literaturemonamour

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‘Only the memories and the mother wounds

Passed on for two centuries

Across continents, oceans, and generations

Which I carry in my blood

Brings us together in the present moment

Forever intertwined in the past’

Searing accounts of indentured labour told by the descendants of the laborers themselves. This anthology explores variegated stories of indentured laborers from the British colonies in the 19th century. The stories are personal and utterly poignant. Many of them stood out to me as they recalled the tales of womanhood that are sometimes omitted from this type of anthology. Slavery in The British Empire was reinvented with a new name as the workers from India were shipped off to the British colonies under indentureship. Many workers who were recruited often struggle to find their own cultural identity in a strange new land under colonialism. In most cases, it was coercion or misrepresentation that paved the way for human exploitation. They were bound by a system that was constructed against their freewill. Their distinct cultural identity was removed along with their humanity - to the masters there were simply workers toiling in the sugar plantation to fill their pockets.

Yes, there are other books written about this particular period of colonial history, but for some reasons, indentured labour remains an obscure subject and controversial in a political sense. What this book has accomplished while the others failed to do is giving an identity to the oppressed by representing them as people with distinct cultural identity. Their voices are being heard, loud and clear through their descendants on these pages. This book represents a distinctive piece of colonial history - it was not written or dictated from the perspective of the oppressors, thus by shifting the cannon - this anthology grants us an access to the voices of the oppressed from the colonial past and explores the impacts indentured labour left on the next generations. Overall, this is an illuminating and thought provoking read, albeit a little bit dry at times. I’d recommend this book if you’re interested in the subject matter. 

[literaturemonamour]

idotdoodle

[literaturemonamour]

“To accept one’s past - one’s history - is not the same thing as drowning it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.” - James Baldwin, as I think today about the myth of the incoming administration’s key declaration and the myth of American democracy we are living in precisely because so many white people refuse to accept how we made this country

[literaturemonamour]

“There's a place beyond words where experience first occurs to which I always want to return. I suspect that whenever I articulate my thoughts or translate my impulses into words, I am betraying the real thoughts and impulses which remain hidden.” ― Jerzy Kosinski, The Painted Bird 

One thing that I quickly realized upon finishing this book, is that all you need to do to feel an existential aghast is picking up a Kosinski’s book. This book is savagely brutal and completely ruthless. There were times when I paused to question the sanity of the author and his state of mind. As you read deeper into the book, you think it couldn’t get any worse, but it did as Kosinski was unyielding and refusing to hold anything back. 

This could almost be a compendium of war-crime atrocities but exaggerated to a great degree tinged with the author’s twisted fantasy. I have to admit, it is difficult to read a book like this and doesn’t feel crippled by the heaviness of it. It offers a heavy and depressing glimpse into the downfalls of humanity and how ethnic hatred could drive us to depravity. 

One thing I do admire, is Kosinski’s beautiful, expressive way of writing which translates quite well throughout the book. His writing is deep and contemplative. So many beautiful phrases and quotes can be taken away from this. His allegory of making the protagonist The Painted Bird himself was ingenious as well. 

[literaturemonamour]

The only people I would care to be with now are artists and people who have suffered: those who know what beauty is, and those who know what sorrow is: nobody else interests me.

Oscar Wilde (via fuckyeahexistentialism)

[literaturemonamour]

@marioncotillard: 🌸💖🌼💜🌹🌻💛🌺Va en paix merveille ✨

[literaturemonamour]

To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.

Arundhati Roy, from “The End of Imagination” (via theclassicsreader)

[literaturemonamour]

Perhaps one of the most underrated feelings is that of an almost relationship. People despair over divorce, over falling out of love, over losing a partner- and they should, those are moments in a life that can define us. But so does the act of losing someone you could have loved. Who you maybe even did love. Someone who may or may not have loved you back once, but now no longer can. Knowing with your entire being that you could have had something great, if only- Well. If only.

K.S. (via raindrop-petal)

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I don’t think I could love you so much if you had nothing to complain of and nothing to regret. I don’t like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and of little value. Life hasn’t revealed its beauty to them.

Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago (via bookmania)

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What is it with me? Am I absolutely nobody, but merely inordinately vain? I do not know. But I am most fearfully unhappy. That is all. I am so unhappy that I wish I was dead—yet I should be mad to die when I have not yet lived at all.

Katherine Mansfield (b. 14 October 1888)

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Like you, I have fought with all my might not to forget. Like you, I have forgotten.

Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), dir. Alain Resnais

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I’ve always loved you, and when you love someone, you love the whole person, just as he or she is, and not as you would like them to be.

Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy (b. 9 September 1828)

[literaturemonamour]

We deceive ourselves about love — about who; and how; and when; and whether. We also discover and correct our self-deceptions. The forces making for both deception and unmasking here are various and powerful: the unsurpassed danger, the urgent need for protection and self-sufficiency, the opposite and equal need for joy and communication and connection. Any of these can serve either truth or falsity, as the occasion demands. The difficulty then becomes: how in the midst of this confusion (and delight and pain) do we know what view of ourselves, what parts of ourselves, to trust? Which stories about the condition of the heart are the reliable ones and which the self-deceiving fictions? We find ourselves asking where, in this plurality of discordant voices with which we address ourselves on this topic of perennial self-interest, is the criterion of truth? (And what does it mean to look for a criterion here? Could that demand itself be a tool of self-deception?)

Philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s Incompleteness Theorem of the Heart’s Truth, from Plato to Proust

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I believe books will never disappear. It is impossible for it to happen. Of all mankind’s diverse tools, undoubtedly the most astonishing are his books…If books were to disappear, history would disappear. So would men.

Jorge Luis Borges (via bookmania)

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“A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development. But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

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Human beings can withstand a week without water, two weeks without food, many years of homelessness, but not loneliness. It is the worst of all tortures, the worst of all sufferings.

Paulo Coelho (b. 24 August 1947)

[literaturemonamour]

Alain De Botton, On Love