Go Tell the Sun Quotes

“I study my daughter's sleeping face. She curves her body the way I do when I sleep and draws her knees up close to her chest. She stretches her legs and her eyes flutter open as if to look at me, but then she closes them again. I hope she dreams in colour.”
― Wame Molefhe, Go Tell the Sun

“I like you,” he said, “a lot.” I smiled. Thato liked me. Out of all the women whose dreams he touched, he chose me. I thought of Kgomotso and I snatched my hand out of Thato's. He looked at me and said, “Sometimes I look at you, Sethunya, and wonder whether you are here with me.” “Ao? Re mmogo, Thato. I am with you. You have never seen me with anyone else, have you?” He shook his head and said, “One day, Sethunya, you will take me with you, to that place where you go.” I smiled. It seemed simpler than finding words for something I couldn't explain. In that moment, I learnt that lying was easier done in my mother tongue. After”
― Wame Molefhe, Go Tell the Sun

“I had finally met my father – the father I thought I did not have. No longer will I search for my blood in the men I see, because I was mirrored in his face: the receding hair line, flared nostrils, sunken hollows for cheeks, and round eyes with eyelashes that my mother said belonged on a girl. But he had shrunk.”
― Wame Molefhe, Go Tell the Sun

“My boy, you know I'm not superstitious, but the way that chicken has been perched in the tree all day – it's telling us someone has died.”
― Wame Molefhe, Go Tell the Sun

“Killed by a train? Ao? That is what our grandparents used to say about useless men who made babies and left them to grow like weed,” she whispered. I”
― Wame Molefhe, Go Tell the Sun

“IN MY childhood dreams, my father was a black giant, towering over me and my mother, with a lion's roar that shook our corrugated iron roof and made me cower under the bed. Mama rarely spoke about my father but when she did, she wielded him like a threat. “If your father were here he would deal with you,” she warned, so I grew up fearing him,”
― Wame Molefhe, Go Tell the Sun

“IN SETSWANA, we say a person's name is a mould into which his life is cast.”
― Wame Molefhe, Go Tell the Sun

“They named their son Thapelo, which meant “prayer”. He had his father's nose and maybe his ears too. Even if the father didn't see it, she did. As”
― Wame Molefhe, Go Tell the Sun

“There is nothing wrong with you,” they all said. The last one said: “You are strong as a horse. Just keep trying – and enjoy it.” She thought she must have imagined the wink-wink that accompanied the last rejoinder. She reported back to Ntsimane and suggested that maybe, maybe he should be tested. A sperm count, something, just to make sure. “No,” he barked. Perhaps his mother and aunts were right, he thought. He should have married a simple woman, one who knew how to make babies. Sethunya”
― Wame Molefhe, Go Tell the Sun

“She was educated, with multiple degrees. She gave up a blossoming career to be a home-maker. But in the society in which she lived, in which a woman's worth was measured in terms of her marital status and the number of children she bore, Sethunya's score was middling to low. Granted, she married young, for love, but she struggled to conceive. In the end she had only one child, where four would have been more respectable. She”
― Wame Molefhe, Go Tell the Sun

“It is time for our hair to be cut as tradition demands. My aunt starts with mine, with a pair of clippers that shave my hair off in strips and groan as they plough through my plaits. Behind my eyes, the stinging starts, but I press my eyes closed with my fingers. I feel like I am a little girl again. I am angry with my mother as I perch on a chair whose insides show. I am blinking and blinking so the tears do not leave my eyes, but they still slip through my eyelids. So I try instead to string together happy memories of my childhood. I”
― Wame Molefhe, Go Tell the Sun

“She used to come home crying when she was a little girl. She said she wanted to be like Rapunzel, then Barbie, and I offered her nothing in their place. From”
― Wame Molefhe, Go Tell the Sun

“When I was a little girl, I had short black hair with small tight curls. Just as soon as you stretched them out with a comb, they snapped back into place like tiny springs. I wished for wavy tresses, blonde, that swayed to the rhythm of my movements. I yearned for hair like that of the girls who lived in the big houses that my mother cleaned. My”
― Wame Molefhe, Go Tell the Sun

“My daughter dreams in English, a language I list as my third. She learnt it at the private schools I sent her to, and I forced her to speak it all the time, just like they did at those schools. “Children are only to speak that language during the Setswana period,” the teacher warned. I wanted my daughter to have a life different, no, better, than mine. I sent her there so she would one day travel to faraway places that I had only seen in books. It pleases me that she lives like rich people do in my country.”
― Wame Molefhe, Go Tell the Sun

“She had rejected the hearing aid the doctor said she needed. “That thing makes my ears go ting-ting-ting like raindrops on a rain water tank.” I wondered about that sometimes. I think she simply chose what she wanted to hear. My”
― Wame Molefhe, Go Tell the Sun

“Look at that spot, Sethunya, there, behind your foot. What kind of a woman will you become if you can't even keep a floor clean?” she used to ask. She”
― Wame Molefhe, Go Tell the Sun

“When Lebo sashayed into a room she cast a shadow over all other women. You pulled your man closer when Lebo was near. “Lebo was not marriageable,” the men said. She was far too beautiful – too much work. But they desired her, for she lit an inferno in their loins.”
― Wame Molefhe, Go Tell the Sun

“You recognise its symptoms in others – they bear the shame. People swear they do not have it but have never taken the test. It is a disease that binds guilty and innocent alike,”
― Wame Molefhe, Go Tell the Sun

“I knew now that I should have run away with her; I hoped that one day I would find her in that oasis where everyone was happy. This”
― Wame Molefhe, Go Tell the Sun

“I repeated after Father Simon that I would love and obey my husband, in sickness and in health, and recited all the other words meant to define marriage. When”
― Wame Molefhe, Go Tell the Sun

“After a year of dating, Thato sent his uncles to my house. I arrived home to the smell of rum-and-maple tobacco. Thato's pipe-smoking uncle had come to our home to tell my uncles that their nephew was looking for a segametsi, a bearer of water. Even before his pipe's aroma had left the room, Mama called Father Simon and announced “Sethunya is to be married.” A month later, ten head of cattle arrived, on the hoof, with Thato racing behind them. Our families had spoken. I would be Thato's wife. I”
― Wame Molefhe, Go Tell the Sun

“How come? How can a girl so beautiful she was named “flower” not have a boyfriend?” “Maybe I was waiting for you,” I said and smiled. He”
― Wame Molefhe, Go Tell the Sun

“She sat back down on the bed then. She wished she could shed her unhappiness. She wished, sometimes, he was less good, more like other men who went out drinking nights and returned at dawn, sometimes not at all, who had other women and lied and cheated. If Thato was like that she would have had good reason to leave. But”
― Wame Molefhe, Go Tell the Sun

“As Sethunya had stood up, she felt tears sting her eyes. She wiped them away as she stood up to hug her new mother. Yes, this was how things were meant to be. No one could then say she liked girls better.”
― Wame Molefhe, Go Tell the Sun

“Her father's sister had spoken first. “When a woman marries, her life changes; she must leave behind unmarried friends.” “A wife does not ask her husband where he has been when he comes home.” “A woman must cook for her husband,” said another aunt. “Bear him a son.” “Care for his parents.” “Do not discuss your marriage with others.” “Pray.” She had wanted to ask who made these rules. But she knew the answer. This is how things are done. Then”
― Wame Molefhe, Go Tell the Sun

“Like a thief I steal away from my home as the sun rises. It is seven days since I lay with Botshelo and swore to love him forever. Today I am burying him. I”
― Wame Molefhe, Go Tell the Sun