Auli'i Cravalho Quotes

Tribal designs are a part of my heritage. It boils down to the influences from my father, Viv Richards' side.

We should have a music of our own - if possible, without any Sauerkraut.

Our language is the reflection of ourselves.

You cannot build a cultural identity without the images and sounds of your culture. Most countries in the third world - poor countries - they've lost their memories. Because everyday, films and cultural artifacts disappear. Film is also a memory - of the character and imagination of a culture.

Don't make a black woman take off her earrings".

That's the statement of the culture of England and Britain that someone would try to con a personal statement out of you to then be broadcast everywhere for everyone to debate.

Style has a profound meaning to Black Americans. If we can’t drive, we will invent walks and the world will envy the dexterity of our feet. If we can’t have ham, we will boil chitterlings; if we are given rotten peaches, we will make cobblers; if given scraps, we will make quilts; take away our drums, and we will clap our hands. We prove the human spirit will prevail. We will take what we have to make what we need. We need confidence in our knowledge of who we are.

The literature of a people must so ring from the sense of its nationality; and nationality is impossible without self-respect, and self-respect is impossible without liberty.

I feel that the English language will be able to carry the weight of my African experience. But it will have to be a new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit new African surroundings.

When I was a teenager, black pride became newly popular again. Suddenly a lot of black people were wearing the fake kente cloth and red black and green and Bob Marley. That was sort of my window into finding my own identity as a black person.

The arts are not just a nice thing to have or to do if there is free time or if one can afford it. Rather, paintings and poetry, music and fashion, design and dialogue, they all define who we are as a people and provide an account of our history for the next generation.

Art is how a culture records its life, how it poses questions for the next generation and how it will be remembered.

The arts and humanities define who we are as a people. That is their power -- to remind us of what we each have to offer, and what we all have in common. To help us understand our history and imagine our future. To give us hope in the moments of struggle and to bring us together when nothing else will.

The Canadian voice is still too rustic.

I kept my culture. I kept the music of my roots. Through my music I became this voice and image of Africa and the people without even realising.

Hip hop - it's an art form but it's a culture as well. You grow up in the culture and you never leave it. It's a style of dress; it's a way of thought. I always grew up in the culture, and it was part of who I was and I carried it into every world I was in.

Iran is the latest expression of a deep, ancient, powerful culture that's different than ours. And we don't know how it's going to play itself out.

Culture is everything. Culture is the way we dress, the way we carry our heads, the way we walk, the way we tie our ties - it is not only the fact of writing books or building houses.

...a young man, Jamaican, perhaps, his head circled in a scarf with sunbleached dreadlocks on piled on top, looking like a plate of soft-shell crabs.

I'm not a policy maker. I'm not even a very great activist. My main thing is to make things that speak for the culture that I live in.

Culture, then, is a study of perfection, and perfection which insists on becoming something rather than in having something, in an inward condition of the mind and spirit, not in an outward set of circumstances.

Non-Indian writers usually say "Great Spirit," "Mother Earth," "Two-Legged, Four-Legged, and Winged." Mixed-blood writers usually say "Creator, "Mother Earth," "Two-Legged, Four- Legged, and Winged." Indian writers usually say "God," "Mother Earth," "Human Being, Dog, and Bird."

Art is not some inessential frippery - it is the nation's means of intelligently regarding itself. To cripple or stigmatize the arts is to doom one's nation to a life of incuriosity, dullness, literalness and the worst kind of rank materialism.