frumiousb

The young woman has just read a novel by Rosamond Lehmann about the suffering of women in love-- it makes her feel inferior as if she isn't capable of suffering so much. Perhaps when I'm older, she thinks hopefully.
pg. 189

At dawn some sparrows, who had evidently not heard that this was not a pleasure resort and that Popov, the prison governor, had categorically forbidden all contact between birds and prisoners, perched boldly on the edge of the wooden screen, their tails fluttering comically. With joyful voices they ushered in the grandest month of the year. It was the morning of August 1, 1937.
pg. 169

When I undertook to write about myself I found that I had embarked upon a somewhat rash adventure, easier begun than left off. I had long wanted to set down the story of my first twenty years; nor did I ever foget the distress signals which my adolescent self sent out to the older woman who was afterwards to absorb me, body and soul. Nothing, I feared, would survive of that girl, not so much as a pinch of ashes. I begged her successor to recall my youthful ghosts, one day, from the limbo to which it had been consigned. Perhaps the only reason for writing my books was to make the fulfillment of this long-standing prayer possible.
pg. 5

What would you have me say? That I think apartheid is stupid and vicious? I do. That I'm sorry? I am, I am. That I'm not like the rest of them? If you'd met me a few years ago, in a bar in London or New York, I would have told you that. I would have told you that only I, of all my blind clan and tribe, had eyes that could truly see, and that what I saw appalled me. I would have passed myself off as a political exile, an enlightened osrt who took black women into his bed and fled his country rather than carry a gun for the abominable doctrine of white supremacy. You would probably have believed me. I almost believed myself, you see, but in truth I was always one of them. I am a white man born in Africa, and all else flows from there.
pg. 18

Adventure for me has three stages. There is the first unshackled interval before starting when my dreams are bounded by nothing, north, south, east or west. There is the second interval when, footsore and insect-bitten, aching-backed and broken-spirited, I wish that I had never come. And then comes the third interval-- and in this interval I know that such adventures are the caviar of my existence compared to which other events in my life are Schwarzbrot. In this interval the fantastic, the unreal, the magnificent, and the unimaginable, which might have occurred only to other people, are occurring really to me. And then I know that it is right that such things must be paid for in discomfort, discouragement and weariness; I know it is right that they are not free.
pg. 205

Forgive me, your Reverence, for wandering from my subject, and do not be surprised, for I am following my own purpose. The writing seems to take control of my soul; and it is very often quite hard to break off my praise of God, when the great debt that I owe Him springs to my mind as I write. I do not think that this will displease you, Father, for I believe we can both sing the same song, though in a different way.
Pgs. 102-103

I cannot pinpoint a moment when I became politicized, when I knew that I would spend my life in the liberation struggle. To be an African in South Africa means that one is politicized from the moment of one's birth, whether one acknowledges it or not. An African child is born in an Africans Only hospital, taken home in an Africans Only bus, lives in an Africans Only area, and attends Africans Only schools, if he attends schools at all.

When he grows up, he can hold Africans Only jobs, rent a house in Africans Only townships, ride Africans Only trains, and be stopped at any time of the day or night and be ordered to produce a pass, failing which he will be arrested and thrown in jail. His life is circumscribed by racist laws and regulations that cripple his growth, dim his potential, and stunt his life. This was the reality, and one could deal with it in a myriad of ways.

I had no epiphany, no singular revelation, no moment of truth, but a steady accumulation of a thousand slights, a thousand indignities, a thousand unremembered moments, produced in me an anger, a rebelliousness, a desire to fight the system that imprisoned my people. There was no particular day on which I said, From henceforth I will devote myself to the liberation of my people; instead, I simply found myself doing so, and could not do otherwise.
pg. 95

I'd left a box of books in Harlem in the fall, and before we sailed I went after them. I brought them aboard ship with me. But when I opened them up and looked at them that night off Sandy Hook, they seemed too much like everything I had known in the past, like the attics and basements in Cleveland, like the lonely nights in Toluca, like the dormitory at Columbia, like the furnished room in Harlem, like too much reading all the time when I was a kid, like life isn't, as described in romantic prose; so that night, I took them all out on deck and threw them overboard. It was like throwing a million bricks out of my heart-- for it wasn't only the books that I wanted to throw away, but everything unpleasant and miserable out of my past: the memory of my father, the poverty and uncertainties of my mother's life, the stupidities of color-prejudice, black in a white world, the fear of not finding a job, the bewilderment of no one to talk to about things that trouble you, the feeling of always being controlled by others-- by parents, by employers, by some outer necessity not your own. All those things I wanted to throw away. To be free of. To escape from. I wanted to be a man on my own, control my own life, and go my own way. I was twenty-one. So I threw the books into the sea.
pg. 98

By the following morning the Congolese had retreated from Ruanda, and although we felt uneasy for many weeks afterward, they did not return. Additional paratroopers were brought in to Kisenyi, and the civilians eventually returned to their homes. Karin Bielska, who had spent three days and two nights holed up at the brewery, returned to her twin houses in Kisenyi and packed her bags and left for Europe. She wrote me a brief note to say she was leaving.

"After all, dear," she wrote, "this is a bit much."

I had to agree. It did seem a bit much.
pg. 134