Sunday 27 May 2012

CACLALS conference: day 1

The end of day one at the conference for the Canadian Assoc for Commonwealth Language & Literary Studies.

I'm tried, and had a lovely fulfilling invigorating day with great conversations and some very good thngs to listen to and get me thinking!

Tonite I'm just going to share a few direct quotes I jotted down while listening...

"at some point you just have to make it up... some of the labour you've done gives you the disposition... [but] the archive is just not there" (about the problem of missing colonial archives)

"the medicine of stories"

"he said language was his home"

One speaker couldn't work out why she had studied law. She thought it might be to she could support herself and her son. She then thought it might be the fulfilment of her father's own dream to be a lawyer. Then she realised it was so she could write poetry.

"breaking and entering the text"

"I knew the stories were in there"

"the sea is the archive; the sea is very fluid" "the words began to float on that archive of memory - the water"

"not taking it back, but getting underneath it" [about Caribbean writers' relationship with English language]

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