Women Authors

"I did not want to express myself, from abroad, where I was participating in an academic seminar, on the reasons that led to my resignation."

"My book focuses on racism, a subject that concerns both women and men. It is aimed at a broader audience than just women. The injustices suffered by women may be partly the subject of my next work.But I think that rather than complaining, women would do better to learn how to defend themselves effectively, and for that, they need to study and better understand men, their weaknesses, their aspirations—in short, what goes on in men's heads."

"Racism is not inevitable. One only has to take the case of the United States of America, the history of this country, the Civil War, the abolition of slavery... The case of the United States is very significant for the history of racism and racial segregation. Martin Luther King fought and many other Black people still do...The Kuklux Klan existed and still exists, but over the years, it is losing ground although some Black Americans continue to be victims of racism. The struggle continues. We have known Black American ambassadors...For me, all this symbolizes in some way the decline of racism, a little more than just a glimmer of hope. Who knows how long it will take for South Africa to resemble New York where today, Whites and Blacks rub shoulders, mixing indifferently?."

"As a feminist, I am not gentle with women who rely on a man to make them happy. I am talking about those, illiterate or not, who take their body for a commodity to be sold and naturally do not stop powdering and dusting their body so that the commodity is presentable to the man who wants to attribute some value to it and buy it."

"Our unique makeup as women makes it very difficult and challenges our ability to function easily in a male dominated environment."

"Every Ghanaian has the ability to invest but procrastination is what is keeping everyone from attaining financial independence."

"a mother, to be able to achieve success in a professional job there is a fundamental need to be supported by your husband and free more roles on the domestic chores."

"My drive has always been to exceed expectation there, by not just meeting targets but exceeding it."

"You cannot say you want to sacrifice career over family or sacrifice family for your career. You’ve got to balance it and that is what I did."

"I was born into a huge family; we’re 63 in number. And growing up, I had to defend myself from my brothers and that taught me how to stand up for myself in the outside world."

"For you to be able to create wealth, you need to be able to plan, you need to be disciplined, you need to have information and also you need to monitor. Without discipline, you can never be a millionaire."

"Interviewer: Anything else you would like to share? Billene Seyoum:I consider myself a feminist and not afraid to claim the word despite the perception it draws in people’s minds. In this regard, I encourage people to seek to understand before concluding."

"Interviewer: What leisure time activities are you involved with? (You are also known for writing poetry and engaging in activities that promote gender equality) Billene Seyoum:I absolutely love hiking and trekking and seize opportunities to do so whenever I can. I consistently write poetry and now perform every month. However, writing poetry is not a leisurely activity for me – rather it is a continuous artistic exhalation to that endured and experienced in the inner realm. [Billene has been writing since the age of 12]."

"Senedu’s ascent to Parliament can rightly be considered one of her more extraordinary accomplishments."

"Senedu Gebru was known as a strict disciplinarian and fierce advocate of women’s rights."

"She may not have been Ethiopia’s first feminist in a sense but she certainly gave voice to the women of Ethiopia like they had never had before."

"Throughout most of her life, Senedu had always been an avid reader."

"It may be that the issues I have raised today as the lone woman here, have been defeated. But one day there shall be many of us standing here and you will listen to our voices then!"

"History may remember the late Honorable Dr. Senedu Gebru foremost as the first woman elected to Parliament, but her contributions to this nation were so many and varied, she could rightly be considered Ethiopia’s Renaissance Woman of the 20th century."

"I found Tsehaytu by coincidence in Rotterdam, Holland, discouraged and not playing much anymore. I build her a new krar and after some practice sessions, we decided to record the CD together. There isn¹t really much Eritrean music recorded, from those days."

"At the time Tsehaytu played music on her own, though she was a woman. On her own she was equal to any band. This has earned her a good name up to this moment. She was courageous and disliked slavishness and did not bow down to anyone. She sang many traditional, love and nationalist songs.Said Jaber Mahmoud"

"But by 1973, the political situation got worse. People didn’t feel safe anymore, they felt uneasy and scared. These were difficult times in Asmara."

"I admire Tsehaytu not only because of her songs but also for the important role she played in the national struggle. I am beyond words to describe the beauty of her voice in spite of her age."

"My favourite song is Freweini. It is a song about Eritrea, but it also tells about a mother. Love is always loved, one doesn’t forget it. But love for one country is incomparable. A mother and your own country is basically the same."

"My aunt once told us that five krars had been made in Port Sudan; one stayed there, one was sent to Egypt and my aunt brought three to Asmara. One for the legend Ato Berhane Segid, one for Hollanda, the daughter of Halima Konti, and the third on my aunt kept for herself and stored it above the cupboard in our home. My niece Meeraf was very tall and we always asked her to get the krar down for us. So she would fetch the instrument and also she knew how to tune it and all the kids at home would play on it one by one"

"Strangely, all four portrayals contain both truth and lies. Mauritius is like that. Contradictions and extremes""

"I had just received the Ouest France Étonnants Voyageurs prize. Between that moment and my first book, Solstices, forty years had passed. But writing has been my constant, my life, my reason for being. I can't imagine what I would have been without it. It has made me an observer of the world, of people, of hearts. A sometimes amazed, often terrified witness of the world as we experience it, as we shape it."

"About twenty books, as many translations, decades of work and passion. My whole life is here, there is no need for other images. My face will in no way express everything that is here. From the first published text, La cité Atlee, in a 1973 anthology, and the first collection of short stories, Solstices, published in 1977, to the latest novel, Manger l'autre, published by Grasset in 2018. It is a long, slow journey to the heart of words, sentences, dreams, obsessions, violence, and silence."

"It is a country invented by colonization. Perhaps this fact makes for extremes, in that there is not the moderating influence of a millennial history. Or maybe it is ‘cyclones’, those visitations that build and build and then wreak havoc, from time to time."

"It all begins with them, the source, the origins, this intimate light that has always guided us, my sisters, Soorya and Salonee, and me. My parents are about twenty and twenty-eight years old in this photo. They were lovers of the arts. This is how Soorya became a dancer, Salonee a painter, and I a writer. Saraswaty and Balgopal Nirsimloo were open doors to the future, imbued with humanism, respect for others, and remarkable modesty. What we owe them is impossible to measure."

"The self-proclaimed Libyan National Army (LNA) must reveal the fate and whereabouts of Siham Sergiwa, a Libyan politician and women’s rights defender who was violently abducted from her home one year ago today, Amnesty International said."

"Siham Sergiwa has not been heard from since the terrifying night she was taken away from her family. Her fate is a chilling reminder of the consequences of peaceful criticism in today’s Libya"

"“We are urging the LNA to put an end to the anguish of Siham Sergiwa’s family and immediately reveal her fate and whereabouts. Abductions and enforced disappearances have become a chilling hallmark of the conflict in Libya, with civilians left at the mercy of militias and armed groups.”"

"“Siham Sergiwa’s case shows that no one, even a well-known politician, is safe in Libya."

"... one feels compelled to admit the justice of Paul Bourget's classification when he places Mrs. Craven in the pious school of novelists. ... From the material point of view her efforts were happily very successful, some of her stories having had an extensive sale. Yet it would be a daring speculation to assert either that she created her reading public or robbed the realistic writers of theirs. Most probably she wrote for a public which already existed—the pious Catholic world in France—and in so doing has laid herself open to the stigma of having "written books for girls." The best which can be said of Mrs. Craven's novels is, that they are conventional romances written by a clever woman."

"Le Récit d’une sœur, qui est pour la plus grande partie la correspondance authentique et intime d’une famille bien connue, fit grand bruit. Peu de livres de femme se sont vendus à un aussi grand nombre d’exemplaires. « Ce livre est un calice de douleurs ! » Elle a été très critiquée par Armand de Pontmartin et Barbey d’Aurevilly. Ce dernier aurait voulu que le Récit d’une sœur fût l’unique livre de Mme Craven. « La plume qui l’a écrit devrait être brisée, a-t-il dit, comme, dans certains pays, le verre avec lequel on a trinqué avec le roi. Le verre funèbre plein de délices et d’angoisses dans lequel Mme Craven a bu à la mémoire des siens ne devait plus servir à personne. Est-ce que le roi de Thulé, après avoir pleuré dans sa coupe, ne la jeta pas à la mer ? » The Tale of a Sister, which is for the most part the authentic and intimate correspondence of a well-known family, caused a great stir. Few women's books have sold such a large number of copies. "This book is a chalice of sorrows!" It was criticized in depth by and . The latter would have liked the Tale of a Sister to be Mrs. Craven's only book. "The pen that wrote it should be broken," he said, "like, in some countries, the glass with which one toasts with the king. The funeral glass full of delights and anguish from which Mrs. Craven drank in memory of her family should no longer be of use to anyone. Did not the , after weeping in his cup, throw it into the sea?""

"It used to be the custom in France to spend the whole of the summer in the country and the winter in town. By , or, at the latest, at the end of December, the chateaux were deserted, and the hotels of the filled with fashionable inhabitants. This is no longer the case. People remain in their country houses until nearly the end of winter, and though the Paris season encroaches a little on the spring, it is over by the beginning of June, and the time devoted to social enjoyment thus considerably abridged. Whether this change is for the best is a question not easily solved."

"The doctor rubbed his spectacles and opened his snuff-box with a great noise, as the young girl made the light repast, which soon brought the color to her cheek again, or, at least, the usual color, for her face was, ordinarily, very pale. Large eyes, grave and gentle, gray rather than blue, shadowed by lashes as black as her hair, made her face singular and striking. Yet, in spite of this singularity, in spite of her paleness, the delicacy of her features, and her slender figure with its willowy grace, if one wished to describe in two words the general impression produced by the aspect of Fleurange d'Yves, one would have chosen these: simplicity and strength."

"There are few accounts of Madagascar written at the turn of the first and second millennia AD. Buzurg Ibn Shahriyar, a tenth-century Persian sailor and writer, collected stories from sailors in port towns on the Persian Gulf which suggest that Persian contacts with Madagascar may have existed then. The name Madagascar did not exist at that time but names like "Wak-wak" or "Qumr"/"Komr" may have referred to the island."

"Chinese ceramics in the collection of the Museum of Art and Archaeology of the University of Antananarivo."

"A major contribution to African and Indian Ocean archaeology."

"Our study of high-resolution satellite images revealed the Teniky site was much larger than previously known. It showed there were more terraces and stone walls on a hill 2km to the west. This led us to take a closer look, hoping to get a better sense of who had lived there and when."

"What we found at Teniky"

"There is no other archaeological site like Teniky in Madagascar. So, the question arises as to what group of people settled there, far inland, and carved the niches and chambers in the cliff walls about 1,000 years ago. The presence of imported ceramics indicates that they took part in the Indian Ocean trade networks at the time but doesn't tell us where they came from."

"Who were the people who lived at Teniky?"

"دلم گرفته است"

"ترا میخواهم و دانم که هرگز"

"...هوس در دیدگانش شعله افروخت"

"You will go into the night accompanied by the moon to read them to children that you meet along each street."

"I did not want to be insensitive to my culture, I did not want to be insulting, but I wanted to be as honest and realistic as possible."