Nabila Tabassum Chowdhury > Recent Status Updates

"Ever the outsider, I created my own strange little world. I did it out of necessity. I needed a way to fit in."

"It was like when he was creating his character he traded in all his intelligence points for beauty points. I stood no chance."

""Trevor, make sure your woman is the woman in your life. Don't be one of these men who makes his wife compete with his mother. A man with a wife cannot be beholden to his mother.""

"I have never enjoyed anything as much as I enjoyed that moment. Revenge truly is sweet. It takes you to a dark place, but, man, it satisfies a thirst."

"My mom thought everything was funny. There was no subject too dark or too painful for her to tackle with humor. "Look on the bright side," she said, laughing and pointing to the half of me covered in dark berry juice. "Now you really are half black and half white.""

"Apartheid said that the only reason colored people couldn't have first-class status was because black people might use coloredness to sneak past the gates to enjoy the benefits of whiteness."

"If you were applying to be white, the pencil went into your hair. If it fell out, you were white. If it stayed in, you were colored. You were what the government said you were."

"Every year under apartheid,some colored people would get promoted to white.It wasn't a myth;it was real.People could submit applications to the government.Your hair might become straight enough,your skin might become light enough,your accent might become polished enough&you'd be reclassified as white. All u had to do was denounce your people,denounce your history&leave your darker-skinned friends and family behind."

"People are willing to accept you if they see you as an outsider trying to assimilate into their world. But when they see you as a fellow tribe member attempting to disavow the tribe, that is something they will never forgive. That is what happened to me in Eden Park."

"The animosity I felt from the colored people I encountered growing up was one of the hardest things I've ever had to deal with. It taught me that it is easier to be an insider as an outsider than to be an outsider as an insider."

"I walked out of his house that day an inch taller. Seeing him had reaffirmed his choosing of me. He chose to have me in his life. He chose to answer my letter. I was wanted. Being chosen is the greatest gift you can give to another human being."

"It was a scrapbook of everything I had ever done, every time my name was mentioned in a newspaper, everything from magazine covers to the tiniest club listings, from the beginning of my career all the way through to that week. He was smiling so big as he took me through it, looking at the headlines."

"I never turned to bitterness, because she made sure I knew his absence was because of circumstance and not a lack of love."

"When a parent is absent, you're left in the lurch of not knowing, and it's so easy to fill that space with negative thoughts. "They don't care.""They're selfish.""

"We'd gone from living under apartheid to living under another kind of tyranny, that of an abusive, alcoholic man."

"The whole issue of Santa Claus is a rather contentious one when it comes to African Christmas, a matter of pride. When an African dad buys his kid a present, the last thing he's going to do is give some fat white man credit for it. African Dad will tell you straight up, "No, no, no. I bought you that.""

"The white people would sit and watch the black people eat, and the black people would sit and eat and watch the white people watching them eat. The curiosity of being together overwhelmed the animosity keeping people apart. The place had a great vibe."

"My dad's restaurant was an instant, booming success. Black people came because there were few upscale establishments where they could eat, and they wanted to come and sit in a nice restaurant and see what that was like. White people came because they wanted to see what it was like to sit with black people.

"I believed that Fufi was my dog, but of course that wasn't true. Fufi was a dog. I was a boy. We got along well. She happened to live in my house. That experience shaped what I've felt about relationships for the rest of my life: You do not own the thing that you love."

"White people treat dogs like children or members of the family. Black people's dogs are more for protection, a poor-man's alarm system."

"It was just another way in which she was a rebel, refusing to conform to ideas about what black people did and didn't do."

"What was ironic to me was that white people had spent years seeing video of black people being beaten to death by other white people, but this one video of a black man kicking a cat, that's what sent them over the edge."

"If you think too much about the ass-kicking your mom gave u,
or the ass-kicking that life gave you,you'll stop pushing the boundaries&breaking the rules.It's better to take it,
spend some time crying,then wake up the next day&move on.You'll have a few bruises&they'll remind u of what happened&that's okay.But after a while the bruises fade,&they fade for a reason-because now it's time to get up to some shit again."

"But I was blessed with another trait I inherited from my mother: her ability to forget the pain in life. I remember the thing that caused the trauma, but I don't hold on to the trauma. I never let the memory of something painful prevent me from trying something new."

'My mom was too much in shock. There's naughty, and then there's burning down a white person's house. She didn't know what to do."

"She taught me to challenge authority and question the system."

"That was the weird and kind of amazing thing about my mom. If she agreed with me that a rule was stupid, she wouldn't punish me for breaking it."

"The truth is she probably took my side against Maryvale more often than not."

"The therapists did give me a series of tests, and they came to the conclusion that I was either going to make an excellent criminal or be very good at catching criminals, because I could always find loopholes in the law. Whenever I thought a rule wasn't logical, I'd find my way around it."

"That was the first of three times the school made my mom take me to a psychologist to be evaluated."