I doubt that the natives can listen to an old woman like her. What can she tell them? This society has no respect for women, whom they treat like chi… - Yvonne Vera

For me writing is light, a radiance that captures everything in a fine profile. This light searches and illuminates, it is a safe place from which to uncover the emotional havoc of our experience. Light is a bright warmth which heals. Writing can be this kind of light.

Time is as necessary for remembering as it is for forgetting. Even the smallest embrace of pain needs time larger than a pause; the greatest pause requires an eternity, the greatest hurt a lifetime. A lifetime is longer than eternity: an eternity can exist without human presence.

Our people know the power of words. It is because of this that they desire to have words continuously spoken and kept alive. We do not believe that words can become independent of the speech that bore them, of the humans who controlled and gave birth to them. The paper is the stranger's own peculiar custom. Among ourselves, speech is not like the rock. Words cannot be taken from the people who create them. People are their words.