Phillippa Yaa de Villiers Quotes

born 1966 South Africa

Phillippa Yaa de Villiers (born 17 February 1966) is a South African writer and performance artist who performs her work nationally and internationally. She is noted for her poetry, which has been published in collections and in many magazines and anthologies, as well as for her autobiographical one-woman show, Original Skin, which centres on her confusion about her identity at a young age, as the biracial daughter of an Australian mother and a Ghanaian father who was adopted and raised by a white family in apartheid South Africa.

South Africa
Artists
Authors
Playwrights
Poets

Random Phillippa Yaa de Villiers quote

3 quotes

"After growing up black in white South Africa, internalising so many negative 'truths' of what black people are like, I needed to reclaim my humanity and myself from the toxic dance of objectification."

"Because I wasn't told that I was adopted until I was twenty, I lacked a vocabulary to describe who I am and where I come from, so performing and writing became ways to make myself up."

"I felt like the colonised and the coloniser were fighting each other inside my brain. Writing continued to be important to me but I was convinced that it was simply a therapeutic process, of no value to anyone else."

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Phillippa Yaa de Villiers (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.