On the other hand, I must inevitably read that world of the colonizer, in which I live, with at least two gazes. It’s simply a daily part of how I exist: the colonizer’s world is in fact also my reality—it is part of me—but I must simultaneously see this world awry, in an inverse gaze, in order to see myself whole. This is why libraries have been such a refuge for me, from the time I was a child. A library is a place of multiple worlds. It offers multiple identities. And because it is so, in a library paradoxically one can always be oneself.
