She understood why all the historians before Basha performed the Remembrance to melody, that impulse to salvage a speck of beauty from tragedy with a dirge, but Yetu wanted people to remember how she remembered. With screams.
Are you now so deluded you think you exist outside the category of everything?
This was always the case when people asked if you knew what something meant. They didn’t want you to know it. They wanted to be able to explain it themselves, to prove themselves bearers of esoteric knowledge.
Listen, then repeat. Listen, then repeat. That was all it took to pretend well. What was a person’s self but carefully articulated mimicry?
There was an excitement coming from Giselle. She was standing on the edge of a new world and so ready to jump. How Lucifer felt upon leaving Heaven. He didn’t fall. He dove.
These didn’t have to be contradictions. She let the multiple truths exist inside her as a way of meditating.
We grow anxious and restless without you, my child. One can only go for so long without asking who am I? Where do I come from? What does all this mean? What is being? What came before me, and what might come after? Without answers, there is only a hole, a hole where a history should be that takes the shape of an endless longing. We are cavities. You don’t know what it’s like, blessed with the rememberings as you are,” said Amaba.
Defiance would always be Vern’s purest and most plentiful resource.
No podemos entender a un pueblo que ha elegido por voluntad propia aislarse de su historia, por mucho dolor que imponga.
She reached into one of the cabinets and got out an old box filled with amber vials of isopropyl alcohol. Expensive. Hard to find. She emptied them out one by one over herself, even over her shorn hair, until she smelled like medicine. Until she was a sterile thing no more sexual than a pair of sanitized scissors. That sharp too.
It was strange to be having such a conversation with her Amaba, discussing their varied interpretations of the history. What had always seemed certain to Yetu wasn’t so immutable. The living put their own mark on the dead. Goodness, how’d did she missed it?
There was no sense mourning that which no longer nourished.
The rememberings carried her mind away from the ocean to the past. These days, she was more there than here.
To everyone I will ever be, and ever was.
In the woods, where animals ruled with teeth and claws, such things mattered not a lick.
You’re a smart one. You know as good as me and as Flick that there is no Promised Land. Matilda’s an orphan, a daughter of dead gods. But Ancestors is real and their spirits are at work. Baby sun giving out is how they making a fuss.
Everything burns up some time or another, even God Herself. That’s how She made the Heavens. She a phoenix. Like me.
They say there’s nothing like watching a child’s face light up as they learn something new, but the folks who say that is lying. Children are fine enough, just not my favorite.
Wife, I require supper. I am hungry, as the mental effort required to digest politics is quite taxing. You would not understand.
Who might she have been had she not spent the better part of her life in the minds of others?
With history, with memory, with retellings, people often settled for the obvious answer.