Sreddy

“For this war was not made to take you away from your country, but to take your country away from within you.”
― Mia Couto, Sleepwalking Land

“[I]t is not ideal to be completely lost in the world of books, for it is not possible to be whole in the refuge of art, of ideas; there is living to be done, living that can be abundant and bittersweet, that can be foggy and unkind, that can be searing and bruising, that can maim and impale, be both meagre and profound.”
― Nthikeng Mohlele, Michael K

“I love Johannesburg – like one loves and protects a fragile puppy, like one removes weeds from beds of blossoming tulips and roses. I am drawn to its formless danger, the lurking disquiets of a big city, by how minute and faceless I have become in the vast frontiers of its palaces and dungeons, how my stargazing crawls by unnoticed by my countrymen. There are other stargazers too, there must be, real stargazers who camp and live and thrive in the wild: lantern carriers and owners of books and celestial maps about the history and unknown charms in the world of stars. There must be true worshippers and disciples of these heavenly fires, these celestial corpses that have long died, exploded into trillions of graveyards that adorn the night skies. There seems, if I concentrate long enough, to be a certain secret that draws me to the stars: their ancient silence, their insistence on commanding attention without shouting from rooftops, unlike the shamelessness of thunder and rain, unaffected by their distance or determination. Stars are quiet – arrogant, maybe – but also of a particular crispness that takes refuge in every pore, every fragment of every hair that covers every slope and plane of the body. It is possible that Michael K is peering from behind the night clouds, content not to be bothered. He has seen the zealots and charlatans coming from miles away, preserved his soul in the most elementary of ways: the ways of silence.”
― Nthikeng Mohlele, Michael K

“We must know how to look into images to see that of which they are survivors. So that history, liberated from the pure past (that absolute, that abstraction), might help us to open the present of time.”
― Georges Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz