A psychiatrist once asked me to draw a picture of my family. This is when I was a member of a family of four. I drew the three other people in the family first, bodies and heads. And then, last, I began to draw myself - but gave up.

Often the lines that define the traditional European arrangement of fiction, non-fiction, history, etc. are not useful. These lines can distort the world we, people who look like me, live in - and by the world, I mean our personal experience of it.

No matter how happy I had been in the past I do not long for it. The present is always the moment for which I love.

I would never never read a work of fiction and want to know about the person's life.

It's too easy to say this or that is "race," and that has been a vehicle for an incredible amount of wrong in the world.

The past is a room full of baggage and rubbish and sometimes things that are of use, but if they are of real use, I have kept them.

This naming of things is so crucial to possession - a spiritual padlock with the key thrown irretrievably away - that it is a murder, an erasing, and it is not surprising that when people have felt themselves prey to it (conquest), among their first acts of liberation is to change their names.