15 quotes
"It is by no means a mean achievement in a country where the male life expectancy is something between a dreadful 45 and 50 years."
"Moral apathy is no option. Silence is oftentimes an evasion of moral responsibility, an advertent or inadvertent complicity with those whose noise enslaves the world."
Passports are passports. The Atlantic is a wilderness of barbed walls brooking no windows, its door of deafening steel.
Waiting Laughters (1990)
My song is space beyond wails, beyond walls, beyond insular hieroglyphs, which crave the crest of printed waves.
Waiting Laughters (1990)
And seasons which wax so loud with the eloquence of the sword, arrogant thrusts and chronictes of desperate gorings
Waiting Laughters (1990)
Waiting, still waiting, like the brown fable of rainless regions, the sun’s stony victory in the wilderness of fleeing dust
Waiting Laughters (1990)
"We are as implicated and committed by every word we utter, every word we write as we are by every word we fail to utter, every word we refuse to write."
"I have been exceedingly lucky, with regards to the kind of good health I have had."
I pluck these words from the lips of the wind. Ripe like a pendulous pledge; Laughter’s parable explodes in the groin. Of waking storms. Clamorous with a covenant of wizened seeds.
Waiting Laughters (1990)
They too are the earth, the swansongs of beggars sprawled out in brimming gutters. they are the earth. under snakeskin shoes and Mercedes tyres
The Eye of the Earth (1986)
Our earth has never lingered so dry, in the season of falling showers, clouds journey over trees and over hills, miserly with their liquid treasure
The sky carries a boil of anguish. Let it burst.
The Eye of the Earth (1986)
"The very calling of the artist/writer is a political statement; with writers from historically disadvantaged parts of the world, political consciousness becomes a social, almost existential imperative."
And every toemark on the footpath, every fingerprint on every bark, the ropy climbers flung, breathlessly, from tree to tree, the haunting sound, and silence, of this sweet and sour forest, dig deep channels to the sea of memory.
The Eye of the Earth (1986)
Here where yam wore the crown, in the reign of swollen roots, amid a retinue of vines and royal leaves; between insistent sky and yielding earth. the sun mellowed planting pageants into harvest march, a fiery pestle in his ripening hand.
The Eye of the Earth (1986)
"One hasn't become a writer until one has distilled writing into a habit, and that habit has been forced into an obsession. Writing has to be an obsession. It has to be something as organic, physiological and psychological as speaking or sleeping or eating."