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Quote by Chinonye J. Chidolue

“Protect your Territory; your dreams, goals, interests, family, friends, everything that in some way have become your essence, protect and nurture it through the good and the bad times. Give no one the power to decide who or what's in or out. Make your territory yours. Mark it in linnings of brimming coals if you may. If it's your own place of uncompromised peace and happiness, If it's your place of growth, own that shit, and watch everyone rest with their opinions.”

Quote by Chinonye J. Chidolue

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Chinonye J. Chidolue

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“Border crossing' is a recurrent theme in all aspects of my work -- editing, writing, and painting. I'm interested in the various ways artists not only cross borders but also subvert them. In mythology, the old Trickster figure Coyote is a champion border crosser, mischievously dashing from the land of the living to the land of the dead, from the wilderness world of magic to the human world. He tears things down so they can be made anew. He's a rascal, but also a culture hero, dancing on borders, ignoring the rules, as many of our most innovative artists do. I'm particularly drawn to art that crosses the borders critics have erected between 'high art' and 'popular culture,' between 'mainstream' and 'genre,' or between one genre and another -- I love that moment of passage between the two; that place on the border where two worlds meet and energize each other, where Coyote enters and shakes things up. But I still have a great love for traditional fantasy, for Imaginary World, center-of-the-genre stories. I'm still excited by series books and trilogies if they're well written and use mythic tropes in interesting ways.”

WritingReadingFantasyMagicGenreMainstreamEditingPopular CultureBorder Crossing
Author:Terri Windling
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“The border remains a fluid, mutating, stubbornly troubling, enthusiastically lethal region. Perhaps it’s not a region at all. Maybe it’s just an idea nobody can agree on. A conversation that never ends, even when it becomes an argument and all participants kick over the table and spill their drinks and stomp out of the room. I was born there.”

DesertBorder CrossingImmigration Issues
Book:The Devil's Highway: A True Story
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“This is the moment of Lydia's crossing. Here at the back of this cave somewhere in the Tumacacori Mountains, Lydia sheds the violent skin of everything that's happened to her. It rolls down from her tingling scalp off the mantle of her shoulders and down the length of her body. She breathes it out. She spits it into the dirt. Javier. Marta. Everything. Her entire life before this moment. Every person she loved who is gone. Her monumental regret. She will leave it here. She stands at Lorenzo's feet. She turns away from him. 'I forgive you,' she says.”

GriefForgivenessTraumaCrossing OverBorder CrossingBorderlands
Book:American Dirt
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“Angie was a border crosser, a wetback, a worker in the immigrant sweatshop they call this city. On days like this I understand her like a woman instead of a child. Everybody thought she was a whore. She wasn’t. She tried to step across the border of who she was and who she might be. They wouldn’t let her. She didn’t believe it herself so she stepped across into a whole other country.”

ImaginationIdentityBorder CrossingCarlaAngieDionne BrandItalian CanadianWhat We All Long For
Book:What We All Long For
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“It seems jolly on the page. But imagine poverty, violence, natural disasters, or political fear driving you away from everything you know. Imagine how bad things get to make you leave behind your family, your friends, your lovers; your home, as humble as it might be; your church, say. Let's take it further - you've said good-bye to the graveyard, the dog, the goat, the mountains where you hunted, your grade school, your state, your favorite spot on the river where you fished and took time to think.”

Border CrossingBorderlands La Frontera
Book:Across the Wire: Life and Hard Times on the Mexican Border
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“Border guards in Canada ask if ou're bringing any firearms into their country. On this side, they just wanna know about cigarettes. Unless you're visibly Nish. Then you get the full questioning. And if you're Nish and Black, like my uncle Art? You get a gun pulled on you at the border with your Nish wife and baby daughters in their car seats”

RacismNative AmericanBlack Lives MatterRacism In AmericaBorder Crossing
Book:Firekeeper’s Daughter
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“Men stumbled away toward illusions in the brutal light. Men thought they were home, walking into their front doors, hugging their wives, making love. Still they walked. Men were swimming. Men were killing Mendez. Men were on the beach, collecting shells and watching their children splash. Their women stood naked before them, soft bellies, hands on ribs, breasts. Men hid their faces from a furious God. And they walked. A voice was heard in the light-shatter, saying “He’s going to die. Lay him down here and let him die. Keep walking.” The desert, out of focus and suddenly terribly sharp, burst white and yellow in their eyes. It tilted. Elongated. It was at an impossible angle! It tipped up towards the sun, and if they didn’t crawl, they would slide right off it and fall forever. It made noise: there were engines beneath the desert. It made evil grinding noises, mechanical humming. No, it was insectile, the screech of hunger and derision. The devils were under the rocks, spitting insults. The black head laughed. I believe in God the father, creator of heaven and earth. No, it did not fucking laugh—- it was silent as a graveyard out there. Just the crunch and slide, crunch and slide, of endless hopeless footsteps. Hundreds of footsteps.”

DeathImmigrationDesertBorder Crossing
Book:The Devil's Highway: A True Story
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