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Quote by Adam Sisman

“In our family histories, the frontier between fact and fiction is vague, especially in the record of events that took place before we were born, or when we were too young to record them accurately; there are few maps to these remote regions, and only the occasional sign to guide the explorer.”

Quote by Adam Sisman

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Adam Sisman

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“Pursuing a family history beyond a simple catalogue of names is always evidence of separation, of severing ties at least to the extent of holding one’s relations at arm’s length. The family member who want to make a private gift of a family tree to a close circle of relatives soon becomes the historian who estranges her antecedents by locating them “in history”. I found that family history, which humanizes those who might otherwise be mere faces in a crowd, also defamiliarized those closest to me, giving their lives a larger pattern than they had when they were lived. They became both more and less themselves. I consoled myself by thinking that this is what history does to us too. As we grow older we see not how unique our lives have been, but how representative we were and are; that we are part of the figure in the carpet woven by events, by chance and accident, and by the play of forces more powerful than us.”

“The ‘modern’, ‘rational’, ‘scientific’, Christian European coloniser could not get himself to acknowledge that the lived experience and traditional knowledge of native societies gathered over millennia could teach him more than a thing or two about living in harmony with nature as opposed to merely salvaging what remained of it in the name of ‘sustainable’ development.”

“Iiwa enkop enye, niturr inkurman enyenak, Itagueta ilpolosien lenyenak, nintipirik imbat e enkuset enye. Itara olmoruo lenye metua, nindaaki oliaisho enye. Ironya ilkejek lenyenak, niintoi inkonyek enyenak, Nintashal isederi enyenak too ilkiyio. Ore te eyieunoto niyieu ninye, nintadoyio inkilani enyenak, Ninchopoki inkarn nemeidim ninye aipoto.”

“You cannot end dehumanization while abiding by the narrative established by the dehumanizers, you cannot end a pandemic while playing by the rules of the virus - you cannot heal a war-inflicted planet while studying from the rulebook of colonialism, that planted the germs of most of those wars in the first place.”