House of Stone Quotes

“That struggle between the fallible ambition of man to lean towards immortality and the fleshly evidence of his certain mortality; that tormenting battle with his consciousness, which is able to live vicariously at any point in time, which dreams, loves, hopes, and aspires to the immortal, but is always brought down to earth by his flesh, this container in which he has been contained, and which will inevitably return to the earth to rot. Too much dreaming, and he begins to forget his fallibility and, believing himself to be infallible, he commits horrendous acts of ambition which amount to crimes against humanity; too much dying, and he begins to forget the sacredness of life, the beauty of dreaming, to live in fear and be paralyzed by fear.”
― Novuyo Rosa Tshuma, House of Stone

“But are there some things that happen in life to make other things, which once seemed unforgivable, forgivable? Does my surrogate father's grief and suffering make forgiveable what he did to Mrs. Thornton? Has what happened to my Thandi - dammit - has what happened to my Thandi not made my Uncle Zacchaeus's vices forgivable? Because I know how my Thandi's death must have hurt him so! How he must have wept! How it drove him to near madness! Did he not, in the mid-'80s, right after her death, begin to scribble anti-establishment tracts that cut the government to the quick? Incisive, precise pieces that were so unlike his former, literary, wispy self...
And can Abednego ever forgive Black Jesus? As Dumo used to say, one can't just exist passively in the twenty-first century. One has to be, actively, an ethical citizen of our global village, seeing in others the mirror of what he sees in himself - humanity - and in himself what he presupposes to be in others - inhumanity. This was one of his sweetest sermons! The loftiest of his speeches, designed to elevate! And yet he, himself, despite admitting that our current oppressors, too, had been, also, once upon a time, victims of oppression under the fascist state of Rhodesia, from which they had learned well and whose lessons they were now applying full force in the jingoistic state of Zimbabwe, in spite of being able to realize all of this, he could not bring himself to recognize Black Jesus's humanity.
'There's nothing human about that man!' he exclaimed, tears streaming down his face.
And I don't blame him! I don't blame him for being unable to transcend this, and yet whenever I look in the mirror and see this face of mine which is as black as a velvet night, with my kissable lips and my finely sloping cheekbones, I can't help but think what this, then, makes me.”
― Novuyo Rosa Tshuma, House of Stone

“And though he beat the boy, it wasn’t really the boy he wanted to beat, but, it seemed to me, himself…”
― Novuyo Rosa Tshuma, House of Stone