Jherane Patmore

“I hearing Queenie’s words: “Let the pain leave out of you with each breath. It want to be free too,” she would say whenever I would get hurt, or if I was feeling sick. Even if I was sad, she would say these words, and through my tears and pain, I would find my center again.”
― Junauda Petrus, The Stars and the Blackness Between Them

“Audre, you are a wild nurturing. You are a complicated specialness. You are ancestral perseverance and sacred erotic,” she says, like she praying, holding me close to her. I cry louder. “Gyal, you been in constant communication with Spirit your whole life and you been taught that Spirit speak loudest when we deep in the water, drowning in trouble and fear.” Queenie suddenly closes her eyes and is quiet and breathing, which I know means she is receiving messages. “And that is when you must let yourself get quiet and still. You must let yourself float above it until you are safe and levitating on the water and beneath the sky and just listen, Audre.” She opens her eyes and looks at me. “And, dahlin’, let me tell you something for truth: America have dey spirits too, believe me,” she say, and she puts out her spliff, rubs my back, and starts humming a song into my spine. It a quiet and low song, and I feel my heart inhale the love of it.”
― Junauda Petrus, The Stars and the Blackness Between Them

“Take your feelings and hold them with softness, but also with power. And whenever you feel afraid, know you can ask your fear about itself.”
― Junauda Petrus, The Stars and the Blackness Between Them

“Collective memory, the foundation of any culture's narrative, is a historical; mythology, laces with figments of truth, is essential to forming a country's founding identity and maintaining social cohesion.”
― Padraig O'Malley, The Two-State Delusion: Israel and Palestine--A Tale of Two Narratives