Stella Nyanzi Quotes

I am aching for the world I live in to become a better place for my children.

When I die, I hope my children will be proud of me as a woman who at least tried to change things, instead of just waiting for the dictator to die.

When I put my nipples on the frontline, I learnt they fight harder than any bazookas. Men don't know how to deal with that.

I wear lipstick, I speak like an academic, I take off my bra… and this is usually not what politicians look like.

I use nudity because it's a weapon of the weak and the poor. The cost to pay is called shame, but I think I'm not ashamed of my body. It's a beautiful big mama body, and I am glad to deploy it for war.

I don't get inspired by high and mighty women, it's everyday women. It's grandmothers, stepmothers, second wives, all swearing at their men.

I feed my children with takeout, once in a while, and sometimes we even buy street food. But ‘a good woman’ doesn’t do that, for example. These stereotypes trap us, and they make us feel like failures if we cannot meet these very high standards.

In my experience, there is much greater currency and power in my deployment of irreverent idioms of satire, mockery, and ridicule of oppressive power.

Codes of politeness demand that colonized, dominated, and subjugated peoples do not talk back to their captors, colonizers or oppressors. Politeness blunts the tongue of criticism, ridicule, satire or irony. On the other hand, radical rudeness breaks down the doors to the arsenal of verbal, literary, and linguistic devices available to launch a counterattack against corrupt militant brutes in government who use bullets, prison sentences, and mass graves to silence their opponents.

A lot of what I do is really related to my position in the world as a woman for whom a lot of things don't come easy. Public health services don't work, the education doesn't work for my children, we struggle a lot and that's why I do what I do.

I fled to get my voice back. I fled to get my mind back. I fled to get my freedom back.

Custody and punishment for writing freed me of the fear I previously held of being imprisoned. Physical and emotional torture during my two terms in prison radicalized me in unexpected ways.

Not only is an educated Ugandan woman expected to respectfully serve and sustain the status quo, but her methods of resistance are also expected to be polished, refined, respectable, and temperate—not abrasive, rude, and hard-hitting. I deliberately defy all these expectations.

The transgressive reversal of my role as an elite academic who chooses to write for (sexual and gender) minorities, poor people, and the political opposition party members further enhances the shock element within my audacity.

In fact, as expressed in one of my poems written in prison, I wear my prison sentence for poetry as a badge of honor.