André Brink

André Philippus Brink OIS (29 May 1935 – 6 February 2015) was a South African novelist, essayist and poet.

André Brink

Quotes

The Other Side of Silence (2002)

• ...flotsam from the fatherland.
  • Describing the people journeying to the South-west Africa. Page 12

• Specific silences imposed by certain historical conjunctions.
  • Page 14

• [t]hrough perceiving the world as a story to be told and endlessly reshaped, I would argue, the reader is actually encouraged to act upon the world (..) literature becomes more, not less, potent
  • Page 14

• History provides one of the most fertile silences to be revisited by South African writers because the dominant discourse of white historiography (...) has inevitably silenced, for so long,so many other possibilities.
  • Page 22

• Address two silences simultaneously: that created by the marginalization of women,and that effected by a (white-dominated) master-narrative of history.
  • Page 24

• Attempt to grasp, with the creative imagination, the past and its silences.
  • Page 25

• She did what no one had thought possible.
  • Page 66

• Uncovers the dark places into which we may fear to look.
  • Page 66

• Even during the days and nights when she was dazed and only half awake the stories must have insinuated themselves into her torn and bruised body like draughts and ointments with healing powers beyond all explanation. (There is no pain and no badness,) she still hears the dry voice of old Taras in her ear, that a story cannot cure.
  • Page 94

• Attempt new strategies which will convert previous defeats into victory.
  • Page 121

• How curious, this urge they have, all of them, to leave their mark on a woman's body. As if despair lies behind it, and fear, (..) In each theneed, the terrifying urge, to scar and leave his mark. And only her body available for their inscription.
  • Page 148

• I believe more and more that as a man I owe it to herat least to try to understand what makes her a person, an individual,what defines her as a woman.
  • Page 153

• Violence our language. A land hostile, empty, strange: it does not talk back, remains inaccessible. Which forces this violence from us,its motive achingly pure. On and one we move through the evermore arid landscape, sowing destruction as we go (....) An orgy of blood (...) with the single purpose of leaving on that virgin barren place the scrawl of our progress. We were here to acquire, to conquer, to have, to possess: I have therefore I am. Land, you are woman. Woman, you are mine.
  • Page 235-6