More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
He’d been so foolish ever to think he could build a life here. There was no straddling the line; he knew that now. No stepping back and forth between two worlds, no seeing and not seeing, no holding a hand over one eye or the other like a child playing a game. You were either a part of this institution, one of the bricks that held it up, or you weren’t.
Power did not lie in the tip of a pen. Power did not work against its own interests. Power could only be brought to heel by acts of defiance it could not ignore. With brute, unflinching force. With violence.
None of this came as a surprise. She was, after all, a woman scholar in a country whose word for madness derived from the word for a womb. It was infuriating. Her friends were always going on about the discrimination they faced as foreigners, but why didn’t anyone care that Oxford was equally cruel to women? But in spite of all that, look at them – they were here, they were thriving, defying the odds. They’d got into the castle. They had a place here, where they could transcend their birth. They had, if they seized it, the opportunity to become some of the lauded exceptions. And why would they
...more
Colonialism is not a machine capable of thinking, a body endowed with reason. It is naked violence and only gives in when confronted with greater violence. FRANTZ FANON, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox
Such an interesting word, Robin thought, strike.* It brought to mind hammers against spikes, bodies throwing themselves against an immovable force. It contained in itself the paradox of the concept; that through nonaction, and nonviolence, one might prove the devastating consequences of refusing to accommodate those one relied upon.
Strikers in this country never won broad public support, for the public merely wanted all the conveniences of modern life without the guilt of knowing how those conveniences were procured.
‘That’s just what translation is, I think. That’s all speaking is. Listening to the other and trying to see past your own biases to glimpse what they’re trying to say. Showing yourself to the world, and hoping someone else understands.’
