#on representations

[nibelmundo]

You gave me a language to dwell in, a gift so perfect it seems my own invention. I have been thinking your spoken and written thoughts for so long I believed they were mine. I have been seeing the world through your eyes for so long, I believed that clear, clear view was my own.

Toni Morrison in her eulogy of James Baldwin in Lovalerie King and L. Scott, James Baldwin and Toni Morrison: Comparative Critical and Theoretical Essays (2006, 2)

[nibelmundo]

Toni (Morrison)’s my ally and it’s really probably too complex to get into. She’s a black woman writer, which in the public domain makes it more difficult to talk about . . . Her gift is allegory. Tar Baby is an allegory. In fact all her novels are. But they’re hard to talk about in public. That’s where you get in trouble because her books and allegory are not always what they seem to be about. I was too occupied with my recent illness to deal with Beloved. But in general, she’s taken a myth, or she takes what seems to be a myth, and turns it into something else. I don’t know how to put this, Beloved could be the story of truth. She’s taken a whole lot of things and turned them upside down. Some of them you recognize the truth in it. I think that Toni’s very painful to read . . . Because it’s always, or most times, a horrifying allegory; but you recognize that it works. But you don’t really want to march through it. Sometimes people have a lot against Toni, but she’s got the most believing story of everybody, this rather elegant matron, whose intentions really are serious, and according to some people, lethal.

1987 interview of James Baldwin in Lovalerie King and L. Scott, James Baldwin and Toni Morrison: Comparative Critical and Theoretical Essays (2006, 1)

[nibelmundo]

I am marked, in so many ways, by what I went through. I survived it, but that isn’t the whole of the story.

Roxane Gay, Hunger (2017, 8)

[nibelmundo]

The destructive character has the consciousness of historical man, whose deepest emotion is an insuperable mistrust of the course of things and a readiness at all times to recognize that everything can go wrong. The destructive character sees nothing permanent. But for this reason he sees ways everywhere. Because he sees ways everywhere, he always stands at the crossroads.

Walter Benjamin

[nibelmundo]

I learned to read, to write, to scream, and to vomit there-

Hélène Cixous, Sorties

[nibelmundo]

My body is a lens I can look through with my mind.

Ama Codjoe, On Seeing and Being Seen

[nibelmundo]

but I don’t know shit about geneses. For eleven years I lied about where I’m from, ashamed by the music of endings—

Aria Aber, Azalea Azalea