Immigrants To The United Kingdom

"That fire you lit our beacon to safe harbour in the islands."

"somebody who has confirmed my vision of literature is Jean Rhys...when I read Jean Rhys’s first novel, I never imagined that she was inventing. It fascinated me, I liked it because she breaks with the vision of woman in literature as a docile, noble creature, influenced by her family and everything. I read all of her works, and I thought that I knew her very well, until I finally realized that she had invented herself completely, so much so that she forbade them to write her biography because she didn’t want the public to see that she was different from the protagonists she had created. I was very pleased because I felt that rather than being a strange phenomenon I was somebody connected to another writer in a different country."

"Miss Rhys's work seems to me to be so very good, so vivid, so extraordinarily distinguished by the rendering of passion, and so true, that I wish to be connected with it."

"No one captured epic sadness as well as Jean Rhys, and none of her books captured it as unapologetically as Good Morning, Midnight"

"Wide Sargasso Sea has 190 pages of words, and each one was weighed and considered in relation to every other in a way that I have never seen except in a poem. It is a poem, and, to paraphrase its author, all her life was in it. How much this is literally true can be seen from her unfinished autobiography, Smile Please (1979). From the portrait of her mother and their antagonistic relationship, to her descriptions of Black people, and her own feelings of being an outcast among white and Black, even to the vegetation, the parrot, the patchwork quilt-the West Indian terrain of Wide Sargasso Sea is shown to be drawn from her own life there. Ms. Rhys, from childhood in the West Indies and adulthood in Europe, had many scores to settle and her creation of Antoinette was for the purpose of settling them. She wanted to burn down all that Rochester symbolized on her own behalf as a West Indian woman, and she wanted us to know. In the original Brontë story of Jane Eyre, the first Mrs. Rochester's maiden name was Mason. Ms. Rhys gives Antoinette another name so that both her mother and father are Creole and the European Mason is the stepfather. The name she gives her is Cosway or causeway, the bridge between the Third World and Europe, between one race and another, a causeway from defeat to victory. I believe it is a triumph for us as women, for all of us as citizens of the world."

"...Jean Rhys, I think, wrote the best West Indian novel...Wide Sargasso Sea."

"Jean Rhys maddens me because she's got this wonderful art-deco prose style, and all it does is paint the same picture of the thwarted woman who's got out of an unbearable relationship but who sees nothing before her except the possibility of another unbearable relationship which she'll be in just as long as she can bear it, and then she'll be back sitting in the corner of this cafe with some single glass of absinthe that she has to make last for four hours because she can only afford one glass. This is after leaving Mr. Mackenzie and before meeting Mr. Somebody Else. I think, "Oh, Jean, for God's sake" - this is so empty and so self-regarding, an exquisite piece of nothing. Just paper cutouts."

"(What moves you most in a work of literature?) I’m not yet the writer I aspire to be, but at my age, great books written by women over 60 give me hope. Diana Athill, Colette, Harriett Doerr, Marguerite Duras, Grace Paley, Elena Poniatowska, Jean Rhys, Mercé Rodoreda, to name but a few."

"One is born either to go with or to go against."

"She could give herself up to the written word as naturally as a good dancer to music or a fine swimmer to water. The only difficulty was that after finishing the last sentence she was left with a feeling at once hollow and uncomfortably full. Exactly like indigestion. ("The Insect World")"

"Ash had fallen. Perhaps it had fallen the night before or perhaps it was still falling. I can only remember in patches. I was looking at it two feet deep on the flat roof outside my bedroom. The ash and the silence. Nobody talked in the street, nobody talked while we ate, or hardly at all. I know now that they were all frightened. They thought our volcano was going up. (beginning of "Heat")"

"There is no control over memory. Quite soon you find yourself being vague about an event which seemed so important at the time that you thought you'd never forget it. Or unable to recall the face of someone whom you could have sworn was there for ever. On the other hand, trivial and meaningless memories may stay with you for life. I can still shut my eyes and see Victoria grinding coffee on the pantry steps, the glass bookcase and the books in it, my father's pipe-rack, the leaves of the sandbox tree, the wallpaper of the bedroom in some shabby hotel, the hairdresser in Antibes. It's in this way that I remember buying the pink milanese silk underclothes, the assistant who sold them to me and coming into the street holding the parcel. (beginning of "On Not Shooting Sitting Birds")"

"One October afternoon Mrs Baker was having tea with Miss Verney and talking about the proposed broiler factory in the middle of the village where they both lived. Miss Verney, who had not been listening attentively, said, 'You know Letty, I've been thinking a great deal about death lately. I hardly ever do, strangely enough.' (beginning of the story "Sleep It Off, Lady")"

"He was intimately acquainted with the police of three countries, and he sat alone in a small restaurant not far from the Boulevard Montparnasse sipping an apéritif moodily, for he disliked Montparnasse and detested solitude. He had left his native Montmartre to dine with a lady and had arrived twenty minutes late. She was not of those usually kept waiting and she had already departed. 'Sacré Floriane', muttered the Chevalier. He looked at a Swedish couple at the next table, at the bald American by the door, and at the hairy Anglo-Saxon novelist in the corner, and thought that they were a strange-looking lot, and exceedingly depressing. (Quelles gueules qu'ils ont, was how he put it.)..."

"She was free-spirited and committed to women's equality - not someone who would easily consent to a marriage arranged by her family in India"

"Nothing is more wearing morally, than a weak husband."

"Her triumph in the college Eisteddfod in 1914 prompted a burst of poetic creativity which has now been celebrated in the first ever collati0n of her verse."

"Bonarjee was also a supporter of women's suffrage"

"Social democracy’s blind spot for the international financial architecture and its power over domestic policy-making has had other consequences. Not only does neglect of the international system let globalized capital markets off the regulatory hook, but globalization has also led to the rise of economic nationalisms."

"In other words, we can – and to survive, we must – transform and even end within the next ten years the failed system of capitalism that now threatens to collapse earth’s life support systems and with them, human civilisation. We must replace that economic system with one that respects boundaries and limits; one that nurtures ‘soils, aquifers, rainfall, ice, the pattern of winds and currents, pollinators, biological abundance and diversity’;6 one that delivers social and economic justice."

"Globalization represents the tragic reversal of all that Keynes hoped to achieve at Bretton Woods: an international framework that would end nationalisms, international trade competition, high levels of domestic unemployment, low levels of aggregate demand and the consequent debt deflation. It was an attempt by Keynes and other economists to prevent the return of nationalisms and fascism by developing policies that increased domestic demand not by boosting exports and raising demand externally but by raising living standards at home: an inter-national system that would restore policy autonomy to democratic states and stability to the world’s economies."

"The reality is that, today, all states are embedded in, governed by and subject to the international system of mobile, volatile, private financial markets – a system that has indebted and impoverished the many and raised political tensions, as reflected in the rise of nationalism. Millions of voters understand the nature of globalization, even while dimly aware of the monetary, fiscal or trade theories on which the system is built. This public awareness explains why some electorates have backed the election of “strong men” – politicians who offer “protection” from the very global markets that have stripped economies of jobs and income, while enriching rentier capitalists."

"Trees, they die dead like people too. They need care too. The earth around us needs care. We come from earth, we eat from earth, and one day we must go back to earth, so why are we treating it so bad?"

"I don’t want to write trauma for trauma’s sake. I want to write it in a way that leads to empathy. To action."

"It is so critical to understand that speaking up transcends the ability to help just the person speaking up, but knowing that whenever we use our voices, we are doing so for many others who have suffered the same experiences or injustices. It is about starting crucial conversations that would hopefully lead to positive change. It is about refusing to be complacent, to accept what is seen as the norm."

"It’s so heartbreaking that we’re killing talent. We’re killing intelligence. We’re killing future leaders. We’re killing brains, inventors. We’re killing so much by not allowing these girls to be educated."

"When you get up every day, I want you to remind yourself that tomorrow will be better than today. That you are a person of value. That you are important."

"You must do good for other peoples, even if you are not well, even if the whole world around you is not well."

"We all be speaking different because we all are having different growing-up life, but we can all be understanding each other if we just take the time to listen well."

"Not his-story. My own will be called her-story."

"“My mama say education will give me a voice. I want more than just a voice, Ms. Tia. I want a louding voice,” I say. “I want to enter a room and people will hear me even before I open my mouth to be speaking. I want to live in this life and help many people so that when I grow old and die, I will still be living through the people I am helping.“"

"I want to tell her that God is not a cement building of stones and sand. That God is not for all that putting inside a house and locking Him there. I want her to know that the only way to know if a person find God and keep Him in their heart is to check how the person is treating other people, if he treats people like Jesus says--with love, patience, kindness, and forgiveness."

"Now I know that speaking good English is not the measure of intelligent mind and sharp brain. English is only a language, like Yoruba and Igbo and Hausa. Nothing about it is so special, nothing about it makes anybody have sense."

"Who knows what else tomorrow will bring? So, I nod my head yes, because it is true, the future is always working, always busy unfolding better things, and even if it doesn’t seem so sometimes, we have hope of it."

"“Your schooling is your voice, child. It will be speaking for you even if you didn’t open your mouth to talk. It will be speaking till the day God is calling you come.” That day, I tell myself that even if I am not getting anything in this life, I will go to school. I will finish my primary and secondary and university schooling and become teacher because I don’t just want to be having any kind voice . . . I want a louding voice."

"I feel a free that I didn't feel in long time. And when I smile, it climb from inside my stomach and spread itself on my teeth."

"If it takes two people to make a baby, why only one person, the woman, is suffering when the baby is not coming? Is it because she is the one with breast and the stomach for being pregnant? Or because of what? I want to ask, to scream, why are the women in Nigeria seem to be suffering for everything more than men?"

"Write your truth, Ms. Tia say. Your truth."

"“Your dead mother and me, we are age-mates. God forbid for me to share my husband with my own child. God forbid that I am waiting for you to finish with my husband before I can enter his room. Ah, you will suffer in this house. Ask Khadija, she will tell you that I am a wicked woman. That my madness is not having cure.”"

"“When you begin to born your children, you will not be too sad again,” she say. “When I first marry Morufu, I didn’t want to born children. I was too afraid of having a baby so quick, afraid of falling sick from the load of it. So I take something, a medicine, to stop the pregnant from coming. But after two months, I say to myself, ‘Khadija, if you don’t born a baby, Morufu will send you back to your father’s house.’ So I stop the medicine and soon I born my first girl, Alafia. When I hold her in my hands for the first time, my heart was full of so much love. Now, my children make me laugh when I am not even thinking to laugh. Children are joy, Adunni. Real joy.”"

"She open her eyes, give me a sad smile. “I wish I am a man, but I am not, so I do the next thing I can do. I marry a man.”"

"I am leaving Ikati. This is what I been wanting all my life, to leave this place and see what the world outside is looking like, but not like this. Not with a bad name following me. Not like a person that the whole village is looking for because they think she have kill a woman. Not with one half of my heart with Kayus and the other half with Khadija. I hang my head down, feeling a thick, heavy cloth as it is covering me. The thick cloth of shame, of sorrow, of heart pain."

"When she come out, she draw deep breath and her chest, wide like blackboard, is climbing up and down, up and down. It is as if this woman is using her nostrils to be collecting all the heating from the outside and making us to be catching cold. I am standing beside Mr. Kola, and his body is shaking like my own. Even the trees in the compound, the yellow, pink, blue flowers in the long flowerpot, all of them too are shaking."

"I didn’t tell Ms. Tia that I ever marry Morufu or about all the things he did to me in the room after he drink Fire-Cracker. I didn’t tell her about what happen to Khadija. I didn’t tell her because I have to keep it inside one box in my mind, lock the box, and throw the key inside river of my soul. Maybe one day, I will swim inside the river, find the key."

"I tear to pieces the paper, and throw it to the floor. Then I swim deep inside the river of my soul, find the key from where it is sitting, full of rust, at the bottom of the river, and open the lock. I kneel down beside my bed, close my eyes, turn myself into a cup, and pour the memory out of me."

"“Fifteen years ago, I was selling cheap materials from my boot, going from place to place, looking for customers. I wasn’t born into wealth. I have worked hard for my success. I fought for it. It wasn’t easy, especially because my husband, Chief, he didn’t have a job. If you want to be like me in business, Adunni, you will need to work very hard. Rise about whatever life throws at you. And never, ever give up on your dreams. Do you understand?”"

"But there are words in my head, many things I want to say. I want to tell Ms. Tia I am sorry I made her come here. I want to ask why the doctor didn’t come too. Why didn’t he come and get a beating like his wife? If it takes two people to make a baby, why only one person, the woman, is suffering when the baby is not coming? Is it because she is the one with breast and the stomach for being pregnant? Or because of what? I want to ask, to scream, why are the women in Nigeria seem to be suffering for everything more than the men?"

"Kike picks up her basket, sets it on her head, leaves it to balance by itself. The girls in our village learn how to do this from when they are first growing two teeth. They know how to use every part of their body to work so that their hand can be free to do even more work."

"“In our land, a sad wife is better than a happy woman with no husband.”"

"That’s the disgusting reality about the human ability to adapt. At first the shock, the repulsion, is all in 3D — sights and sounds and smells. You recoil and gag and wish for a bath and cry at the devastation. Time passes. You live in it. You spend time in it. You blend, and everything fizzles to normalcy, and that which once repulsed slowly becomes natural, acceptable if you do nothing. That, I realize, is what culture is: doing things a certain way until you get used to it."