Patrick Teed

“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

“It's amazing what we can do if we simply refuse to give up.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Bloodchild and Other Stories

“Nothing happened here. Nothing extraordinary for its time. Two nuns held slaves like any priest or explorer or settler in the New World. It is the others, the ones they held, who keep the memory, who imagine over and over again where they might be. It is they who keep these details alive and raw like yesterday. They twist and turn in all imaginations to come, in plain sight or in disguise. This fragile place and its muscular dreams. Nothing really happened here”
― Dionne Brand, At the Full and Change of the Moon

“One girl can stand in for any of them, can serve as the placeholder for the story, recount the history from the beginning, convey the knowledge of freedom disguised as jargon an nonsense. Few understand them, studied them like they are worth something, realized their inherent value. If you listen closely, you can hear the whole world in a bent note, a throwaway lyric, a singular thread of the collective utterance. Everything from the first ship to the young woman found hanging in herself. Marvel at their capacity to inhabit every woman's grief as their own. All these stories ever told rush from her opened mouth. A tome of philosophy in a moan”
― Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval