Kalliope’s Reviews > Incomparable World > Status Update

Like it or not, this is an English inn and we are English-speakers. Until we blacks use our original African language, our lives are linked with these people and theirs to ours, even agains our proper interests, with the best will in the world.

The teeth were strong, white and shiny like new-ivory cuff-links. They were simply too large for his gums and it dawned on William that they were not his own - thy'd once belonged to a black man.

Everyone on earth will die before they die. Lives will be lost many times, in many ways. And the boundless, private voids -- where one's momentum is the only measure - must be haunted anew with fresh hope and new suspicion. .. The land of desire is like the kingdom of the dead: there is always room for more.

This was something he could never have imagined: seeing a black adult in the company of their parents.

This is a crime that will never be reported. A black gang robs the American Embassy of its secret slave bounty. Who would dare tell of it?

Where in the world would you go with two thousand pounds? As a black man, I mean?

A pleasure to make your acquaintance, Mr Supple. I once saw you in the role of Oroonoko at the Theatre Royal. You were splendid. A great improvement of Roger de Villiers.
-Indeed it was. I believe it was the black paint on his skin that made this playing the poorer.

Black-Face in the 18thC.

Paper, he realized, was he one thing that kept him in touch with human life. Without it he was nothing, simply spinning idiotic fictions in voids of his won creation: like Buckram, illiterate, insolvent, invalid.

He didn't like church as a rule, especially a church like St Giles where black people formed a sizeable part of the congregation. It reminded him too much of his plantation life, when an overseer would ride down to the shacks on the Lord's day to eat to knelling slaves...

Transportation to Africa? What the devil d'you mean? Every year they find something new to scare us with. It never works. We're still here. there's too many of us, slaves, ex-slaves, free-born and all, just too many.