Khadija Abdalla Bajaber
Khadija Abdalla Bajaber is a Mombasa-born poet and novelist with a degree in journalism whose manuscript was selected as the first winner of the Graywolf Press Africa Prize,[1] awarded for a first novel manuscript by an African author primarily residing in Africa.
Quotes
editAdimora My Books Browse ▾ Community ▾ Khadija Abdalla Bajaber Quotes Follow Author 82 followers You look for your faces, your history, some representation, anywhere—and you have to sort of take what you can get, badly done as it is. I got tired. No one was going to write our stories. How could I only write about the English moors and fantastical places and wait for an outsider to misrepresent my people? I want to write about those places, but I’m not going to wait for someone to write about my home. I’m going to make a lot of mistakes probably, not out of malice or deliberate ignorance, not out of lying—but I’d rather make my own mistakes than get angry when others do it for us. I’m not looking to wow or shock readers with what I write, or creating an uproar. What I care about is not being deliberately or accidentally unkind to others, or to further alienate those who are already being alienated.
- I’m a visibly Muslim woman from Kenya, I understand that the world is very hostile toward a lot of the parts that make up my identity. I’m not a historian, I studied journalism but I’m not a practicing journalist. What I care about is not contributing to erasure or overlooking or forgiving it.
- It’s a gift, it’s a blessing. Say a prayer over it, let the blood from the old dead—usually so estranged to me—warm. When I eat what they ate, I am for a moment more than the little I am, I am the present because of what was past. I am blood. I have a people.
- Una donna non viene lodata quando soffre, ma soltanto quando soffre in silenzio
- A donna does not have lodata when soffre, ma soltanto when soffre in silence