women-from-jamaica

"It felt pretty good. I mean, it’s a bittersweet feeling because usually we’re one of the last events at the championship and now we’re one of the first. I was like, ‘Okay, this is different, but I like it.’ Got it out of the way, got the rust off, the dust off, and, you know, did what I came out here to do"

"It’s an honour to win this award and I’m humbled to accept it. It will keep me motivated as I continue to work towards my targets"

"The season was a tough one, but we went out there with our heart and our soul and we put on a show"

"You get a lot of motivation when you achieve your first victory of the season"

"Even though the achilles injury was challenging and meant I was unable to sprint or even walk at times, I continued to work. To come back from that and achieve what I did is a surreal feeling and I’m happy and proud"

"Every champion has struggles that they’ve been through. There will always be obstacles and you have to learn to hurdle them – you’re never too old to learn new stuff. I think I’ve learned a lot over the past year, and the main thing is that I’ve learned to listen to my body. Like any athlete who wants to be a champion, you tend to want to train through your pain, but sometimes it’s better to rest and listen to your body, which will help you in the long run. That’s one of the mistakes I’ve made in the past; I’d try to push through the pain"

"I told myself that I want to be the greatest female sprinter, so I am just going to focus on what the future holds for me."

"I would say I am very, very proud, but I cannot dwell on the past. Even though it’s very special, it’s memories. I cannot just sit and say ‘OK, I’m a double Olympic champion, I’m a five-time Olympic gold medallist’. I have to continue working because my motivation is to be even better"

"I know Usain (Bolt) has won Laureus awards before, so to bring this trophy back home to the Caribbean, also in Jamaica, is very special"

"Process is training hard and trusting in God. That’s all it is. Trusting in God, trusting in the training that I put in, trusting in the abilities that I have, and believing without a doubt that everything will work out for the good of those who love the Lord and were called for his purpose. If that’s me, that’s me"

"The younger girls are running really fast. I’d like to think I have a lot of experience under my belt, and so if I need to call on that experience, I feel like I can, but at the end of the day, you know, it’s just to do my best every time and let the chips fall where they may"

"You know, I try to keep a clear mind and a loose body, I try to focus on what I can control. I know I can do all the hard work that’s possible but it’s God who gives me the strength to keep going and provides the opportunities and I’m just really grateful, and I keep that in mind and just enjoy the process. I mean, it’s not going to last forever, so while I’m in it, I enjoy what I’m doing"

"It felt good, the start felt really good. I definitely would like to get hurdles eight, nine and 10 a little bit more efficient in the next round, because everybody’s coming all guns blazing in the semis and so if I want to make it to the final, I have to be as sharp as possible"

"I will sprint but I don’t like it. It’s so difficult, I tell people every day I give sprinters a lot of credit because whenever I sprint I feel so much pain."

"I don’t put pressure on myself."

"If you want the help, go get the help."

"I am not scared to say I go for help when I want help, because I think that should be on top of everybody’s list."

"I don’t like sprinting."

"We have a word - I don't know if you have anything like it in America - we say that something "clide" you. It gets so strong that you get sick of it. That's how I used to feel about black American literature, especially that of the men, because it was very defeatist. It's a certain something very much like fundamentalist Christianity. It never actually looked at internal blame, which is as important as external blame, because if you can't take responsibility you're not human and you're not adult and you're not able then to ask for a share in things."

"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."

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

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

"[about the character Hyacinth in The Unbelonging] the reason she's an outsider here [in England] is because she never ever made a life here. She lived there in the past, but time continued."

"because I have written a book which actually goes to the heart of how poor people are kept in control - which is by the church actually doing the job for the government - people are resentful."

"It struck me that memory is actually quite negative in lots of ways because it stops you from creating new, sustaining memories as a kind of other to survive with...It's...as though if you don't resolve all that luggage you carry around with you, it somehow is going to come back and haunt you."

"[about writing a character who works as a cleaner] you've got to look beyond the mop because there's a human being there; and until you can accept the fact that people are people and stop seeing people through the eyes of occupation segregation then you are always going to be prepared to step on people."

"(Q: Your first three novels are powerful indictments of racism, Joan. Yet you've gotten some negative responses from the British for them.) Riley: I think because I'm writing about their backyard. It's okay for people from elsewhere to write even similar things, but it's not right to write about British systems in the same way."

"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."

"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."

"I've always been very unhappy about leaders. I see my brother with his cap in his hand, with his head bowed just like my uncles-probably like my grandfathers and my great-grandfathers-and he's saying, "Mr. Manley, liberate us, man." Then I think, But, you're not liberated. And that's because we look always to somebody else. I never write about the leader. It's always the antihero because the antihero is the salt of the earth. And if this earth is to have any chance, it is the antihero we are going to have to look to."

"I started to write because I was getting so angry that I thought that I was going to explode, because the images on the television I was seeing about Jamaica were deliberately misleading images. It was at the time that Jamaica was going through a very bad patch, you know. It was fermenting; there was lots of destabilization. I saw it from the other side...from the mean streets of Kingston. On television they would only spin the shacks and they would say, "This is Jamaica." And of course the way it was being portrayed didn't happen."

"I think I'm an odd kind of Caribbean writer in the sense that I don't come out of the rich, middle-class elite who are the traditional writers. It's almost like cloning themselves, you know. So what they write is very much their image of the world. There's never been a voice that's been a poor voice, and I've never, ever seen myself reflected in Jamaican fiction. To some extent in Olanda Paterson, but very little. All of them, including Olive Senior, can't get into the psyche [of poor people] because they don't know it and it's an alien place, something they are afraid of. And so what happens is that they create a distorted image of people like me and my family."

"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."

"Joan Riley has an extraordinary ability to portray pain and loneliness...her novels become powerful parables of the creation and destruction of illusions... It is this quality which steels Joan Riley's work and the lives of her characters."

"I think that what Erna Brodber is doing is wonderful because she's coming from that extremely spiritual dimension which is so powerful."

"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)"

"…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)"

"not only do I want people to know the history of the underclass, but I want them to go investigate. So, engaging with my work should send you into further investigations into knowledge. So, it’s a stimulus to knowledge search. (2015)"

"…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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"…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."

"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 suppose the main thing about me is that I don't feel or see any disjunction between life and land or between living and landscape; I don't make those separations at all. I imagine that I'm like that because I grew up in deep rural Jamaica and I was conscious from earliest childhood about the power of plants."

"Somebody, I forget who it was, said that I was like a literary archeologist, which pleased me because that is how I look at it myself."

"OS: There is a certain imperative about what I write and how I write, and I'm going to follow that imperative regardless. (KD: And that imperative is prompted by...) OS: the desire to explain. It's the why, the who and the why. I am driven by those issues."

"I was always going to be an artist or a writer, because I was talented in those areas, but also, I now think, because they held out the seductive whiff of freedom. I was always in silent rebellion against the conformity and authoritarianism of the world I was born in. (format 2006)"

"She let herself out by the back door and carefully shut it behind her, and ran through the short cut that led to the main road, hoping that no one would see. (beginning of "Discerner of Hearts")"