The Minotaur at Calle Lanza Quotes

“As a site of understanding the world, we know that not all bodies are considered equal. From skin color to disabilities, visible or otherwise, to the physical performance of gender, there is a history that determines what kinds of struggles one has to deal with because of the body one has been born into. The more marginal those bodies are, the better—or rather the clearer—understanding one gets of the world’s true face. In New York, it only took an ankle injury for me to see the cruelty against disabled people that’s inherent in the city’s architecture. This is not by mistake but rather is a statement about who gets to participate in that society, who gets to be part of that community. Sometimes this statement is made by not having any way for disabled people to access buildings, and sometimes it’s done through the violence of borders, laws, societal structures, and long stares as someone walks around that remind them that they are not wanted or welcome. I’ve said before that I sometimes like to be invisible, but depending on one’s body, that possibility is often impossible.”
― Zito Madu, The Minotaur at Calle Lanza

“That the endless suffering, humiliation, grief, and pain caused by systems outside of one’s control, circumstances already determined before one’s birth, and the exhaustive process of having to create a good life for yourself and your family—a process that keeps one away from so much of what makes life worthwhile that at the end of it, what one feels is relief more than joy—all these things are natural parts of life, and a great sign of maturity, of being a true adult, is to simply accept them and keep striving, when the proper reaction should be instead to sit like Job and scream that none of it is deserved.”
― Zito Madu, The Minotaur at Calle Lanza

“I enjoy smaller gatherings more because the performance of self in them is less extreme. Life itself is a performance, and there’s no need to pretend otherwise. There’s an old video of Bernard Stiegler I used to love that ends with him declaring that it’s not a matter of whether life is a performance or not, because it is, but how good you can make that performance. In large groups, I feel like an actor on stage wearing a mask in front of thousands of other people. The mask is necessary for many reasons, including the need to hide the shame of the performance itself.”
― Zito Madu, The Minotaur at Calle Lanza

“My word processor wishes to change “aloneness” into “loneliness,” but they are not the same. There is no pain to aloneness, no isolation from others except that which one chooses.”
― Zito Madu, The Minotaur at Calle Lanza

“...no matter where a home is - in Venice, New York, Paris, London, Lagos, Dakar - it becomes normal and standard once you've gone to the grocery store enough times.”
― Zito Madu, The Minotaur at Calle Lanza

“It is not absurd that someone would become a bird under great stress. What is absurd is that so many people do not.”
― Zito Madu, The Minotaur at Calle Lanza

“...the true absurdness of the world is in its pretense that so much of life is not ridiculous.”
― Zito Madu, The Minotaur at Calle Lanza