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The wind is calling in a voice I remember
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Chris Abani |
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We are hunting the demons that haunt others. We get a smell and off we go. And you know why, Sunil? You know why we are so good at hunting the demons of others? Because we are so good, gifted even, at stalking and evading our own. But all demons hunters think that they are really heroes, and you know what all heroes need?
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Chris Abani |
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But the thing is that, in the end, we each must decide how comfortable we are with how much we hurt other people
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Chris Abani |
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ee3dbe4
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This is the prevalence of ritual. To remember something that cannot be forgotten.
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Chris Abani |
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He knew that scar, that pain, that shame, that degradation that no metaphor could contain, inscribing it on his body. And yet beyond that, he was that scar, carved by hate and smallness and fear onto the world's face. He and everyone like him, until the earth was aflame with scarred black men dying in trees of fire.
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Chris Abani |
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Listening to the clack clack of the pal fronds form a percussive background to the oboe throb of the sea, he dozed off. An hour later, he woke with a start and, standing up, dusted off the seat of his trousers. White sand, in fine glittering silicon chips, clung to him, catching the sun, turning him into a patchwork fabric of diamonds and ebony.
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Chris Abani |
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d48f988
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Abigail read in Reader's Digest that all plane landings were controlled crashes. Like the way we live our lives, she thought. Bumble through doing the best we can and hoping that some benevolence keeps us from crashing.
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Chris Abani |
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She who had been taken and taken and taken. And now the one time she took for herself, the one time she had choice in the matter, it was taken away.
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Chris Abani |
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9d4efa9
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circles of hell. He hated to admit it, but Eugene had been right in his choice of Inferno, except their interpretations differed. Where Eugene saw only the internal battle of the privileged soul, Sunil saw the entire architecture and structures of racism and apartheid: three concentric circles of life and economics. Color-coded circles for easy understanding, whites at the heart, coloreds at the next remove, and finally, the blacks at the o..
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Chris Abani |
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4e775b8
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What you hear is not my voice. I have not spoken in three years: not since I left boot camp. It has been three years of a senseless war, and though the reasons for it are clear, and though we will continue to fight until we are ordered to stop-and probably for a while after that-none of us can remember the hate that led us here. We are simply fighting to survive the war. It is a strange place to be at fifteen, bereft of hope and very nearl..
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Chris Abani |
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3591e83
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Thoughts of Abigail filled her world. By all accounts she had bee a tall, thin, woman, whose eyes held a power beyond the black pools of er irises. Tall, thin, and dark, she, this Abigail, looked so much like the other that her father had named her the same She was more ghost than her mother, however, moving with the quality of light breathing though a house in which the only footprints in the dust were those of her dead mother. Even her la..
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Chris Abani |
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386d397
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Abigail read in Reader's Digest that all plane landings were controlled crashes.
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Chris Abani |
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806947e
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There had been many such experiments when he worked in South Africa, in Vlakplaas, a notorious apartheid death camp.
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Chris Abani |
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He too, it seemed, had come to believe that he could somehow escape history. That it was possible, and even desirable, to live in a perpetual present.
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Chris Abani |
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as his mother told Grandma Marie, there are no words for some
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Chris Abani |
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7c7c714
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Something that had the quality of a dimly lit stage set just before the curtains rise on opening night. There was a rhythm to it, a beckoning, and a bittersweet tear in time.
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Chris Abani |
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b58f6de
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Circuses are about entertainment and juggling and animals and all that shit. Sideshows are about freaks, about people and the limits of acceptability. We push those limits. If a circus is an escape, Fire said, a sideshow is a confrontation.
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Chris Abani |
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Time was the only variable in every equation of power and oppression-how long before the pot boiled over.
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Chris Abani |
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Do you think anything ever changes, Salazar asked. That we can make a difference? That we will become a better species? I don't know, I'm not sure if it even matters. I think all that matters is that we don't shrink away from the truth and that we keep trying, Sunil said. I like that. Push the stone up the fucking hill because we should. Yes,
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Chris Abani |
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4c9ba5a
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I would say it is because the striving and the power keep you from realizing just how helpless you really are. It protects you from facing the fact that others are manipulating you, that regardless of what you might claim, your philosophy is simply a way to rationalize what you do for others too afraid to do their own dirty work; that you are in a way also a victim of the apartheid state. You
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Chris Abani |
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0d0c53a
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It is easy to forget the decadence of glass. How some of us find it only in fragments. The glass between us and the world is often the measure of our wealth. Looking out at the world through it colors the hunger beyond.
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Chris Abani |
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bf99d2f
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I watch what happens below and I am grateful that I can smell my smell, smell my smell and live while below me it happens, it happens that night bright as day, but I cannot name it, those things that happened while I watched, and I cannot speak something that was never in words, speak of things I cannot imagine, could never have seen even as I saw it, and I hide and am grateful for my smell crouched like an animal in that dark hot space
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Chris Abani |
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a4b0505
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There are no easy ways to speak these words. No way to honor love and truth without something getting lost in translation. It is made even more complex when one party is dead, silent to this world. And how do you tell a story that is commonplace and felt by all without giving in to sentimentality? But the thing is that, in the end, we each must decide how comfortable we are with how much we hurt other people.
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Chris Abani |
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86ce5c7
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Elvis, take de passport. You know I myself no go ever go America,' Redemption said. 'Why?' 'Because dis na my home. I be area boy, alaye. I no go fit for States.
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Chris Abani |
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f5fce6b
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blacks. As in any free market, the coloreds were the middle classes, as it were--those who would give their lives to maintain the status quo, a life they knew they could never improve but which had meaning only because there were those who suffered worse; that in fact, a larger population suffered worse.
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Chris Abani |