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Quote by Abdulrazak Gurnah

“I'm afraid, you're right...though not only of them. We'll lose everything, including the way we live,' Hussein said. 'And these young people will lose even more. One day they'll make them spit on all that we know, and will make them recite their laws and their story of the world as if it were the holy word. When they come to write about us, what will they say? That we made slaves.”

Quote by Abdulrazak Gurnah

Work

Paradise

This book delves into the concept of paradise, examining the societal structures and individual experiences within an idealized community. more

Author

Abdulrazak Gurnah

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“The questions must be, what were the effects on the people as their lands were stolen and desecrated, relationships destroyed, children taken and violated, lore and ceremonies devalued and dishonoured? What long-term impacts have these separate yet inter-related tragedies had on the survivors? Answers to these questions will provide answers to present distressful circumstances.”

“The drive to live in the master’s house is also symbolic of the desire to become like the master. Our colonized consciousness has convinced us that to be is to be like the master. To be Filipino is not good enough—or so we we have been taught (or coerced) to believe. It is a reflection of the internalization of the dark shadows projected by the colonizer onto the colonized. These are shadows from which there is no escape, shadows that will keep haunting until they are withdrawn, atoned for, and integrated within the colonizer’s self”

“The traumas associated with colonization that lasted almost 400 years scarred us all, regardless of our nativity, language, class, or gender. Trauma fragments and fractures the essence of our being and self-knowledge; it disconnects us from each other.” Regardless of your nativity, your memories are colonized. You are born into trauma without an initial understanding of or hermeneutic for your fragmented self and you must work diligently just to explain your own life—to recognize and name your scars, to educate yourself about your specific cultural history and uncover its connections to your subjectivity. The ideologies of your family are colonized, and even your own thoughts and actions are colonized, despite your initial unawareness of the systematic forces at work in the simple procedures of your daily life.”

“In the initial stages, when contact between the two peoples might be limited to scouting out the possibilities of invasion, or trading with them for their furs or other produce, there is less need or cause to demean the inhabitants as savages or to regard them as beasts. However, the descriptions are radically different once dispossession becomes the aim or when the natives violently resist the intrusion of explorers.”

“Not all influences of colonialism were necessarily bad. Along with enslavement, subjugation, exploitation, loss of cultural heritage, and repression, colonists also brought modern scientific methods in fields such as medicine and agriculture. Note that this can be no apologia for colonialism, because these advances could have been gained without the societies' becoming colonised, as in Japan.”

“The idea of discovery and consequent possession is used by those with neither the intelligence nor sensitivity to see the value in lives other than their own. Anyway, there is no need to possess anything when there is access to everything. It is only when someone says that your mother belongs to them that there is a problem.”