Andaiye

"For us, here, a key aspect of anti-austerity organizing we would need to take back up is the search for an alternative economic vision with people and nature at its center; and by putting people at the center I mean at the center of decision-making about economic development."

"I'm always being accused of not feeling strongly enough about the location of the Black person. I don't know why you can't feel more than one thing at the same time, or why you can't see out of both your eyes. I perfectly well feel the location of the Black person. That doesn't stop me from seeing other people's location."

"My strongest memory of both Ratoon and New World is the excitement of being part of a world of ideas, because, after all, my other world is one that has increasingly moved far away from the ferment and enthusiasm of the fifties to something that behaves as if there's no way out."

"One of the things that strikes me about now is that if you talk to Indo-Guyanese and Afro-Guyanese they can tell you the same story as two stories; and it's now crystallized even into what (television] stations we look at. Afro-Guyanese get their news from some stations, and Indo-Guyanese get their news from others. That first started for me in the 1960s: these two different stories from these two people living in the same place."

"if you want to talk about “empowering” any group of people, it is because you believe or know that something is taking power away from that group...For me, then, the first question is, what are the factors that stop young people in Guyana today from developing or using their power."

"I hated a lot of things about the Guyana in which I grew up, so I am not romanticising when I say that in spite of all that was wrong with it, it was as a child in that Guyana that I learned you could change your place. And one important reason was, that I grew up when men and women whom you came to know only as belonging to this party or that party, or this race or that race, joined together when they themselves were still young people in their twenties, to show that “ordinary” people could transform their world. That we didn’t have to be a colony. That people, poor and some not poor, women and men, from the races that were despised, could organise together and refuse to stay in their place."

"Sometime soon, some of you have to try walk across the divisions between you and join yourselves together to become the power you can be. Only then, whichever party or other group you belong to, can you work out your demands (not your requests) as young people, work out how you will make them happen, and make them happen."

"Andaiye was the most important Caribbean woman intellectual-activist of the generation of Walter Rodney. Her subtle, loving and angry intelligence is rescued here, and with it the memory of the political struggles of the 1970s and 80s in which a critical feminism emerged from the ruins of the Black Power moment"

"Her death was the loss of a dedicated anti-racist, a valued sister, and a friend we loved...Andaiye's anthology, published posthumously, is a great and unique gift to the movement."

"...this volume will occupy a vaunted place alongside the writings of C. L. R. James, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Sylvia Wynter, Édouard Glissant, George Lamming, Kamau Brathwaite, Stuart Hall, and Walter Rodney"

"in Andaiye’s departure we mourn Guyana’s conscience...Part of what Andaiye has done over the years is to point these political giants to a human and humane mode of conflict resolution, which has always been in their power and even at this stage lies in their power...In the tributes paid to Andaiye in the Guyana media were many regrets that she had not been suitably, or at all, recognised or honoured by governments. What has hurt the country is not the failure of governments serially to accord some spectacular honour to this wiry gift of the ancestors to our age. It is their failure as one commentator expressed it to attempt, to adopt her praxis. She not only stood forever with those of all races threatened with marginalisation. She set examples of a healthy and sincere respect for the Other of the spirit that can achieve the necessary reconciliation and of respect for difference and of cooperation across differences. She achieved the status of a global mentor of her time. May perpetual recognition attend her memory."