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 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

“I'm not a writer, or a teacher, or a priest. I don't know anyone on the island who could be described as a writer. It's an occupation, or a state, that none of us knew anything about. We've never heard of it before. The only people who ever knew how to write on the island were the teacher, the priest and the functionaries who worked in the governor's office, though we never knew what they came to do. What I have spoken of is what I experienced, heard and saw when I was a child. It has never been put down on writing before, because, as I said, I am not a writer; nobody on the island is. If this story becomes known, it will be because of some white people. They came to our island and wanted to know our folk tales, the stories we tell at night before going to sleep.”
― Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel, By Night the Mountain Burns

“[I]n the face of every image we have to choose whether, or how, to make it participate in our knowledge and action. We can accept or reject this or that image; take it as a consoling object or as a worrying object; make it ask questions or use it as a ready-made response.”
― Georges Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz