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Petina Gappah Quotes

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Famous Petina Gappah Quotes

“There is only one illness that pushes both the well-wheeled and the un-wheeled to seek out the prophet. It is the big disease with the little name, the sickness that no one dies of, the disease whose real name is unspoken, the sickness that speaks its presence through the pink redness of lips, the slipperiness of hair, through the whites of the eyes whiter than nature intended.”

Short StoriesZimbabwePetina Gappah
Book:An Elegy for Easterly: Stories
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“She looked around for something with which to cut the cord. There was nothing, and the baby almost slipped from her hands. Through a film of tears she chewed on Martha’s flesh, closing her mind to the taste of blood, she chewed and tugged on the cord until the baby was free. She wiped the blood from her mouth with the back of her hand. The baby cried, she held it to her chest, and felt an answering rise in her chest. – ‘An Elegy for Easterly”

Short StoriesPetina GappahZimbabe
Book:An Elegy for Easterly: Stories
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“This is one of the consequences of a superior education, you see. In this independent, hundred-per-cent-empowered and fully and totally indigenous blacker-than-black country, a superior education is one that the whites would value, and as whites do not value local languages at the altar of what the whites deem supreme. So it was in colonial times, and so it remains, more than thirty years later.”

LanguageRaceEducationColonialismAfricaZimbabweDialectAfrican LanguagesWhite WashMiseducationShonaLocal Languages
Book:The Book of Memory
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