women-from-barbados

"I wanted to take slavery out of its niche."

"It’s not a black story, it’s not a white story. I want to remind people that this story belongs to us all."

"The reality is that most blacks have mixed blood."

"When I was doing research on George Ashby, I felt some empathy. There’s something brave about leaving the world you know. If you can make that empathetic journey, you can show a more complicated picture."

"I’ve always been interested in the epic story of how sugar, slavery and settlement shaped individual lives. I just had to find a way to tell it."

"I kept thinking this book tells a story that Britain does not want to remember."

"With the book, what I didn't want was for my conclusion to be about blame. I wanted it to be about acknowledgement and remembering, because those were the things that came out of it for me. And the fact is, we hold in ourselves so many histories. Normally so much of the narrative around race is to try to make people feel bad, rather than to make them do better. And actually, I'd just prefer them to do better."

"When I think of dangerous women I don’t think of women in whose presence I am in danger. When I think of dangerous women I think of women in whose presence the dangers of life finally meet their match. The kind of dangers I’m talking about are the hypocrisies, the patriarchy, the rules that are no rules at all but simply ways to cheat freedom and oppress those who dare sing out"

"Dangerous women show up sometimes, they disturb something"

"Many of the women on the island of my birth are like this. Their bow tongues launch arrows into the world and never miss their mark"

"Hating, after all, was a drier form of drowning."

"My mother’s cousins. Dangerous in the sense that they take up magnificent space, they know what it is to laugh even though they have cried too"

"I believed that the woman in front of me, frail and sitting, had eaten life, swallowed it completely whole. I imagine she danced, fell in love, made love, made children, made lives, and set people straight with her arrow-words. And you know, danger, in the way it manifests in these women, has never been more allowing or more generous"

"This is a new kind of meaning, this danger. A serious kind of love. For oneself, one’s kin; and what life is meant for. Dangerous. I didn’t say it then; I was too young and answered Doctor or Mother but ask me now what I wish to be when I grow up"

"My grandmother was one such woman. For very long she convinced me only of her sweetness until one day when I commented on how lovely she was she, holding a pot of boiling water, said Muh dear there was time when I throw this water on you soon as look as yuh. It would appear, I learnt, that my sweet grandmother once had a temper. Most dangerous women do, an important ability to access their rage whose existence alone runs counter to nursery rhymes we were fed about sugar and nice"

"The pieces of life, even when put together, assembled, never amount to the life itself."

"She understood what perhaps they are only just learning. That if you attempt to clean the messiness of life you end up scrubbing the life away from living. We can't excise joy from pain."

"Coming from across cultures, I believe I mostly value difference as opposed to being threatened by it... Over time as I gain in knowledge and become braver I hope to set more stories solidly in Nigeria or Barbados but you cannot, as a writer, fake familiarity with a place – I don’t think so anyway."

"My mother died when I was 23, and apart from the recent birth of my children, that is the most profound experience of my life. The grief that followed is a sharp memory of mine and I’ve often joked that the experience irrevocably marked my writing."

"Regardless of how many years I’ve lived in South Africa I think of myself as a product of three nations: Barbados, Nigeria and South Africa. Nigeria forms a very strong part of my sense of myself, my identity"

"Identity is complex. I love being a Nigerian, I love belonging to that identity even if my belonging is complex, due to my multiple identities and migratory life experience"