Chantal Akerman Quotes

I love my heritage!

I always identified myself as non-Swedish. I was never discriminated against, because I looked Swedish and speak without an accent. But I had an outsider's perspective.

Whoever imitates a people is one of them.

I think everyone is kind of an immigrant somehow, and I wasn't raised in an American society at home. My household was a Jamaican household, so I got all my traditions, all my roots and culture intact, so I'm able to support both countries.

I didn't really grow up with any traditions. I grew up in a pretty liberal household in Southern California. I think that's part of my interest in thinking about heritage. I don't have a second language or cultural heritage in that way.

Traditions are the inventions of people who mean to routinely put love and comfort and meaning into their lives and in the lives of those they live with.

The film 'Documented,' a project of the nonprofit and nonpartisan Define American campaign, is about my families: the family I was blessed to be born into, and the family of friends, mentors and allies that I found when I moved to the United States at 12, a Filipino kid trying to make sense of my new home in America.

Identity in America is complicated but it's also simple: it's about whom you identify with and who identifies with you.

By virtue of my traditions, and my community, I worked hard to ensure that I was accepted as part of the traditional family of America.

I found my place when I moved to London, where I chose to live, making my own tribe who were all from different backgrounds and places. The class thing is very dominant there, but in the cultural cross-fertilization, I felt a sense of belonging.

I am not an African. I am an American.

I want to clear this once and for all. I was born in Hong Kong. I grew up in Japan and China. London is not home for me. I was there only for three years before I moved to India, but that's probably why I am connected with it. London is definitely not the place I consider my home. It's India that I consider home.

My heart is half Puerto Rican, half Canadian. That is how I feel.

The Africans know I'm not an African. I'm an American.

Thus the races, though alike in their physical response to climate, may possibly be different in their mental response because they have approached America by different paths.

We Indians only know that schools will make our children like white people, and some of us do not like white people and their ways.

Indians should associate with English youths in a mixed school, and should be removed entirely from native influences.

I think that's what makes many Swedes jealous of immigrant groups. You have a culture, an identity, a history, something that brings you together. And what do we have? We have Midsummer's Eve and such silly things.

The audiences for some of many of our greatest cultural events—I’m thinking particularly of the Proms [traditional patriotic promenade concerts]—is still a long way from demonstrating that people from different backgrounds feel at ease in being part of this. I know this is not about making every audience completely representative, but if we claim great things for our sectors in terms of their power to bring people together, then we have a right to expect they will do that wherever they can.

We used to have a view that to really be a good Australian, to love Australia, you almost had to cut your links with the country of origin. But I don’t think that was right and it never was right.

The fallacies of the Melting Pot theory have also become obvious. Years before the war [WWI] it had become increasingly apparent that the Melting Pot was no longer successfully performing its function; that the American population was losing its homogeneous character; that various nationalities of recent immigrants were forming more and more compact racial "blocs," each bloc tenaciously maintaining its own racial character, customs, and traditions.

One of my clearest impressions about India as a child was that my parents' stories would have been impossible had they stayed. Of course, such a vision was self-serving, for it made a virtue of our displacement.

I didn't choose to come to the United States, but being raised here has shaped exactly who I am today, and I can't imagine that being taken away from me.

I grew up in L.A. in a school that was diverse, but it was not really integrated, so I didn't ever fully fit in with the black girls or the white girls or the Latina girls.

I'm made up of immigrant stock. I went to a primary school in London. I grew up eating Spangles, why shouldn't I be as well placed to speak for Londoners as anyone else?