novelists-from-ghana

"The pain you have endured does not justify the pain you inflict on others."

"The past devours those naive enough to forget it."

"First, a story ends when it ends, and not a moment before. If you are unhappy with this ending, make a new one."

"Do not underestimate the strength it takes to be kind in a world as cruel as ours."

"Slaves deserve to be remembered just as much as queens."

"....would never do anything to hurt her."

"All the women seemed to be doing something – sweeping or carrying water in large bowls on their heads – but there was a good supply of men sitting languidly around doing nothing in the “life is boring” kind of way, not the “life is good."

"Bad news spreads through any small town like fire through dry savanna bush."

"I understand what you mean, Inspector. I got up early this morning-I couldn't sleep anyway-and I went to Bedome to check. Everyone told me yes, that Gladys had been there yesterday and she had left some time before sunset to go back to Ketanu."

"Others have come searching. Wha t they find they take back to America [...] to sell [...]"

"Yet she suspected that in its ten thousand disguises Cinque's Zombi corpse still ruled Africa; that those working to remember the dismembered continent were still fugitives in need of sanctuary from the storm troopers of destruction."

"Changes that seem reasonable, natural and basic," Armah says, "the academic world, far from performing as the rational part of a confused universe, seemed peculiarly denatured in its own right"

"Here, educated people use their intelligence to avoid risk, to accumulate power, money, privilege. We call it security. That makes our choices sound less cowardly, not so greedy"

"He seemed to have no weight at all. There he was winning prizes, playing for the school team, starting a study group. Yet he drew no feeling of importance from anything he did. He floated"

"The companionship risked attack from those ambitious todominate others. For it respected no social hierarchies, only the fellowship of shared ideals and work. Those whose powerwas based on force and fraud quickly enough understood that this society of intelligence and wotk, this society of life, the companionship of the ankh, would end their rule if it survived. They tried to destroy it"

"It was to work against such continuous disasters (induced by our interaction with the whites) that the companionship of the ankh was bom: an ellipse of life linking future with past through intelligent work in the present. This, [...] was no royal society. There were farmers and princes and potters in it, there were masons and cobblers and aristocrats and fishers in it, there were priests and scribes in it. They were in the companionship not because they wete peasants or princes or aristocrats or scribes, but because they agreed to work to its aims. [...] Because it was devoted to life, its chosen symbol was the oldest of Africa's life signs, the ankh"

"The present is were we get lost -- if we forget our past and have no vision of the future."

"Send me words of eloquence."

"He saw a fierce, nameless beast, half serpent and half forest cat. The beast had coiled itself around the body of the prince Appia, still alive, and Densu saw it bare its fangs to destroy Appia. In halfawake nightmare state he was in, Densu had only seen the body of the prince. But at the moment when the beast was on the point of sinking its fangs into his neck Densu saw Appia's face. It was his own."

"There would be no kings if some catastrophe brought all black people together. . . . And if we are such fools as to stand against the whites, they will grind us till we become less than impotent, less than grains of bad snuff tossing in a storm. That is the choice before every one of us. I myself, I have already chosen. And those who think like me have chosen. We shall be on the side of the whites. That is where the power lies. We have chosen power because we find impotence disgusting."

"Words are mere wind, but wind too has always been part of our work, this work of sowers for the future, the work of story-tellers, the work of masters in the arts of eloquence."

"I am saying this is seed time, far from harvest time."

"The present is where we get lost -- if we forget our past and have no vision of the future."

"If we do not help the whites, we shall be left by the roadside. And if we are such fools as to stand against the whites, they will grind us till we become less than impotent, less than grains of bad snuff tossing in a storm."

"Two thousand season, a thousand going into it, a second thousand crawling maimed from it, will teach you everything about enslavement, the destruction of souls, the killing of bodies, the infusion of violence into every breath, every drop, every morsel of your sustaining air, your water, your food. Till you come again upon the way."

"Isanusi sees Abena and, thinking she is alone, despairs. When the other 19 members of the community are revealed, Isanusi asks about Tawi and invites everyone to his small shelter. Isanusi asks them about their motivations for returning. They explain that they view their project as the “necessary work of preparation against destruction."

"To them that know their destination fatigue is a brief stranger merely passing in the glare of day."

"Purpose lends wings to the traveller."

"Dishonest words are the food for the rotten spirits."

"It is not easy to hide any kind of love and young love loathes disguise."

"A people losing sight of origins are dead. A people deaf to purposes are lost. Under fertile rain, in scorching sunshine there is no difference: their bodies are mere corpses, awaiting final burial."

"She spoke of those needing the white destroyers' shiny things to bring a feeling of worth into their lives, uttered their deep-rooted inferiority of soul, and called them lacking in the essence of humanity: womanhood in women, manhood in men. For which deficiency they must crave things to eke out their beings, things to fill holes in their spirits."

"No job is worth one’s life."

"I think all cultural output is a form of narrative. Somebody once said that culture is the sum total of stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. So, there's a very deep need to say something, to impart something. In these questions of colony, identity, territory, and history, there is a sense amongst many black practitioners that we've never had the space to tell our own stories, and part of the act of recuperating what has been lost is the desire to speak. In some senses, the Biennale has been a healing experience, a kind of closing over of a wound, of a void."

"I don't expect this exhibition to teach anybody anything, I don't think it's a didactic exhibition. That's not to say that people won't learn something from it. But I don't want any of the participants to be the ones dictating what the lesson is. It should be read from it. What they have done is put out an authentic, genuine, sometimes vulnerable story. What happens to that story is somehow beyond their control. What I hope that the audience takes from it is a kind of openness where previously, there might have been a closeness, or an unwillingness to engage with the other, not on our terms, but on their terms."

"It is an opportunity to talk to the rest of the world about Africa, and also to talk to Africa from here (Venice). The ability to be several things at once — traditional and modern, African and global, colonized and independent — is a strong thread running through the continent and the Diaspora. We’re used to having to think about resources, about switching on a light with no guarantee of electricity. We’re able to grapple with change. That capacity to overcome, to negotiate, to navigate ones’ surroundings is going to take center stage."

"When you are African, you speak to a world that has an existing view of who and what you are. You walk with this kind of label. So for me, the Biennale was an opportunity to both talk about the label, to confront it in a way, but to also show underneath how similar we are."

"I’ve always thought of ‘race’ as a powerfully creative category of exploration and expression. I was fed up trying to find a way to talk about identity, race and Africa in architecture that wasn’t only about poverty and ‘informality,’ a word I loathe."

"There’s something about the training of an architect that’s particularly suited to our time: it’s about bringing disparate pieces of information together in a framework. Architecture is about more than building buildings."

"Architects have the power to change the culture of how we build and how we think about resources."

"Succession is something you make, by constructing opportunities."

"Africa's unique context, which is both richly challenging and richly creative, means it's a powerful place from which to examine the issues that will dominate the next century – climate change, societal change, demographic change, new forms of governance, explosive urbanity."

"All futures are uncertain. We do our best to anticipate the future."

"The dominant voice has historically been a singular, exclusive voice, whose reach and power ignores huge swathes of humanity — financially, creatively, conceptually — as though we have been listening and speaking in one tongue only."

"Change is the one thing that everybody hollers for and longs for, but when it actually arrives, most people don't want it. It's a complex thing."

"You have to find yourself. When you meet him again, you have to know who you are. He's finding out who he is."

"The glow of delicioous tension coudn't be faked, not at any price. So when you leave, that's when you realise you've been living in a lie."

"How could you teach someone to survive? You pointed them in the right direction and hoped they'd swim, not sink. Waving, not drowning. There are more important things in life than individual happiness. It was an easy trap to fall into, mistaking a lack of self-direction for an expression of love."

"She would love it. Just as he loved her. He paused for a second, his fingers touching the door handle. He was in love. The realisation came to him quite suddenly."

"Guilt, Ameline discovered, was a terrible, unruly think, like toothache - dull nagging, persistent, never far from attention. Just when you got used to its rumbling, ruminating presence, it would lash out, stike you down, stio you dead in your tracks. The worst thing was, it was entirely unpredictable."