Taylor > Recent Status Updates

And genocide is not war, itself another human choice—ostensibly a choice with agreed-upon rules. In genocide there are no rules, save, of course, to be thorough, to finish the job. That’s what genocide is: an effort to finish the job of completely erasing the other, his actuality and his possibility. And once started, it is usually efficient

It is easy to imagine that war and genocide come from place outside of ourselves. But genocide is not an accident of nature, nor an act of God. It is an act of man—a human choice.

“Humanitarianism is about more than medical efficacy or technical competence. In its first moment, in its sacred present, humanitarianism seeks to relieve the immediacy of suffering, and most especially of suffering alone”

“Why had no one told me that my body would become a battlefield, a sacrifice, a test? Why did I not know that birth is the pinnacle where women discover the courage to become mothers? But of course, there is no way to tell this or hear it.”

“a clear pattern of vilification across the millennia and throughout history to bring down powerful individuals suffering from chronic no-penis syndrome.”

“Think of the vine that curls from the small square plot that was once my heart. That was the only marker you need. Move on. Walk forward into the light.”

“Yes, you are all accomplices to the fall, and yes, we are gone forever. Gone to a ruin so strange it must be called by another name. Call it muntu: all that is here”

“The glide of belly on branch. The mouth thrown open wide, sky blue. I am all that is here.”

“As long as I kept moving, my grief streamed out behind me like a swimmers long hair in water. I knew the weight was there but it didn’t touch me. Only when I stopped did the slick, dark stuff of it come floating around my face, catching my arms and throat till I began to drown. So I just didn’t stop.”

“Recalling her strange transfigured shadow the last time I pushed her in the swing”-Leah recalling when she saw Ruth May’s legs as antelope legs while pushing her on the swing. Foreshadowing to her death? As this moment came as a downward spiral after Leah chose to hunt with the men, and created discord in the community, and subsequently shot an antelope. An antelope in exchange for her sister?

“The trilling of our neighbours’ tongues set loose knives that cut the flesh from our bones and made us fall down with our shame and our love and our anger. We were all cut down together by the knife of our own hope, for if there is any single thing that everyone hopes most dearly, it must be this: that the youngest outlive the oldest.”

“The death of something living is the price of our survival, and we pay it again and again. We have no choice. It is the one solemn promise every life on earth is born and bound to keep”