Patrick Teed > Patrick's Quotes

“I hate the past and for that matter the present”
― Dionne Brand, At the Full and Change of the Moon

“To believe, as I do, that the enslaved are our contemporaries is to understand that we share their aspirations and defeats, which isn’t to say that we are owed what they were due but rather to acknowledge that they accompany our every effort to fight against domination, to abolish the color line, and to imagine a free territory, a new commons. It is to take to heart their knowledge of freedom. The enslaved knew that freedom had to be taken; it was not the kind of thing that could ever be given to you”
― Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route

“It's amazing what we can do if we simply refuse to give up.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Bloodchild and Other Stories

“and suddenly there was Sweet Home rolling, rolling, rolling out before her eyes, and although there was not a leaf on that farm that did not make her want to scream, it rolled itself out before her in shameless beauty. It never looked as terrible as it was and it made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“Nothing happened here. Nothing extraordinary for its time. Two nuns held slaves like any priest or explorer or settler in the New World. It is the others, the ones they held, who keep the memory, who imagine over and over again where they might be. It is they who keep these details alive and raw like yesterday. They twist and turn in all imaginations to come, in plain sight or in disguise. This fragile place and its muscular dreams. Nothing really happened here”
― Dionne Brand, At the Full and Change of the Moon

“The demands of the slave on the present have everything to do with making good the promise of abolition, and this entails much more than the end of property in slaves. It requires the reconstruction of society, which is the only way to honor our debt to the dead...”
― Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route

“You come to this, here's the marrow of it, not moving, not standing, it's too much to hold up, what I really want to say is, I don't want no fucking country, here or there and all the way back, I don't like it, none of it, easy as that. I'm giving up on land to light on, and why not, I can't perfect my own shadow, my violent sorrow, my individual wrists”
― Dionne Brand, Land to Light On

“How do we memorialize an event that is still ongoing?”
― Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being

“Leaving? To leave? Left? Language can be deceptive. The moment when they ‘left’ the Old World and entered the New. Forced to leave? To ‘leave’ one would have to have a destination in mind. Of course one could rush out of a door with no destination in mind, but ‘to rush’ or ‘to leave’ would suggest some self-possession; rushing would suggest a purpose, a purpose with some urgency, some reason. Their ‘taking’? Taking, taking too might suggest a benevolence so, no, it was not taking. So having not ‘left,’ having no ‘destination,’ having no ‘self-possession,’ no purpose and no urgency, their departure was unexpected; and in the way that some unexpected events can be horrific, their ‘leaving,’ or rather their ‘taking,’ was horrific. What language would describe that lost of bearings or the sudden awful liability of one’s own body? The hitting or the whipping or the driving, which was shocking, the dragging in the bruising it involved, the epidemic sickness with life which would become hereditary? And the antipathy which would shadow all subsequent events”
― Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return

“humanization is not an antidote to slavery’s violence; rather, slavery is a technology for producing a kind of human”
― Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World

“One girl can stand in for any of them, can serve as the placeholder for the story, recount the history from the beginning, convey the knowledge of freedom disguised as jargon an nonsense. Few understand them, studied them like they are worth something, realized their inherent value. If you listen closely, you can hear the whole world in a bent note, a throwaway lyric, a singular thread of the collective utterance. Everything from the first ship to the young woman found hanging in herself. Marvel at their capacity to inhabit every woman's grief as their own. All these stories ever told rush from her opened mouth. A tome of philosophy in a moan”
― Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval

“There may be sophistry in all this; but the condition of a slave confuses all principles of morality, and, in fact, renders the practice of them impossible”
― Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

“in the dark, none of us have names and no one is sacred”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, This Wound Is a World

“Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love of a free man is never safe. There is no gift for the beloved. The lover alone possesses his gift of love. The loved one is shorn, neutralized, frozen in the glare of the lover’s inward eye.”
― Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye