Anushree

“In America, we saw more food than we had seen in all our lives and we were so happy we rummaged through the dustbins of our souls to retrieve the stained, broken pieces of God. We had flung him in there way back when we were still in our own country, flung him during desperate, desperate moments when we were dizzy with hunger and we thought, How come he will not pity us, how come?”
― NoViolet Bulawayo, We Need New Names

“There are times, though, that no matter how much food I eat, I find the food does nothing for me, like I am hungry for my country and nothing is going to fix it.”
― NoViolet Bulawayo, We Need New Names

“And then our children were born. We held their American birth certificates tight. We did not name our children after our parents, after ourselves; we feared if we did they would not be able to say their own names, that their friends and teachers would not know how to call them. We gave them names that would make them belong in America, names that did not mean anything to us: Aaron, Josh, Dana, Corey, Jack, Kathleen. When our children were born, we did not bury their umbilical cords under the earth to bind them to the land because we had no land to call ours.”
― NoViolet Bulawayo, We Need New Names

“It’s a long time ago that I lost my faith in Mary, a long time since she was the fulcrum of the scheme of salvation I then believed in, alongside Jesus the chief redeemer. But I find that the symbolism of mercy and love which her figure has traditionally expressed has migrated and now shapes secular imagery and events; Catholic worship and moral teaching no longer monopolize it or control its significance.”
― Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary