Malaya Quotes

“I feel gratitude for the sense of permanence here, but sometimes the permanence gives me—I don’t know what else to call it—a fright.”
― Cinelle Barnes, Malaya: Essays on Freedom

“Maybe I am finally the enigma she can’t decode. Maybe I like to be a mystery. What child of trauma doesn’t?”
― Cinelle Barnes, Malaya: Essays on Freedom

“Books, art, fashion, history—were these not the things I had been erased from once I was deemed unfit to be a protected member of a state? Don’t we call them the humanities because they are supposedly what make us human, or acceptably human? Was being learned or worldly or talented not the currency that often bought me eye contact and first-name basis with guests and classmates and teachers?”
― Cinelle Barnes, Malaya: Essays on Freedom

“Books did not discriminate, at least not explicitly.”
― Cinelle Barnes, Malaya: Essays on Freedom

“She talked with an energetic voice, pitchy and onomatopoeic, but with her hands folded on her lap. That’s how I would always remember her: body constrained but dying to talk.”
― Cinelle Barnes, Malaya: Essays on Freedom

“Maybe I amass these stories—about heroes and antiheroes—to tally how many times I am better and they are worse.”
― Cinelle Barnes, Malaya: Essays on Freedom

“when we show signs of anxiety such as nail-biting, fidgeting, stuttering, or hiding, that we are acting nervous because we care. There are these movements because there is thought. And every time I say this, we feel less guilty for having bodies that move the way they do.”
― Cinelle Barnes, Malaya: Essays on Freedom

“Words, images—where we three live. Home is, even here and even now, in the imagination.”
― Cinelle Barnes, Malaya: Essays on Freedom

“Acting as family historian, I know now, is really just telling myself the story I already knew. I wait not on anybody else's affirmation, just my own. And here, in expecting only my own validation, is where my freedom lies.”
― Cinelle Barnes, Malaya: Essays on Freedom