Out of the Sun Quotes

“The level of advocacy on behalf of others is a rarity -- and sorely needed. The work of equality is the labour not of the few but the many, including those who have benefited and continue to benefit the most from an unequal system. Change that must take place on a broad social scale must be just that -- broadly social. Everyone has their part to play. But it is not for advocates to occupy spaces intended for the very people they are fighting for.”
― Esi Edugyan, Out of the Sun: On Race and Storytelling

“Had Africa's mineral wealth not been plundered, had its people not been enslaved and made subjects, the possibilities for its future would be limitless.”
― Esi Edugyan, Out of the Sun: On Race and Storytelling

“The condition of being alienated and "othered" reflects the ways in which navigating Western societies as a Black person is an endlessly unsettling experience, something that might be ripped whole from the pages of a speculative novel. Because of this, the search for lost cultural touchstones is a gesture towards survival: it is an Afrofuturistic act. At its heart it is the creation of a possible future based on a reconstructed, or reimagined past. In this way, a ware is wages against erasure.”
― Esi Edugyan, Out of the Sun: On Race and Storytelling

“Race, it seems, has become the fiction into which we pour our pent-up frustration and rage. Benign physical differences become, in the absence of understanding, stand-ins for an enemy virus we cannot visibly see. People are reduced to the symbolism of their bodies, and those symbols fuel a preconceived narrative. That is one definition of racial prejudice, though of course its forms are many. One of its lasting effects is to create a deep sense of alienation from a culture a person might claim as their own but that others would shut them out from. The story of belonging is not theirs to inhabit.”
― Esi Edugyan, Out of the Sun: On Race and Storytelling

“In conveying just how severe the Black experience could be, Sprigle and Griffin sought to hold whites accountable for perpetuating a system that caused needless hardship, and urged them to reach across racial lines to end it. Griffin especially made a point of stressing how whites, as the overclass and creators of a divided society, had a crucial responsibility to racially reconcile. This is not to suggest that there isn’t something inherently condescending in these experiments. But this condescension seems merely a natural acknowledgement of genuine power. It feels distinctly different from, for example, Thomas Jefferson’s paternalistic view of African Americans. Rather, Griffin seems to be saying that since it is white people who establish and enforce the rules, rules that have terrible repercussions for Black lives, it is up to whites to begin the process of dismantling them.”
― Esi Edugyan, Out of the Sun: On Race and Storytelling

“Griffin’s narrative, by contrast, seems more steeped in indignities. Some of the scenes he endures are stomach-turning: being shooed away from white restaurants, as if his race will taint the food; hearing from Blacks about the difficulty of taking even brief trips away from home due to the scarcity of “coloured” bathrooms and drinking fountains, effectively confining them to their own neighbourhoods; being constantly questioned by white men about his sexual prowess and where they themselves could find loose Black women. Most painful to Griffin is what he refers to as the “hate stare.” He writes: “Nothing can describe the withering horror of this. You feel lost, sick at heart before such unmasked hatred, not so much because it threatens you as because it shows humans in such an inhuman light. You see a kind of insanity, something so obscene the very obscenity of it terrifies you.” It is this, beyond everything, that starts to get to him: not racism’s physical threats, but the way it distorts the mind and dehumanizes everyone it touches, both the hated and the one who hates.”
― Esi Edugyan, Out of The Sun: Essays at the Crossroads of Race