23 quotes
Myths circulate like gifts without givers, and no myth teller (cares to) knows where they come from or who invented them.
Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (1989)
Knowledge belongs to the one who succeeds in mastering a language.
Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (1989)
Never does one open the discussion by coming right to the heart of the matter. For the heart of the matter is always somewhere else than where it is supposed to be.
Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (1989)
Time and space are not something entirely exterior to oneself, something that one has, keeps, saves, wastes, or loses.
Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (1989)
Questions are always loaded with the questioner’s prejudices.
Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (1989)
Writing as an inconsequential process of sameness/otherness is ceaselessly re-breaking and re-weaving patterns of ready-mades. The written bears the written to infinity.
Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (1989)
No situation proves too small or too insignificant for a writer, since there is truly no narrow experience, only narrow representation.
Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (1989)
Substantial creative achievement demands not necessarily genius, but acumen, bent, persistence, time.
Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (1989)
We create the dualism, not realizing that death, like life, is a process. The moment I am born, I enter the realm of death. Life and death are together one process, and we are dying every moment.
Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (1989)
To write is to become. Not to become a writer (or a poet), but to become, intransitively. Not when writing adopts established keynotes or policy, but when it traces for itself lines of evasion.
Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (1989)
Language also reveals its power through an insignificant slip of the pen, for no matter how one tries to subject it to control and reduce it to “pure” instrumentality, it always succeeds in giving an inkling of its irreducible governing status.
Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (1989)
Anonymous myths give birth to other anonymous myths, multiplying and ramifying themselves without the fear of one being absorbed by the other, and beyond any myth teller’s control. Like leaves of grass, they grow and die following the rhythm of impermanent-permanent nature.
Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (1989)
A story is not just a story. Once the forces have been aroused and set into motion, they can’t simply be stopped at someone’s request. Once told, the story is bound to circulate; humanized, it may have a temporary end, but its effects linger on and its end is never truly an end.
Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (1989)
The task of criticism is to bring to light the enigmatic content of a work by reestablishing the ties between it and its author or reconstituting the latter’s thought and experience through her/ his works.
Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (1989)
Writing, for the majority of us who call ourselves writers, still consists of “expressing” the exalted emotions related to the act of creating and either appropriating language to ourselves or ascribing it to a subject who is more or less a reflection of ourselves.
Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (1989)
Words empty out with age. Die and rise again, accordingly invested with new meanings, and always equipped with a secondhand memory.
Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (1989)
Writing, in a way, is listening to the others’ language and reading with the others’ eyes. The more ears I am able to hear with, the farther I see the plurality of meaning and the less I lend myself to the illusion of a single message.
Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (1989)
The story circulates like a gift; an empty gift which anybody can lay claim to by filling it to taste, yet can never truly possess. A gift built on multiplicity. One that stays inexhaustible within its own limits. Its departures and arrivals. Its quietness.
Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (1989)
Theory no longer is theoretical when it loses sight of its own conditional nature, takes no risk in speculation, and circulates as a form of administrative inquisition. Theory oppresses, when it wills or perpetuates existing power relations, when it presents itself as a means to exert authority—the Voice of Knowledge.
Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (1989)
The story of man’s infatuation with his language is an unending one. In a remote village of Africa, a wise Dogon man used to say “to be naked is to be speechless.” Power, as unveiled by numerous contemporary writings, has always inscribed itself in language. Speaking, writing, and discoursing are not mere acts of communication; they are above all acts of compulsion.
Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (1989)