Ambassadors

"in giving birth to Gabriel, I gave birth to myself as a mother-a role for which I was unprepared but which I try to carry out as best I can. Mother and poetess do not rhyme, but they go together rather well."

"I can say with Amado Nervo that "I loved and was loved and the sun caressed my face." But all of that happened in the School of Philosophy and Letters, in the halls that led from one classroom to another, from a lesson poorly noted, from a tutorial en route to a professional degree."

"I have confidence not so much in my own abilities as in the generosity of everyone else."

"Hablo no por la boca de mis heridas."

"palabras que los vientos dispersan como pétalos"

"The march, as you know, was not only to express their dissatisfaction but also to begin a strike against household chores-those jobs so sui generis, so unique that they are only noticed when left undone"

"Possibilities were available to me, doors were opened to me, all because of one government official's concept of justice and the consistency of his desire to see the law equally applied. I refer to Lázaro Cárdenas."

"Of course, there have been commentaries. And, of course, the gamut of these commentaries has been exactly what one might expect. From foolish outbursts and impudent plays on words to the rending of garments in the face of this new apocalyptic sign that heralds the decadence and perhaps even the death of our civilization and culture."

"Outside the family circle, friendship evolves into good will. In the workplace this allows us to manage without despotism, and to follow orders without resentment. In society we will learn to intervene without violence, but also without servility. And we will be able to look beyond the geographical borders of our own country, our customs, our race, our religious beliefs, and our political ideology to see that humanity is an attribute of all mankind."

"You may not be interested in hearing it, but I want to talk about it. To talk about them, rather: the forty-five years (exactly the number I have lived) as of today. I don't want to hide anything or misrepresent the date, like one covers up a gray hair or a wrinkle. No, each day has been worth what it has cost, and much more."

"I warn you that we Mexican women are taking due note of what is happening to our northern cousins and making ready for the day it becomes necessary for us."

"He who has a friend lavishes benevolent actions on those around him."

"Friends dislike being apart. Separation, says Emily Dickinson, is all the Hell we need. Each shared moment is precious. And the only ones who can remember the hour of loneliness are those who survive it."

"Veneration of our parents is seen in this light, not as an obligation difficult to fulfill, but rather as an easy inclination of our affection. We gratefully remember what we owe them: our existence, thanks to the love they expressed to one another, the care with which they watched our growth; and the gentleness and skill with which they guided us toward independence, responsibility, and the ability to make wise choices."

"Children, because of their helplessness, evoke our tenderness. But we must give them more than that: a vigilant sense of responsibility, an exquisite equilibrium between the extremes of exercising our authority and respecting their freedom. There is no greater satisfaction than a child who, when grown and at the age of accountability, is able to forgive us."

"A young man needs friends to serve as guides and counselors, confidantes and role-models. The mature man is capable of meaningful undertakings only when his actions are undergirded by the support of others. And the elderly seek strength in their time of weakness and, ultimately, in their struggle for survival, in companionship and affection. Even if there is love at first sight, there is no friendship that does not demand time and space to reach its perfection. The ancient proverb states, and rightly so, that two friends cannot truly know each other without having first shared a bag of salt."

"I've been at this long enough to realize that my column is like a mirror-a little mirror to which each Saturday I pose the question of who is the most marvelous woman on the planet."

"I tried what all children try in their desire to be noticed: tantrums and every sort of illness I could dream up. But since these were not successful, I found myself obliged to seek other means. And so it was that I came to write and publish my first verses. At ten years of age I was already perfectly installed as a poetess."

"The word "love" is used far too frequently and far too imprecisely. It moves heaven and earth, it illuminates the purest of pages, but oh, with what ease it is pressed into service to mask the most infamous of passions, the vilest selfishness, and even crime!"

"Dreamers remember their dreams when they are disturbed;And you shall not escape what we will make of the broken pieces of our lives."

"We are all mothers,and we have that fire within us,of powerful womenwhose spirits are so angry, we can laugh beauty into life and still make you taste the salty tears of our knowledge."

"You cannot know how long we cried until we laughed over the broken pieces of our dreams."

"Historically leadership and the concept has always been the top down one most of us who do leadership training we do the bottom up leadership you don't impose structure you figure out organically who the people are."

"The idea of family however conceived is at the root of old family structure and we leave in a world were those family structure are in the end the basis of the legal, religious,social and state laws under which we live."

"Thinking through what makes a leader, how do you communicate and how do you organize yourself."

"I came to the United States of America conscious of my African-ness, conscious of my blackness, I became conscious of women studies and became a feminist."

"New family law can end violence against women."

"A lot of work is being done by feminist because we have to think about breaking the glass ceilings and think about if the systems we have been living under will work for us what is different what to do."

"For we are not tortured anymore; we have seen beyond your lies and disguises, and we have mastered the language of words, we have mastered speech and know we have also seen ourselves raw and naked piece by piece until our flesh lies flayed with blood on our own hands."

"Hello everybody and thank you for joining us, wherever in the world you’re joining us from. My name is Abena Busia. I am a Ghanaian, very proud to be so, a Ghanaian writer and poet, and currently Ghana’s ambassador to Brazil. I am very, very honoured today, however, to be part of this festival and to interview a friend of mine, an extraordinary woman herself who today is best known for co-winning the 2019 Booker Prize with her eighth book, Girl,Woman, Other, making her the first Black woman to win it. But for some of us, her reputation preceded that."

"What terrible thing can you do us which we have not done to ourselves? What can you tell us which we didn’t deceive ourselves with long time ago?"

"Well, you did it very well, I must confess . You do succeed in bringing us along. To the point where I am about to send your novel to somebody facing that dilemma. Because it’s not easy on either side. And to be honest, yours was the first thing I read that made it so clear how difficult it was, but at the same time humanised the process both from the point of view of the person transitioning as well as the point of view of the people receiving them. Her grandmother’s responses, the point where her grandmother says, “Look, love, I was born in the 1920s” or whatever it was, you know, “You do your thing but it’s too late for me, I’m a hundred, take it or leave it!” (APAB and BElaughing) “I love you anyway, you can come to the farm but that... I’ve got other things to fight!” Which was also very [much] to the point. Her grandmother had had different things to negotiate, generations of displacement, fatherlessness or in her case, a father who didn’t get it, and looking for her daughter for seventy years. So, again, the complexity of the stories that get bound up in this vision of “This is who we are and need to understand”."

"There are a couple of people who have identified themselves [in the chat], including the person who invited us both here, Amina Mama, and I just want to read what Amina says because I think it’s important and it emphasises what you said when you introduced yourself and your origins. Amina has put up on the platform that she grew up between Nigeria and London, so the exactness of your portrayals hits her very deeply. And it is true that there was only Buchi Emecheta in those days, and [she’s] celebrating the fact that our daughters and mothers have you to read. So that was her comment."

"Her first non-fiction book, Manifesto, on never giving up, is to be published next month. And she has taken that wit and wisdom so many places, including, most crucially, the academy, where today she is professor of creative writing at Brunel University in London and vice-president of the Royal Society of Literature."

"It was a good piece because it creates the atmosphere and the vision. Carole is very interesting, of course, because she is the woman of disguises. The woman who has a secret that she needs to [or] feels she needs to keep quiet about in order to negotiate. I love her mother who is like, “I am a Nigerian and so are you, and we’re not going to get past this, so let’s...” The scenes with her mother and the ways in which the mother helps her re-find herself by dealing with, who is the person that you’re going to marry. I will ask you now about the structure of this particular book and the multiple voices, the twelve different voices, all of whom are connected – some intimately, some tangentially."

"I am one of these obsessive people that find myself going back, going “Oh! Oh! Oh yes! That was that person’s classmate” and “Oh yes! It’s the same teacher.” Going through all of that and trying to understand. I wonder, what inspired you to create the book that way and what was the kernel that made you in a sense move out and flourish from?"

"And that’s important. I do want us to turn to your own writing, but I have to acknowledge that it is characteristic of you not only that you have been an activist but that you always acknowledge the people that you’ve been working with, and the importance of a collective voice and solidarity has always been part of your work which some of us really appreciate. I’m going to extrapolate something from that, that may or may not be true, and that is: I see that collec-tivity actually in the structure of your novels."

"Thank you! That’s a wonderful concluding statement. As always, moti-vating us to be inspirational and think about our own lives. On that note, I would like to thank all of you who are out there in different parts of the world, those of you who are in this room, for being here. This has been a privilege."

"It’s interesting though. I had a similar experience very, very recently. I am working on an epic poem, in fact, of Black women all over the place, the spirit of a Black woman from what is now Ghana who is following her lost daughters in all these spaces and through time. And I was so excited to discover that book about Black Tudors, Black people in Tudor England.1 What excited me was looking at the timeline. I grew up in this little English country village outside Oxford which was part of the divorce settlement between Henry VIII and Anne of Cleves ... (laughs)... documented! And I found enough material in this book on Black Tudors to decide that one of my little daughters is going to get lost in Standlake in Anne of Cleves’ manor house!"

"Yes, and we will come back to that and the matter of your hidden histories. But I now want to ask a question about something that not many people think and talk about. And that is, what is a catholic grasp, if you like, of the place of Black writers in British society? I had the privilege of hearing you speak, five years ago, at [the] African Literature Association conference in Germany and I remember being struck by your keynote speech, about the way you could so clearly map the progress of Black writing, the recognition of Black writing and the issues that Black writers had taken on in the public space: naming the challenges and difficulties you face in the sense of not just what you wrote but that you wrote at all, that you existed at all. And I was wondering if you could share a little bit of that activist part of the collectivity before we return to the question of your personal creativity."

"Yes, it is liberating and so wonderful to find the historians supporting our imaginative lives."

"What makes a leader different is the different communication styles respecting different forms of leadership."

"Always, always, always uplifting to see and hear you, Bernardine. It matters to some of us that you are out there in the world, so keep on your journey, and thank you so much."

"For some of us, she is a person who is a trailblazer and a visionary who has helped put Black women writers – particularly those writing out of Britain – on the map. She is visionary, she is feisty, and she has an acute sense of the politics of being and the politics of representation. Yet in all of that, her wit and her wisdom have brought to consciousness the place of those of us Black people of African descent growing up in England – the way we negotiate our identities, the way we negotiate the politics of space, the way we interact intergenerationally and between ourselves [which] has been, for some of us, the food of life."

"Violence is both visible and invisible."

"The country (Moldova) is prepared (for) any kind of scenarios, including the very worst-case scenario. So we will be defending what's to be defended (from Russia)."

"With this blatant breach of international laws and principles (by Russia towards Ukraine), one should be really concerned about what the future holds, including what could be the future plans of the Russian leadership? So, indeed, all the scenarios could be on the table."

"The issue of recognition for the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics by Kazakhstan is not on the agenda. We operate on the basis of international law and the founding principles of the UN (United Nations) charter."

"Militarily, Russia will be defeated. It will cost us further losses of civilian and military lives, and we can only try to minimize the damages, but together with Norway and other allies I am not in doubt that Russia will be militarily defeated on Ukrainian territory."

"Ukraine wants to be independent, and we will celebrate our national day with our partners and friends."