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Alexandra Fuller
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“The rains are rhythmic, coming religiously in the afternoons (after lunch has been eaten but before tea, so that the nights are washed clean-black with bright pinpoints of silver starlight hanging over a restless, grateful earth).”
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“ People who disagree with His Excellency, the President for Life and 'Chief of Chiefs,' are frequently found to be the victims of car crashes (their bodies mysteriously riddled with bullets); or dead in their beds of heart attacks (their bodies mysteriously riddled with bullets); or the recipients of some not-quite-fresh seafood (their bodies mysteriously riddled with bullets).”
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“Once, I discovered the skulls of two impala rams, their horns locked into an irreversible figure-of-eight; the two animals had been trapped in combat, latched to each other during the battle of the rut. The harder they had pulled to escape from each other, the more intractably stuck they were, until they had fallen exhausted, to their knees, in an embrace of hatred that had killed them both.”
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“What is important is the story. Because when we are all dust and teeth and kicked-up bits of skin — when we're dancing with our own skeletons — our words might be all that's left of us.”
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“There aren't enough doctors in Africa. Those who choose to become doctors here don't do it for the money or because they want to do good. They do it because they have to heal, the way most people need to breathe or eat or love.”
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“She is moving slowly, grief so heavy around her that it settles, like smoke, into her hair and clothes and stings her eyes.”
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“I had the constitution of a missionary.”
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“... when a government talks about 'fighting for Freedom' almost every Freedom you can imagine disappears for ordinary people and expands limitlessly for a handful of people in power.”
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“As a result of Auntie's standard nonconformity .... it is sometimes a little difficult to tell when her natural eccentricity crosses into territory better understood by the professionals.”
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“War is Africa's perpetual ripe fruit. There is so much injustice to resolve, such desire for revenge in the blood of the people, such crippling corruption of power, such unseemly scramble for the natural resources. The wind of power shifts and there go the fruit again, tumbling toward the ground, each war more inventively terrible than the last.”
Alexandra Fuller, English-born African writer living in the U.S.
(1969)