Patrick Teed

“I hate the past and for that matter the present”
― Dionne Brand, At the Full and Change of the Moon

“Leaving? To leave? Left? Language can be deceptive. The moment when they ‘left’ the Old World and entered the New. Forced to leave? To ‘leave’ one would have to have a destination in mind. Of course one could rush out of a door with no destination in mind, but ‘to rush’ or ‘to leave’ would suggest some self-possession; rushing would suggest a purpose, a purpose with some urgency, some reason. Their ‘taking’? Taking, taking too might suggest a benevolence so, no, it was not taking. So having not ‘left,’ having no ‘destination,’ having no ‘self-possession,’ no purpose and no urgency, their departure was unexpected; and in the way that some unexpected events can be horrific, their ‘leaving,’ or rather their ‘taking,’ was horrific. What language would describe that lost of bearings or the sudden awful liability of one’s own body? The hitting or the whipping or the driving, which was shocking, the dragging in the bruising it involved, the epidemic sickness with life which would become hereditary? And the antipathy which would shadow all subsequent events”
― Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return

“and suddenly there was Sweet Home rolling, rolling, rolling out before her eyes, and although there was not a leaf on that farm that did not make her want to scream, it rolled itself out before her in shameless beauty. It never looked as terrible as it was and it made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“humanization is not an antidote to slavery’s violence; rather, slavery is a technology for producing a kind of human”
― Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World