on losing momentum…

don’t ever stop moving… once you lose momentum it’s so hard to get going again. so even if you have to slow down because you have too much work, or not enough energy or resources, don’t stop moving. slow down when necessary. but keep moving.

the uncritical acceptance of English

“The ‘uncritical acceptance’ of English or French as the medium of educated African writing is ‘misdirected’, says [Obiajunwa] Wali, and ‘has no chance of advancing African literature and culture’.”

from Stylistic Criticism and the African Novel by Emmanuel Ngara (1982). Quoting Wali, ‘The Dead End of Afican Literature?’, Transition, Vol. 3, No. 10.

rumi on healing and trust

Trust your wound to a teacher’s surgery.
Flies collect on a wound.
They cover it,

meditation 18 Jul

meditation on Bashō to the tune of Mood indigo…

“Make up a story…” Toni Morrison on writing

“Make up a story… For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don’t tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief’s wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear’s caul.”

―Toni Morrison, The Nobel Lecture In Literature, 1993

“I tried to kill him but I missed,” Nina Simone

this is one of the reasons she’s one of the voices in my head – around 22 mins 45sec…

Tim Sebastian: There’s a report that at a business meeting you once pulled a knife
Nina Simone: I sure damn did!

bell hooks on the Power of Representation

“It’s scary to me now, because, particularly in issues around erotica and sexual violence, people want to deny the direct link between representations and how we live our lives. I think that it’s possible to embrace the knowledge that there’s a direct link between representations and choices we make in our lives that does not make that link absolute, that does not say, “oh, if I look at a movie in which a woman is fucked to death,” than I will go out and think I should let myself be fucked to death by any man who wants to fuck me. I think that’s an absurd sense of a direct link, but that is not to say, that if I watched enough of those images I might not come away thinking that certain forms of unacceptable male violence in coercion in relationship to my female body are acceptable.