Literature Quotes by Taiye Selasi

2 Literature quotes by Taiye Selasi

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I read recently that the problem with stereotypes isn't that they are inaccurate, but that they're incomplete. And this captures perfectly what I think about contemporary African literature. The problem isn't that it's inaccurate, it's that it's incomplete.

Taiye Selasi

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So often, literature about African people is conflated with literature about African politics, as if the state were somehow of greater import or interest than the individual.

Taiye Selasi

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More by Taiye Selasi

I wouldn't mind my book being called an African novel if it didn't invite lazy readings.

Taiye Selasi

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“loss” is a notion. No more than a thought. Which one forms or one doesn’t. With words. Such that one cannot lose, nor ever…

Taiye Selasi

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“Then Ghana, and the smell of Ghana, a contradiction, a cracked clay pot: the smell of dryness, wetness, both, the damp of earth and dry of dust. The airport. Bodies pushing, pulling, shouting, begging, touching, breathing. He'd forgotten the bodies. The proximity of bodies. In America the bodies were distant. The warmth of it … Why had he hated this…

Taiye Selasi

What distinguishes [Afropolitans] is a willingness to complicate Africa – namely, to engage with, critique, and celebrate the parts of Africa that mean most to them. Perhaps what most typifies the Afropolitan consciousness is the refusal to oversimplify; the effort to understand what is ailing in Africa alongside the desire to honour what is wonderful, unique. Rather than essentialising the…

Taiye Selasi

“und dass es in Nordamerika kaum zweieiige Zwillinge gab (ganz anders beispielsweise in Nigeria, wo Zwillinge die Norm waren).�”

taiye selasi

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Sight is subjective. We learned that in class.

Taiye Selasi

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“loss” is a notion. No more than a thought. Which one forms or one doesn’t. With words. Such that one cannot lose, nor ever…

Taiye Selasi

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When I'm working, I'm so narrowly focused on sound, language, rhythm, flow, that I rarely feel the emotion of the text. It's only after…

Taiye Selasi

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The big ideas always come in flashes. I don't really craft stories that much. I genuinely don't know where these people come from, and…

Taiye Selasi

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“They were doers and thinkers and lovers and seekers and givers, but dreamers, most dangerously of all. They were dreamer-women. Very dangerous women. Who…

Taiye Selasi

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The summer I finished my first novel 'Ghana Must Go,' I drove across west Africa: from Accra to Lome to Cotonou to the deliciously…

Taiye Selasi

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I read recently that the problem with stereotypes isn't that they are inaccurate, but that they're incomplete. And this captures perfectly what I think…

Taiye Selasi

Image