Werewere Liking

“To find out whether you are truly on your own path, get off it every now and then; break with what seems impossible to lose without losing your life in the process. And if you find your conscience is better because of it, that means you weren’t really on your own path. On the other hand, if you yearn for it, if everything seems blocked, and you can find no reason or strength or joy in continuing, never hesitate to turn around and go back to your former path, for you’ll have the proof that it was right.” Remembering”
― Werewere Liking, The Amputated Memory: A Novel

“She prays here, intercedes there, and brings hope, comfort, and a zest for life with her wherever she goes. And when, exhausted, she is all alone again in the evening, the only purpose of her tiny television is to link her up once more with the other children for whom she had no time that day. The clichés that politicians spout remind her how political prisoners are forced to endure the despotism of these men, and how the populace is turned into beasts of burden. Perversely violent movies make her ponder the people upon whom these crimes are inflicted, and in her nightly prayers she has a word or two for God about perversion, violence, and their innumerable victims—prostitutes and delinquents, her other brood, who have been dumped into the street and for whom her heart bleeds in compassion. Even in her delayed and furtive sleep, Auntie Roz is never cut off from her thousands of children: In her dreams she fights the crooked cops who, on every corner and for all to see, rip off her poor little public transportation drivers and street vendors and get away with it! She fights and fights, surrounded by angels with swords of light, striking the evildoers and liberating the virtuous, healing some and feeding others, until she wakes up, always with a start. And once she’s up, the first prayer is a new surge of inspiration to serve her youthful thousands. For them, Auntie Roz imagines a better world made up of small certainties, a world just livable enough for all of them as they wait for the Eden that’s far too long in coming and impossible to foresee honestly, at the center of a world that’s worse than hell and not even truthful enough to call itself by that name. With”
― Werewere Liking, The Amputated Memory: A Novel