Maaza Mengiste Quotes

What is lost is gone, my child, what is lost makes room for something else.

She is afraid of crumbling and disappearing, of being taken and being left behind at the same time: a body tumbling between hands while dying inside.

He is doing as she once did, in the naïve belief that what is buried stays that way, that what is hidden will stay unseen, that what is yours will remain always in your possession. He is being foolish.

My father was always a stranger to me, he will say. I knew him through his questions, not his answers.

Who remembers what to do? she asks. Who remembers what it means to be more than what this world believes of us?

Make living your act of defiance. Record it all.

We all know that war destroys mankind, and in spite of their differences in race, creed, and religion, women all across the world despise war because its fruit is nothing but destruction.

The routine dulls the terror.

What he knows is this: there is no past, there is no "what happened", there is only the moment that unfolds into the next, dragging everything with it, constantly renewing. Everything is happening at once.

Here is the truth he wants to ignore: that what is forged into memory tucks itself into bone and muscle. It will always be there and it will follow us to the grave.

She does not want to remember but she is here and memory is gathering bones.

who is to judge what makes a "real African"? It is almost impossible to apply a single identity to an entire racial or ethnic group, much less to an entire continent. As individuals, we are each comprised of a series of contradictions. We are not neatly constructed sets of qualities. At our best, we should defy simple categorisation. It is living with difficult choices and easy accommodations that makes us human and, if we're lucky, keeps us interesting. It is from within contradictory existences that some of our greatest works of literature have been born.

It seems that every new writer with any remote connection to the continent of Africa, either willingly or unwillingly, has first to wrestle with this question of identity before talking about what should matter most: their book...we should focus on the ability of the story to immerse us so fully in the world that has been constructed, that it feels a bit like home.

Maybe we have to allow our discomfort as another consequence of the violence depicted. Our shared confusion and disgust can bind us to those who are suffering, rather than draw us away from them. They too have had to witness. To deny our own human reactions makes it easier to deny the humanity of those who are photographed. Though we cannot change what has happened, we can alter the symbolism attached to the images. Photographs can be more than a reminder of cruelty and the inevitable aftermath of war. There are narratives unfolding right now in South Sudan, in the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of Congo that can be rewritten. We have the ability to strip away what we’re supposed to see – just another African victim – and gaze upon what we should: a human being. But first, we have to look.