Women Authors

"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."

"the church has done more to destroy people in the Caribbean than any other institution."

"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."

"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."

"Bapsi Sidhwa's voice - comic, serious, subtle, always sprightly, is an important one to hear."

"Sidhwa's triumph lies in creating characters so rich in hilarious and accurate detail, so alive and active, that long after one has closed the book, they continue to perform their extraordinary and wonderful feats before our eyes."

"One of the finest responses made to the horror of the division of the subcontinent."

"There is no comparison between what Partition was to what today is. Partition was a time of too much chaos. I am the only old woman in this room who remembers that time. I was seven or eight. And I remember the roar of the mob from a distance. I couldn’t make out the words. But later, I was able to decipher the “Hare Hare Maha Dev”, the “Allahu Akbar” and the “Sat Siriye Kaal”. Even back then, I could understand that they are killing each other. I knew it was evil. And there was no comparison to what’s happening today."

"You cannot write a non-political book anywhere in the world. Because politics colours each character’s way of thinking, way of relating to other people and so on. You see, each time there has been a regime change in Pakistan, I have felt myself changing. During the time of Bhutto, the women around us felt very energised. I was joining women’s committees, we were doing progressive things. And when Zia came, we sort of wilted and all the energy just drained away from us. Then Benazir came, and we all felt different. So it influenced us, as people, as characters. It influences how men look at us. You see? So the dynamics between people change. It’s all related to politics, to culture, to your environment. It all influences you."

"Globalization has its advantages. To be translated and read in several countries is immensely satisfying; after all a writer - this writer at least - is driven by the impulse to communicate. Conversely, globalization exposes one to wonderful writers from diverse cultures."

"A ground-breaking writer, whose works have lost none of their freshness, humour or heart"

"What is happening with the Talibanization is really frightening [in the FATA and NWFP] – it’s scary because the brunt seems to fall on the women. When people talk of religion they often think in terms of “a woman shouldn’t do this or shouldn’t do that.” It’s not only Islam or in Islamic countries – in America the issue becomes the “woman doesn’t have right over her body,” etc. And in Pakistan, we go through a cycle of hope and despair. Right now we are in a place where we don’t know where we are headed…"

"[about the Partition of India] The roar of the mobs appeared to be a constant in my life; even as a 7 year old I knew it was an evil that threatened our lives. I couldn’t make out the words although I vaguely realized they were shouting religious slogans as they set fire to houses and harmed people. The memory of smoke and fire and fear and the sudden appearance of hoards of bedraggled refugees in my neighborhood are still vivid."

"My world is compressed. Warris Road, lined with rain gutters, lies between Queens Road and Jail Road: both wide, clean, orderly, streets at the affluent fringes of Lahore."

"Bapsi Sidhwa has blossomed into Pakistan's best writer of fiction in English...Cracking India deserves to be ranked as amongst the most authentic and best on the partition of India.""

"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."

"Writer’s narratives are woven into the fabric of life and history – it makes people aware of where they stand in relation to each other and the rest of the world. The word, as we understand it, may mutate, but it will always count."

"The Parsi community has been on the brink of extinction ever since I can remember, but it seems to be holding its own and still flourishing in Mumbai, Karachi, and recently in America and Britain. Of course, Parsi youth are marrying outside the community and many of the children born to these marriages are not accepted as Parsi, but this too is changing. I think this dodo bird of world religions will continue to exist -- at least I hope so!"

"Basically where you come from in your writing is what you have experienced yourself, have internally absorbed as part of your adventure of life and I think that’s the best you can do… is writing about things that you know intimately."

"racism is not a white problem; it's a problem of the world."

"One of the great comic novels of the 20th century"

"A woman's life can be divided thus: the age when she dances but does not dare to waltz — it is the spring; the age when she dances and dares to waltz — it is summer; the age when she dances but prefers to waltz — it is autumn; finally, when she dances no longer — it is winter, that rigorous winter of life."

"It is not easy to be a widow: one must reassume all the modesty of girlhood, without being allowed to even feign its ignorance."

"Love with men is not a sentiment, but an idea."

"We are only vulnerable and ridiculous through our pretensions."

"Self-interest, that leprosy of the age, attacks us from infancy, and we are startled to observe little heads calculate before knowing how to reflect."

"It has been said that society is for the happy, the rich; we should rather say the happy have no need of it."

"Hope, alas! is our waking dream."

"Infidelity, like death, admits of no degrees."

"I do not believe in virtue, but I do believe in innocence. They are very different. Innocence is ignorance."

"Car, vois-tu, chaque jour je t'aime davantage, Aujourd'hui plus qu'hier et bien moins que demain."

"Our instinct inspires us, — warns us, our intelligence scents out what our reason docs not discover, for instinct is the nose of the mind."

"Les esprits dont la mission est de détruire les préjugés, sont précisément ceux qui ont la plus de préjugés, et qui les professent avec le plus d'aveuglement."

"O, how true it is there can be no tête-à-tête where vanity reigns!"

"Good taste is the modestly of the mind; that is why it cannot be either imitated or acquired."

"Aimer qui vous aime, admirer qui vous admire, en un mot, être l'idole de son idole! ... C'est trop, c'est dépasser les joies humaines, c'est déruber le feu du ciel!"

"Quand on veut dessécher un marais, on ne fait pas en voter les grenouilles!"

"For ages happiness has been represented as a huge precious stone, impossible to find, which people seek for hopelessly. It is not so — happiness is a mosaic, composed of a thousand little stones, which, separately and of themselves, have little value, but which, united with art form a graceful design. Set the mosaic carefully, and you have a beautiful ornament; learn to understand intelligently the passing enjoyments which chance, which your character gives you, or which Heaven sends you, and you have an agreeable existence. Why always look to the horizon when there are such fine roses in the garden you live in?"

"Treasures are not for youth; at twenty years one does not know how to be rich, or to be loved."

"There is only one proper way to wear a beautiful dress: to forget you are wearing it."

"…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."

"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."

"…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)"

"…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."

"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."

"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."