Hope Phelps

“The tree of life knows that, whatever happens, the warm music spinning around it will never stop. However much death may come, however much blood may flow, the music will dance men and women as long as the air breaths them and the land plows and loves them.”
― Eduardo Galeano, Century of the Wind

“Borders, though, are rarely as definite as they appear on maps. The longer you spend living around them, the less sense these kinds of simplistic divisions make. Frontiers are places where identities take on absurdly definite forms, in barbed wire fences and vigilante patrols. At the same time, they're places where boundaries between different cultures break down. Sicilian history is white, Christian and Western, certainly, but it has also been, and still is, black, Arab, Muslim among other things. Such ambiguities are present everywhere, but they are particularly visible on the shores of the Mediterranean. This is what makes the region so exciting. It's also what makes it difficult and, for some, uncomfortable.”
― Jamie Mackay, The Invention of Sicily: A Mediterranean History

“Inside this volatile mix, a woman who had volunteered to help us, as needed, fell apart. She was, she is, an attorney... Rather than speak to the police, she started to tremble and cry. She said to me, "I can't. I can't do this. I'm just a single mother with three children." And so on. And it was awful to watch her fear making her powerless. It was awful. It was very depressing. And I thanked her for showing up, anyway. And I watched her retreat: Not blessed by a visible, known, tested, and building community on which she could rely, she felt, and therefore, she was isolated. She could not do herself, or anyone else, any good.

I think this has something to do with rape, which, I think has a lot to do with domination and the dominator's determination to deprive you of your rights.”
― June Jordan, Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays

“Whether read from the perspective of slavery or that of colonial occupation, death and freedom are irrevocably interwoven. As we have seen, terror is a defining feature of both slave and late modern colonial regimes. Both regimes are also specific instances and experiences of unfreedom. To live under late modern occupation is to experience a permanent condition of "being in pain": fortified structures, military posts, and roadblocks everywhere, buildings that bring back painful memories of humiliation, interrogations, and beatings; curfews that imprison hundreds of thousands in their cramped homes every night from dusk to dawn; soldiers patrolling the unlit streets, frightened by their own shadows; children blinded by rubber bullets; parents shamed and beaten in front of their families; soldiers urinating on fences, shooting at rooftop water tanks just for kicks, chanting loud and offensive slogans, pounding on fragile tin doors to frighten children, confiscating papers, or dumping garbage in the middle of residential neighborhoods; border guards kicking over vegetable stands or closing borders at whim; bones broken; shootings and fatalities - a certain kind of madness.”
― Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics