I come from the small island of Antigua and I always wanted to write; I just didn’t know that it was possible.
It’s too easy to say this or that is “race,” and that has been a vehicle for an incredible amount of wrong in the world.
The people who invented race, who grouped us together as “black,” were inventing and categorizing their ability to do something vicious and wrong.
Love and hatred don’t take turns; they exist side by side at the same time. And one’s duty, one’s obligation every day, is to choose to follow the nobler one.
Life has a truth to it, and it’s complicated – it’s love and it’s hatred.
The thing we call romance is a diversion from something truer, which is life.
A psychiatrist once asked me to draw a picture of my family. This is when I was a member of a family of four. I drew the three other people in the family first, bodies and heads. And then, last, I began to draw myself – but gave up.
I’ve written a book about my mother, and I don’t remember anyone going to Antigua or calling up my mother and verifying her life. There is something about this book that drives people mad with the autobiographical question.
Often the lines that define the traditional European arrangement of fiction, non-fiction, history, etc. are not useful. These lines can distort the world we, people who look like me, live in – and by the world, I mean our personal experience of it.
I wouldn’t mind being labeled as “angry,” if it wasn’t used once again to denigrate and belittle.
I don’t feel I’m angry. I feel as though I’m describing something true. If I had stabbed my husband, I could understand being called “angry.” If I had an affair with my husband’s best friend and written about that experience, I could see the anger. But I’m not doing that.
People think if you describe someone with glistening brown skin you’re writing about race, as if the whole of the African diaspora is in someone’s brown skin.
I’ve come to see that I’m saying something that people generally do not want to hear.
The sound of words in a novel is a pretty amazing thing, and I am concerned with the sound of every word I write.
You know how they say a man’s house is his castle? I think for a woman, it’s her body. I feel so strongly about a woman’s right to choose. This is my Zionism. It’s not a “right” any more than it’s a right to breathe, to take in oxygen.
It’s very funny, American society: White culture can do all sorts of things and get away with it, but the minute a black person does it, it’s interpreted in some way.
We had accepted each other’s shortcomings and differences; then, just when we began to feel the yoke of each other’s companionship, just when we began to feel the beginnings of what might eventually lead to lifelong loathing, we decided to move in together. It could have been worse. People marry at times like tat; they then have ten children, live under the same roof for years and years, eventually die and arrange to be buried side by side. We only signed our names to a two year lease.
Isn’t it the most blissful thing in the world to be away from everything you have ever known – to be so far away that you don’t even know yourself anymore and you’re not sure you ever want to come back to all of the things you’re a part of?
For isn’t it odd that the only language I have in which to speak of this crime is the language of the criminal who committed the crime?
The night-soil men can see a bird walking in trees. It isn’t a bird. It is a woman who has removed her skin and is on her way to drink the blood of her secret enemies. It is a woman who has left her skin i a corner of a house made out of wood. It is a woman who is reasonable and admires honeybees in the hibiscus.