May Fly

“The self is undone before the impossibility of naming: all the previously known names and essentialist categories representing the world and the self are dismantled.”
― An Yountae, The Decolonial Abyss: Mysticism and Cosmopolitics from the Ruins

“Rule Britannia, a bunch of thugs had been sing-shouting in the street at the weekend past Elisabeth's flat. Britannia rules the waves. First we'll get the Poles. And then we'll get the Muslims. Then we'll get the gyppos, then the gays. You lot are on the run and we're coming after you, a right-wing spokesman had shouted at a female MP on a panel on Radio 4 earlier than same Saturday. The chair of the panel didn't berate, or comment on, or even acknowledge the threat the man had just made. Instead, he gave the last word to the Tory MP on the panel, who used what was the final thirty seconds of the programme to talk about the real and disturbing cause for concern — not the blatant threat just made on the air by one person to another — of immigration.”
― Ali Smith, Autumn

“I'm everything that makes everything. I'm everything that unmakes everything. I'm fire. I'm flood. I'm pestilence. I'm the ink, the paper, the grass, the tree, the leaves, the leaf, the greenness in the leaf. I'm the vein in the leaf. I'm the voice that tells no story.”
― Ali Smith, Autumn

“Elisabeth had been listening to the programme in the bath. She'd switched the radio off after it and wondered if she'd be able to listen to Radio 4 in any innocence ever again. Her ears had undergone a sea-change. Or the world had.

But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and —

Rich and what? she thought.
Rich and poor.”
― Ali Smith, Autumn