Written in Her Own Words
“Word-work is sublime…because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference – the way in which we are like no other life.”
Word-Work
“The kind of work I have always wanted to do requires me to learn how to manoeuvre ways to free up the language from its sometimes sinister, frequently lazy, almost always predictable employment of racially informed and determined chains.”
Learn
“I think some aspects of writing can be taught, obviously, you can’t expect to teach vision or talent, but you can help with comfort.”
Language
“I am a black writer struggling with and through a language that can powerfully evoke and enforce hidden signs of racial superiority, cultural hegemony, and dismissive “othering” of people and language…”
Racially Informed and Determined Chains
“Living in a nation of people who decided that their world view could combine agendas for individual freedom and mechanisms for devastating racial oppression presents a singular landscape for a writer.”
Meaning
“We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”
Meaning of Life
“Everything I’ve ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulations, rather than to close it, to open doors, sometimes, not even closing the book – leaving the endings open for reinterpretation, revisitation, a little ambiguity.”
Measure of Our Lives
“Narrative has never been merely entertainment for me. It is, I believe, one of the principal ways in which we absorb knowledge.”
Life
“I didn’t plan on either children or writing. Once I realised that writing satisfied me in some enormous way, I had to make adjustments. The writing was always marginal in terms of time when the children were small. But it was major in terms of my head. I always thought that women could do a lot of things. All the women I knew did nine or ten things at one time. I always understood that women worked, they went to church, they managed their houses, they managed somebody else’s houses, they raised their children, they raised somebody else’s children, they taught, I wouldn’t say it’s not hard, but why wouldn’t it be? All important things are hard.”
Writing Satisfied Me
“I’m just trying to look at something without blinking, to see what it was like, or it could have been like, and how that had something to do with the way we live now. Novels are always inquiries for me.”