Chris Abani

• "This is the kola nut. This seed is a star. This star is life. This star is us".
  • Chapter One, p. 6
  • Each chapter opens with a brief description of the kola nut ceremony, an important Igbo tradition in Nigeria symbolising hospitality and respect and closes with a recipe from Elvis’ mother’s journal, which he carries with him at all times to keep her spirit with him.

• "Elvis! Elvis! Wake up. It’s past six in de morning and all your mates are out dere looking for work,” his father, Sunday, said.
  “What work, sir? I have a job.”
  “Dancing is no job. We all dance in de bar on Saturday. Open dis bloody door!” Sunday shouted.
  • p. 8
  • Elvis' father, Sunday, wants him to quit dancing and find a better job.

• He stared at the city, half slum, half paradise. How could a place be so ugly and violent yet beautiful at the same time? he wondered. He hadn’t known about the poverty and violence of Lagos until he arrived. It was as if people conspired with the city to weave a web of silence around its unsavoury parts.
  • p. 10
  • A vision of an altogether different world, where the first and the third world is separated virtually only by the lagoon.

• What I've come to learn is that the world is never saved in grand messianic gestures, but in the simple accumulation of gentle, soft, almost invisible acts of compassion, everyday acts of compassion. In South Africa they have a phrase called ubuntu. Ubuntu comes out of a philosophy that says, the only way for me to be human is for you to reflect my humanity back at me.
  • "Chris Abani muses on humanity," dotSUB (2008-11-13)

• He said to me, "It will always be difficult, but if you cry like this every time, you will die of heartbreak. Just know it is enough sometimes to know it is difficult."
  • Quoting a former child soldier who held his hand over a goat's eyes while Abani, aged 13, killed it
  • "Chris Abani muses on humanity," dotSUB (2008-11-13)

• We are hunting the demons that haunt others. We get a smell and off we go. And you know why, Sunil? You know why we are so good at hunting the demons of others? Because we are so good, gifted even, at stalking and evading our own. But all demons hunters think that they are really heroes, and you know what all heroes need?
  • [1]

• Circuses are about entertainment and juggling and animals and all that shit. Sideshows are about freaks, about people and the limits of acceptability. We push those limits. If a circus is an escape, Fire said, a sideshow is a confrontation.
  • [2]

• Time was the only variable in every equation of power and oppression-how long before the pot boiled over.
  • [3]

• There had been many such experiments when he worked in South Africa, in Vlakplaas, a notorious apartheid death camp.
  • [4]

• He too, it seemed, had come to believe that he could somehow escape history. That it was possible, and even desirable, to live in a perpetual present.
  • [5]

• Something that had the quality of a dimly lit stage set just before the curtains rise on opening night. There was a rhythm to it, a beckoning, and a bittersweet tear in time.
  • [6]

• “blacks. As in any free market, the coloreds were the middle classes, as it were—those who would give their lives to maintain the status quo, a life they knew they could never improve but which had meaning only because there were those who suffered worse; that in fact, a larger population suffered worse.
  • [7]

• Do you think anything ever changes, Salazar asked. That we can make a difference? That we will become a better species? I don’t know, I’m not sure if it even matters. I think all that matters is that we don’t shrink away from the truth and that we keep trying, Sunil said. I like that. Push the stone up the fucking hill because we should. Yes,
  • [8]

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