NoViolet Bulawayo

Running and chanting, the word change in the air like it's something you can grab and put in your mouth and sink your teeth into.

Generally the men always tried to appear strong; they walked tall, heads upright, arms steady at the sides, and feet firmly planted like trees. Solid, Jericho walls of men. But when they went out in the bush to relieve themselves and nobody was looking, the fell apart like crumbling towers and wept with the wretched grief of forgotten concubines.And when they returned to the presence of their women and children and everybody else, they stuck hands deep inside torn pockets until they felt their dry thighs, kicked little stones out of the way, and erected themselves like walls again, but then the women, who knew all the ways of weeping and all there was to know about falling apart, would not be deceived; they gently rose from the hearths, beat dust off their skirts, and planted themselves like rocks in front of their men and children and shacks, and only then did all appear almost tolerable.

And so the spirits just gazed at us with eyes milked dry of care.

If you are stealing something it__ better if it__ small and hideable or something you can eat quickly and be done with, like guavas. This way, people can__ see you with the thing to be reminded that you are a shameless thief and that you stole it from them, so I don__ know what the white people were trying to do in the first place, stealing not just a tiny piece but a whole country. Who can ever forget you stole something like that?

With all this snow, with the sun not there, with the cold and dreariness, this place doesn't look like my America, doesn't even look real. It's like we are in a terrible story, like we're in the crazy parts of the Bible, there where God is busy punishing people for their sins and is making them miserable with all the weather. The sky, for example, has stayed white all this time I have been here, which tells you that something is not right. Even the stones know that a sky is supposed to be blue, like our sky back home, which is blue, so blue you can spray Clorox on it and wipe it with a paper towel and it wouldn't even come off.

I am careful not to look anyone in the face because I don't want them to see the shame in my eyes, and I also don't want to see the laughter in theirs.

...and the women spread their ntsaroz and sit on one side, the men on the other, like they are two different rivers that are not supposed to meet.

We are all watching and not knowing what to do because when grown-ups cry, it's not like you can ask them what's wrong, or tell them to shut up; there are just no words for a grown-up's tears.

[Jesus Christ] used to have blue eyes but I painted them brown like mine and everybody__, to make him normal.

You want Change, today we'll show you Change!Here's your democracy, your human rights, eat it, eat eat eat!

That's what you do in America: you smile at people you don't know and you smile at people you don't even like and you smile for no reason.

this place doesn't look like my America

When things fall apart, the children of the land scurry and scatter like birds escaping a burning sky....They will never be the same again because you cannot be the same once you leave behind who and what you are, you just cannot be the same....Look at them leaving in droves, despite knowing they will be welcomed with restraint in those strange lands because they do not belong

And they had nothing, except of course memories, their own, and those passed down by their mothers and mothers' mothers. A nation's memory.

I am starting to talk fast now, and I have to remember to slow down because when I get excited, I start to sound like myself and my American accent goes away.

Because we were not in our country, we could not use our own languages, and so when we spoke our voices came out bruised.