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Forget them. Burn all, burn everything. Fire is bright and fire is clean. —Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
I’m standing in front of this burning city and I still want peace! —Unknown
The old old books inside the library burned faster than the screaming man outside had imagined. Those books had moldered underground, aged in the harsh sun, been nibbled at by termites over centuries, and then over the recent decades dried in this library. Their feathery pages were flimsy, thin, and near the ends of their current lives. Their next lives were as dust.
She opened her eyes and looked at her arms. Colors. Long dark-brown fingers, wrists draped in her favorite blue coral beads; they were the color of the early evening. Her dress was made of the same heavy blue beads. They hung from her ears too, and one was pressed to her forehead. Blue was her color, and she was happiest during the hottest part of the day.
The man had died like this because of his mouth, not because of the manuscripts for which Timbouctou had become famous.
“Heat rises, but it also scorches the earth when it is hungry,” she said. “That fire is hungry.”
spirits and djinn always linger when there is something to linger for.”
strong that he finally broke into tears. Education and the future were important, but family was the true elixir of life.
Faro had dwelled in a poorly written book for millennia, and this vastness overwhelmed her.
She took off into a world within a world. She was a natural.
She wasn’t remembering him because she’d never forgotten him. That face, the way he slept, the sound of him breathing . . . up until he no longer was.
His mother had once told him that only half of them were actually blood relatives, but none of that really mattered; uncles were uncles.
The elders always spoke as if their concerns were the most important concerns on earth. Yet if he told them about how tough his physical therapy program was, they’d only scoff and say that he’d better do well or he’d be bringing shame to his entire family. Failing after making it all the way to America was a disgrace.
They want to erase the history of our people. They want to erase our ancestors. Wipe them all away and replace them with the memory of the Arab. It is a false jihad against the genius of the black African. It is not Islam at all.”
“It’s black because it is so full of words, there is no space untouched.”
