; to include people of color in significant positions on your staff (editorial, marketing, etc.); to educate yourself to the ways in which cultural specificity results in stories being told differently, signifying differently on race, culture, fashion, language, you name it; to recognize that "not seeing race" means that they also can't perceive structural racism; to grasp that racism isn't just a stoned white male musician ranting at his concert that all people of color should be kicked out of the UK. I suspect that only if you do that groundwork will you be able to assess submissions from authors of color on an equal footing with white authors. The Anglophone market is still hugely skewed in overwhelming favor of straight, white, male authors. There are still nowhere near enough translations from other languages into English. (2021)"
"(IL: So why do you think the SF community is more willing to discuss gay/lesbian issues versus race issues?) NH: Yeah, why do I think that is? Because queerness is still seen as a white issue, to the irritation to those of us who are both of color and queer."
"[about writing science fiction with an African sensibility] You have to reinvent the language. You have to craft some bizarre amalgam of the sensibility you're trying to bring and a science fiction sensibility... you're grafting two things together that did not grow together, and it's difficult to do that successfully."
"I'd like to see support right through the various forms, the various artistic disciplines for artists of color who are interested in futuristic and fantastical visions. I'd like to see us really start to make them welcome because they bring a different vision. We bring a different vision and that will change the genre, and the genre is about change."
"to be color-blind in a racist world is to not be an ally...if the playing field isn't level, and you're not doing anything to make it level, you aren't actually being fair."
"I think what happens is as with any form of oppression the people most concerned with or think about it the most deeply are the people most negatively affected by it."
"Science fiction and fantasy are about looking at the world through a different lens. So whatever I write, including sex scenes, I may first think, how can I cause myself, and the reader, to see this differently? What can I do to challenge, delight, surprise, unsettle?"
"When I write, I want to present as wide a spectrum as I can of the ways in which people can choose to behave sexually and in relationships, and I like representing those where possible as visible, acceptable behaviors. Because they should be, and because science fiction is about conceiving new possibilities. So yes, I find I'm constantly resisting both monoliths and binaries because I find them limiting for myself. It took a while for me even to be able to understand myself as queer, because monoliths and binaries obscured me from seeing it. Gay/straight/bisexual are all important to represent, but they aren't the only possible axes along which to sort human sexual attraction."
"Science fiction is and has been ripe to discuss other possibilities for sex and relationships: multiple marriages, communal structures, different genders. Writers like Theodore Sturgeon, Samuel R. Delany, Octavia Butler, Elizabeth Lynn, Nicola Griffith, Elisabeth Vonarburg, Candas Jane Dorsey, Eleanor Arnason, Storm Constantine have been my touchstones."
"Sexuality gets binarized too often. Not only do I resist the idea of one form of sexuality, but the assumption that there are only two forms, and you do one, the other, or both, and those are the only possible behaviors. It sometimes seems to me-and perhaps whimsically so-that the people who are courageously non-normative in their sexualities are doing in the real world some of the work that speculative fiction can do in the world of the imagination, that is, exploring a wider range of possibilities for living."
"I hope that my vanilla and het sex scenes are graphic and explicit, too! I write. It's an art form. Why would I make the effort to describe a meal or a sunset in a way that's detailed and responds to all the senses, but not do so for a sex scene? Why are "graphic" and "explicit" good in descriptions of walking through a field of lavender in full bloom, but not for a character coming so hard that his eyes roll back in his head?"
"Every time I put my work out into the public, I risk putting something out there based in my unexamined and unrecognized assumptions. That's part of the game."
"people will love each other, no matter what circumstances they are in."
"Science fiction as a literature probably helped to save my life. I suspect I would have self-destructed without it, and without the people I have met because of it. So even when I'm critical of it, I'm very happy that it's here."
"Write whatever the blast you want, and if you live in an environment where doing so doesn't endanger your life or career, count yourself blessed."
"When I hear a (usually white and usually male) writer trying to shut down a discussion about representation by bellowing that no one should tell him what to write, it sounds very much as though he's trying to change the topic, to make it all about him. To him I'd say: Why not try to further the discussion, rather than trying to, um, censor it? What do you think needs to be done in order to make publishing more representative? Nothing, you say? The doors are already open but we just won't come in? Women, Black people (and purple polka-dotted meerkats) actually "just don't write much science fiction"? Or their books are "only relevant to their communities" (which is often code for "those people are incapable of producing anything of real literary merit")? Funny, how every one of those statements boils down to not being willing to change the status quo. You do realize that you're even drowning out the white voices amongst you that are trying to make some changes along with the rest of us? You do realize that a more representative literary field would be representative of all of us, yourself included?"
"To certain white male writers, I'd like to say, "When those around you try to wrestle with issues of entitlement and marginalization, please don't give us the tired trumpeting of 'Censorship! No one can tell me what to write!" True, people shouldn't tell you what to write, but people will try to, for bad reasons and better ones. Your mother will try to tell you what to write or not write. Your husband will. Your editor, your government, your church, your readers, your nosy neighbor. Humans are an argumentative lot. Dealing with that as a writer comes with the territory."
"Science fiction and fantasy are already about subverting paradigms. It's something I love about them."
"No one can make me give up the writing I love that's by straight, white, Western male (and female) writers, but at a certain point, I began to long to see other cultures, other aesthetics, other histories, realities, and bodies represented in force as well. There was some. I wanted more. I wanted lots more. I wanted to write some of it. I think I am doing so."
"Folktales are great for learning dynamic storytelling and how to structure the resonant echoes that give a plot forward motion. It wouldn't be the last time that I modeled a plot upon the shell of a preexisting folktale. I've discovered that it doesn't matter whether your readers recognize the folktale. It may not even matter whether the folktale is real, or one you invented. What matters is that it has structure, echoes, trajectory, and style."
"The title's sort of the distilled version of what the story wants to be. Before I quite know what the story is, the title whispers hints to me."
"(You once said, "Fiction is NOT autobiography in a party dress." OK, then what is it?) NH: It's what happens after you grind up a bunch of your personally received input, everything from life experience to that book about spices you read ten years ago, compost it within your imagination, and then in that mulch grow something new. I think that could even apply to autobiographical fiction."
"mainstream American media seem to believe that Caribbean people are little more than simpleminded, marijuana-steeped clowns who say "de" instead of "the.""
"Particularly when I speak at schools, people in the audience want to know whether there are going to be films of my books. Myself, I'm more jaundiced. I've seen what can happen when text-based science fiction gets zombified by Hollywood. Look at what happened to Gibson's "Johnny Mnemonic""
"There are a lot of readers who pride themselves on not paying attention to the identities of their favorite writers. Some of them think this means that they're not prejudiced. I don't know anyone who isn't, myself included. But let's just say for argument's sake that those particular readers in fact are not prejudiced. How many books by writers of color do you think you'll find on their bookshelves? I'd lay odds that if there are any at all, they will be far outnumbered by the books by white authors. Not necessarily because those readers are deliberately choosing mostly white/male authors. They don't have to. The status quo does it for them. So those readers' self-satisfied "I don't know" is really an "I don't care enough to look beyond my nose." And that's cool. So many causes, so little time. But don't pretend that indifference and an unwillingness to make positive change constitute enlightenment. If you truly want to be a colorblind, unprejudiced reader, you can't do so from a place of being racism-blind, or you'll never have the diverse selection of authors you say you'd like. Why get pissed off at people who are fighting for the very thing you say you want? Yet I don't think there's some conspiracy of evil racist editors. There doesn't have to be. The system has its own momentum. In order to be antiracist, you actually have to choose to do something different than the status quo. People who're trying to make positive change (editors and publishers included) have a hell of a battle. Fighting it requires a grasp of how the complex juggernaut of institutionalized marginalization works, and what types of intervention will, by inches, bring that siege engine down."
"A lot of the time, all I'm trying to do is put some of my specific ethnocultural touchstones into science fiction and fantasy. When white writers do that, it's barely remarked-upon. And sometimes it should be, because it's often wonderful."
"There are those who fear that if books get published according to some kind of identity-based quota system, literary excellence will suffer. What seems to be buried in the shallow grave of that concept is the assumption that there are no good writers in marginalized communities."
"I like imagining that Lovecraft is spinning in his grave as he's forced to view the world through the eyes of his statuettes placed in the homes and offices of the likes of Nnedimma Okorafor, Kinuko Y. Craft, S. P. Somtow, Haruki Murakami, Neil Gaiman, and me."
"Indigenous scientific literacies play key roles throughout Nalo Hopkinson's works. The excerpt from Midnight Robber introduces the practice in its simplest guise: a child comes under the tutelage of an Indigenous mentor who begins teaching her the science of survival, emphasizing the practical, day-to-day transmission of generational knowledge."
"What I love about current Indigenous Futurisms and how they’re changing is that they aren’t constrained by this binary between Western science and Indigenous or non-Western science. One example is Nalo Hopkinson’s novel The New Moon’s Arms (2007), set in the Caribbean."
"When Jamaican-born Canadian Nalo Hopkinson burst on to the science fiction scene with Brown Girl in the Ring in 1998, she seemingly single-handedly reinvigorated interest in Black science fiction (SF). Afrofuturism had not caught fire at this point, but Hopkinson did. She grabbed the attention of the SF community with her Caribbean-inspired science fiction, fantasy, and magical realism. Hopkinson represents the obvious first link in Octavia Butler's legacy."
"Public officials of the judicial system of Los Angeles routinely use the acronym ‘N.H.I.’ to refer to any case that involved a breach of the rights of young Black males who belonged to the jobless category of the inner city ghettos. N.H.I. means ‘no humans involved.’"
"It was early morning. There were mists over the hills and valleys of Hebron. Down in the square, Aunt Kate sat on the cold earth beside the spring. She rocked to and fro and cradled her arms as she hummed a lullaby. The clear water murmured an accompaniment. She had dressed hurriedly, and her cotton frock was unfastened at the back, her headkerchief askew, like a crumpled hibiscus. A light wind lifted the loose strands of her grey hair. Her face was oval. Pouches of reddish-brown skin framed a beaked nose and black eyes as swift as bees. The sound of feet squelching on wet grass, of people greeting each other, carried towards her. She remained still and listened. Then she smiled and nodded. Her lips formed words that were propitiatory echoes. The part of her mind which was secret and cunning accepted that she would have to pretend to practise rites which the others used to assure a reality from which she had escaped. For the others were not without power. If they demanded her involvement in their conspiracy, she needed them in hers. (beginning of 1: The Vow)"
"In the silence that followed, the bubble of the morning's celebrations was shattered and the fragments went spinning away like the mist in the morning light. (from 1: The Vow)"
"The sun reared up over Hebron like a wild horse. It streamed across the sky, tangled with the naked branches of trees, brightened the hills, illuminated winding paths, glittered like incandescent dust on the heads and shoulders, the marching feet of the congregation; rimmed their flags and banners with light, and settled in the gleaming river of morning that flooded the land. (7: The Money-Box)"
"Ann sat in the back of the cart, and, as they drove off, she waved to Aunt Kate. The old woman did not wave back. The past had taken over in her mind once more. (7: The Money-Box)"
"In the square not even the ghost of a wind stirred the naked trees. Aware of the creeping death around them, the children no longer played by the spring. They remained at home, lingering by their mothers or sitting on the doorstep beside their fathers. And they wondered at the silences which had sprung up between their parents, between neighbour and neighbour. (6: The Star-Apple Tree )"
"[He] heard her singing and knew that she had forgotten him already, that in the morning, if she remembered him, it would be with the vagueness of an indistinct dream. And knew that, walking away from her, he was walking away from the land and the people whose reflected image of him had shaped his dreams, fashioned the self that he would now go in search of, to be swept away into the wide indifference of the sea. (19: The Rape)"
"...as he sat waiting, he took up a fragment of wood and carved idly, thinking of making a toy for the child. Then as he shaped the rough outlines of a doll, he began to concentrate. For the first time in his life he created consciously, trying to embody in his carving his new awareness of himself and of Hebron. When he had finished he put the doll in his pocket, and left Hebron as twilight settled into the hollow spaces between the hills. He took the short cut down the hill-side that by-passed the church. From time to time he touched the doll as if it were a fetish. For, in carving the doll, [he] had stumbled upon God. (20: The Return)"
"As he returned to the congregation he sought for words to share with them the long journey that he had taken. He sought for words to tell them of the world that he had entered where there were no far places and no strangers: only men, like themselves, who would one day inhabit together the same new continents of the spirit, the same planets of the imagination. (21: The Journey)"
"The cheap and easy radicalism does not address the underlying requirement for a total transformation—who are we as Black people, as Africans? The Marxists, and actually no party could give us that. Only we could do it! That is the easy way. The hard way is to reclaim our past, present and future selves, totally!"
"in this country we must begin to think about education as an initiation into a world full of symbols and descriptions about who we are. Thinking of it as initiation helps us to understand the importance of introducing something else into the lives and worlds of children. Initiation also gives an understanding of the symbolic significance of education, and how language and art structure the whole of our existence. We need to re-initiate ourselves, a symbolic life through death, and create ourselves anew!"
"The affliction of today is one concerned with who we are—and the need for a we. The question is, “What will be the cure?” That is where the Third Event becomes important you see, because it is a recognition that we are a species, but not in the manner we have been accustomed to, that we can narrate this problem in a different way."
"Where Africa as our ‘origin’ becomes important is in recognizing that if we are going to tell a different story of ourselves, we must grapple with the beginnings, in which Africa is not only important for Blacks but the key. They want us to think about Africa as a way to think about affliction but it is Africa that gives us so much of our language world, and gave us much of what has been transformed over time, and continues of course into the present. And so you see, we cannot have the Third Event without Africa right at the middle—because how do you tell the story differently if the beginning hasn’t been grappled with?"
"this is where the potential of Black studies was! Language is the way that we will carry ourselves out of these problems we have—that is what is important now to remember about Black studies during those early years, that it was one part of a bigger project of developing a transformation of knowledge and therefore the transformation of the whole of society, by using a different language to address these intellectual concerns."
"When you talk about women writers in the Caribbean, I would say she would be up on top, and second to nobody...An exceptional woman."
"Make no mistake, there’s formula detective fiction, there’s formula science fiction…but there’s formula literary fiction too. It’s genre snobbery that we’re only ready to acclaim stuff that’s of the genre but different in some way. It’s sci-fi but, it’s fantasy but… I didn’t want to write a but."
"I was trying on being a writer for size…I was trying on writing about things that are close to me for size. Like sexuality. At the time, I wasn’t in any form of gay relationship. It’s funny that I’ve gone from hating pop psychology to being way too Freudian. I can see all my fears and desires in it. Ones I could never give in to because I was deep in the church and I was a super-suppressed gay dude."
"A lot of it came out of all the research and reading I was doing. African folklore is just so lush. There’s something so relentless and sensual about African mythology. Those stranger elements aren’t about me trying to score edgy post-millennial points. They are old elements. A lot of this book was about taking quite freely from African folklore, specifically from the area below the Sahara Desert. And that’s important to me. Mostly when people think of sophisticated Africa, they think of Egypt. And even that they attribute to aliens."
"Being a big black man in America, I literally do not know how to conduct myself in a physical space. I don’t know how to meet people without it seeming intimidating. I don’t know if I should wear glasses, if I should try to look extra gay, if I should stand up, sit down, wave my ID, not reach for an ID. I don’t know. I am literally immobilized in the presence of a lot of police power. That is a reality that could cross any form of social class, because it’s racist. And it’s very Caribbean of me to think my class can exclude me from racism. It’s very Caribbean of me to think that if I just dress nicer, if I just wear a suit… It has nothing to do with that, it’s racism…"
"Not everything the eye sees should be spoken by the mouth."
"I think what’s going on with this country is that Americans are now experiencing what it’s like to be an immigrant because it’s not the easiest decision to move away from your home land. And so when that decision is made it’s definitely because you’re fleeing something and hoping for the better, but still not wanting to cut ties with your country…"
"I feel like we’re constantly evolving as human beings, and there are usually epiphanies that happen. It doesn’t have to be the deepest darkest secrets but something that we didn’t know before, that we just discovered, and we’re like, “Oh. Wow,” and the world suddenly looks different…"
"I could not write properly until I owned every aspect of my identity - my identity as a lesbian woman, my identity as a black woman, my identity as a Jamaican woman, an immigrant, then also a working-class Jamaican woman..."
"Had I lived in Jamaica, I could not have been a writer…I wouldn't be courageous to challenge the issues that I challenge in my work, you know, especially homophobia, sexualization of our young girls, race, class, socioeconomic disparities. Being here in America gave me that opportunity…"
"not only do I want people to know the history of the underclass, but I want them to go investigate. So, engaging with my work should send you into further investigations into knowledge. So, it’s a stimulus to knowledge search. (2015)"
"…all sorts of things that don’t even look political got mixed up with the 1970s and the new politics. So, that was how, when I came here, how I viewed Mr. Manley and Woodside. Anything that was out of the current order then was now possible. As if Mr. Manley had shattered some sort of glass globe and people could go inside and take what ideas they felt like having. It was really quite revolutionary, if unstructured. (2015)"
"I don’t know that the writers are aware enough of the rural. I mean, there’s nature, they will talk about the blue skies and they’ll talk about the roses, but—my models, which are deeply embedded in the soil, I’m not sure I see anybody else doing that. Because I’m a rural child, I understand these things, I want to understand them. So my metaphors will tend to be coming out of agriculture. (2015)"
"The business of being translated—it’s an honor if people from somewhere else, another language group, another culture, want to hear what you have to say."
"My work belongs to the people who are reading it. That’s how I hold with the work going away: people have the right to put their interpretation and their meaning into it—it is in the public arena."
"…it’s not just a culture, it’s a history that needs to be preserved. There have been so many omissions in our history…that’s one of the things I set out to do: to preserve…[it] might have come from my knowledge of how people’s history gets distorted and stolen."
"Louisiana was part of my larger interest in Africa and diaspora, and the need for blacks of the diaspora, and to a certain extent of Africa, to know each other and to understand that you have to get through it together, for political purposes if nothing else…[it] was an attempt to say, “Look, we’re the same thing.” So it’s not just the preservation, it’s also the preaching"
"People read about these things in something called “history” at school, but it’s not made to relate to your real life. You hear about the slaves, and who wants to be related to the slaves? They’re not people, they’re some creature that you read about. So why would you believe it happened to your people, or anywhere near you? So even if we’re doing all these things, you are not quite sure how much of it is sticking—but it’s worth a try."
"…you can’t assimilate until you are something. Then you have something to give other people. My position is this: the universe, the universal, is beautiful, but if you imagine the world as a set of plates piled on each other, there’s this one that’s a little skewed because of a particular history in the New World: our history, that of the descendants of the slaves, is skewed, and it is at the bottom. And if you don’t settle that one, all the others will fall and crash. So that one has to be settled, has to know itself, so that it can take its place sitting firmly with all the other plates…It will continue to run away from us. People don’t know what it’s like, being snubbed for how you look, always being seen as the sniper or whatever. How can they know, unless we stick up for ourselves and say this is who we are."
"Reading Dr. Erna Brodber’s novel Myal (1988) is a transformative experience that unchains both truths and memories and moves you to explore what she calls the “half that’s not been told”...A paragon of cultural memory, Brodber lives truly, completely and freely as a cultural historian, sociologist, novelist, teacher, community organizer, social activist, caregiver, mother, entrepreneur, healer and chronicler."
"I think that what Erna Brodber is doing is wonderful because she's coming from that extremely spiritual dimension which is so powerful."
"She saw them before they saw her, the two men leaning against a dusty red Cortina and looking out of place in the regimented grey street. Her heart lurched and her stomach sickened. There was a stitch in her left side and she leaned heavily into it, pressing her palm hard against the spot, her breathing ragged as she came to a dead stop."
"racism is not a white problem; it's a problem of the world."
"the church has done more to destroy people in the Caribbean than any other institution."
"[about the character Hyacinth in The Unbelonging] the reason she's an outsider here [in England] is because she never ever made a life here. She lived there in the past, but time continued."
"because I have written a book which actually goes to the heart of how poor people are kept in control - which is by the church actually doing the job for the government - people are resentful."
"It struck me that memory is actually quite negative in lots of ways because it stops you from creating new, sustaining memories as a kind of other to survive with...It's...as though if you don't resolve all that luggage you carry around with you, it somehow is going to come back and haunt you."
"[about writing a character who works as a cleaner] you've got to look beyond the mop because there's a human being there; and until you can accept the fact that people are people and stop seeing people through the eyes of occupation segregation then you are always going to be prepared to step on people."
"(Q: Your first three novels are powerful indictments of racism, Joan. Yet you've gotten some negative responses from the British for them.) Riley: I think because I'm writing about their backyard. It's okay for people from elsewhere to write even similar things, but it's not right to write about British systems in the same way."
"I've been told my poetry is anti-male and anti-white. I think that's very unfair because it raises issues like, Have I not got a right to protest against your exploiting me because you are being exploited, too? I mean, isn't that how we get into hierarchy? And isn't that how we get into trouble? Well, people don't like those questions."
"Jamaicans don't like to admit to all of the things that are wrong with their society. Children are unprotected. They are fair game, basically. Violence against women and children is endemic and accepted. Academics write about it as if it is a subversive act. Women are simply expendable, and when they write about it, it is always a woman's fault somehow. A woman is mad because she is drinking or something. There's never any rational reason why somebody reaches this point."
"I've always been very unhappy about leaders. I see my brother with his cap in his hand, with his head bowed just like my uncles-probably like my grandfathers and my great-grandfathers-and he's saying, "Mr. Manley, liberate us, man." Then I think, But, you're not liberated. And that's because we look always to somebody else. I never write about the leader. It's always the antihero because the antihero is the salt of the earth. And if this earth is to have any chance, it is the antihero we are going to have to look to."
"I started to write because I was getting so angry that I thought that I was going to explode, because the images on the television I was seeing about Jamaica were deliberately misleading images. It was at the time that Jamaica was going through a very bad patch, you know. It was fermenting; there was lots of destabilization. I saw it from the other side...from the mean streets of Kingston. On television they would only spin the shacks and they would say, "This is Jamaica." And of course the way it was being portrayed didn't happen."
"We have a word - I don't know if you have anything like it in America - we say that something "clide" you. It gets so strong that you get sick of it. That's how I used to feel about black American literature, especially that of the men, because it was very defeatist. It's a certain something very much like fundamentalist Christianity. It never actually looked at internal blame, which is as important as external blame, because if you can't take responsibility you're not human and you're not adult and you're not able then to ask for a share in things."
"I think I'm an odd kind of Caribbean writer in the sense that I don't come out of the rich, middle-class elite who are the traditional writers. It's almost like cloning themselves, you know. So what they write is very much their image of the world. There's never been a voice that's been a poor voice, and I've never, ever seen myself reflected in Jamaican fiction. To some extent in Olanda Paterson, but very little. All of them, including Olive Senior, can't get into the psyche [of poor people] because they don't know it and it's an alien place, something they are afraid of. And so what happens is that they create a distorted image of people like me and my family."
"In Unbelonging the past is a handicap, just as it is for so many people here. It's something that stops them from going forward because they've never actually come to terms with exile. It is as much exile if you emigrate as if you came because you had to, particularly for young people who came in their preteens. They had no choice. They are as much exiled as a political refugee. Memory is a funny thing. It keeps you sane because there is another, better dreamland that you can escape to. It commonly has that function here. But what happens when memory comes up against reality? That's what has caused so much pain for people here. When they were able somehow to find the money - half of them actually went to the moneylenders to get it - and went back to paradise, paradise was an illusion. What happens with memory is that it's very faulty. It edits out pain."
"Joan Riley has an extraordinary ability to portray pain and loneliness...her novels become powerful parables of the creation and destruction of illusions... It is this quality which steels Joan Riley's work and the lives of her characters."