Alex Haley Quotes

When I first left Iran at the age of 13, Iran had become such a shining star - it was the point to which all my desires and dreams returned.

'Commonwealth' is not a word I ever used growing up in Colombo. There, in the late 1950s, it would have meant little more than New Zealand lamb and Anchor butter at the cold stores.

I'm a writer obsessed with remembering: with remembering the past of America above all - and above all, that of Latin America, intimate land condemned to forgetfulness.

My first inkling of what the Commonwealth might really mean came only when I escaped the oddly British-tinged Asia I had known and went to live in the Philippines.

Imperialism and popular government have nothing in common: they differ in spirit, in policy, in method.

Our colonies are great and growing nationalities.

Tell my people to go West—there is no justice for them here.

When you first leave Uganda for Europe you think, ‘At last, I'm free to do what I want’. But when you arrive there, you become an African for the first time, in a sense. Because you are responsible for Somalia! They call you up and say, ‘What do you think about Somalia?’ And you can't say, ‘I'm Ugandan, I have nothing to say about Somalia’. You have this big, huge chunk of experience to defend --and you will defend it, because nobody else is defending it. You become some sort of an ambassador and for the first time you become conscious of what Africa means.

Talk not to me of peace. Ireland is not at peace, it is smothered war. England has sown her laws as dragon's teeth, and they have sprung up as armed men.

All of the Antilles, every island, is an effort of memory: every mind, every racial biography culminating in amnesia and fog. Pieces of sunlight through the fog and sudden rainbows, arcs-en-ciel. That is the effort, the labour of the Antillean imagination, rebuilding its gods from bamboo frames, phrase by phrase.

History has proven that art depicting black people cannot be disentangled from the political implications that such art has on their lives. As Africans were being stripped from the continent and sailed across the Atlantic to the Western world, depictions of black people in Western art changed in order to further render them racialized caricatures.

The invention of the African American, or the Haitian or Jamaican, is a consequence of the transatlantic slave trade.

War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country.

We're not Americans, we're Africans who happen to be in America. We were kidnapped and brought here against our will from Africa. We didn't land on Plymouth Rock - that rock landed on us.

The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long that nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was... The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

The status of 'native' is a nervous condition introduced and maintained by the settler among colonized people with their consent.

...wherever one is, some part of oneself remains on another continent.

Memory feeds a culture, nourishes hope and makes a human, human.

The American dream has always depended on the dialogue between the present and the past. In our architecture, as in all our other arts-indeed, as in our political and social culture as a whole-ours has been a struggle to formulate and sustain a usable past.

... a man leaves much when he leaves his own country.

Representation is a crucial location of struggle for any exploited and oppressed people asserting subjectivity and decolonization of the mind.

The reality of any place is what its people remember of it.

When a human being is oppressed, the natural tendency is to feel anger. Jazz is a response to oppression that is not bullets and blood. Jazz is the expression of harmony ... and at the same time of hope and freedom.

A trauma is something one repeats and repeats, after all, and this is the tragedy of the Iqbals--that they can't help but reenact the dash they once made from one land to another, from one faith to another, from one brown mother country into the pale, freckled arms of an imperial sovereign.