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Quote by Aminatta Forna

“Writers do not write about places, they write about people who happen to live in those places. This is something that the labellers and their labels don’t understand either.”

Author

Aminatta Forna

Aminatta Forna is a British author of Sierra Leonean origin, renowned for her fiction and non-fiction works that explore themes of identity, memory, and the African diaspora. Born in 1964, she has penned several novels and essays that reflect her own experiences as a woman of African descent living in the UK. more

“The obsession with past trauma refracts World Lit’s sense of belatedness, even when the genre advertises its contemporaneity. You can argue that we’re still haunted by Hiroshima or the Holocaust, that people refuse to speak about this haunting — kind of the way they refuse to care about the novel. Past horrors, unlike contemporary ones, also tend to be events liberal readers agree about. But they displace the contemporary world, locating politics always elsewhere, in some distant geography and irrecoverable past. Present day confusions and controversies are neglected or sentimentalized.”

Contemporary Literature World Literature

Author:The editors n+1

“Great works of literature from other places are not only censored by banning them, but even more so by silencing them, by refusing to translate them in the first place. Marginalization is the worst form of censorship and intellectual assassination. Likewise, choosing what gets translated into a certain language and what gets marginalized is a form of shaping and constructing the historical memory of a place according to whims of those who own the money and means of knowledge production.”

Knowledge Colonialism Translation Decolonization Marginalization World Literature Knowledge Production

Author:Louis Yako

“The Vase The bouquet of flowers in the vase is two weeks old, Or maybe a little older? They are all wilted and dead now. The scene is much like a mass grave, Each flower has died in its own way. The first flower—the biggest in the bunch— Opened as widely as it could. Each of its petals dried up. The second one seemed as though it had tried To bend itself towards the end of her life, It broke her neck as she dried in silence. The third flower tried to close after opening, As she felt her life was coming to an end. She died closed. The fourth flower looked like she had started to sacrifice herself For the sake of everyone else around her. She, too, dropped most of her petals, And died naked, except for one or two petals. The fifth flower didn’t have time to open, Or perhaps she realized the futility of opening up in such a tight vase. She also wilted and dried prematurely and half-opened. The sixth flower died very young, Before having a chance to bloom. The colorless water in the vase is now yellowish and dead. Yes, waters die too. For colorless waters, death can be colorful. April 12, 2013”

Inspirational Death Poetry Meaning Of Life Death And Dying Flowers World Literature

Book:أنا زهرة برية [I am a Wildflower]

Source: أنا زهرة برية [I am a Wildflower]

“The Problem The problem I have, my friends, is too complicated. It is not only that I no longer have a home, Or a roof over my head. It is that I no longer wish to have one. I confess to you; however, that Even if I wished to have a place to call home, My wish would be impossible to realize, Because I have been erased from everywhere. Yes, the mercenaries And those who worship the dollar notes, Under the names of religions and ideologies, Have erased me from history. They have revised and rewrote my story. Everywhere I go, I find them lurking and waiting for me, To blockade me, To suffocate me, And to steal from my mouth The few crumbs of bread I have left. And so, I repeat, my friends, My problem is too complicated. I don’t have a home, I no longer want a home, And I couldn’t have a home to shelter me, Even if so I wished in my wild dreams. June 1, 2017”

Inspirational Poetry Creativity Exile Alienation Arabic Poetry World Literature