But I have long loved the written word, and come to see in it the power of the sleeping lion. This is my name. This is who I am. This is how I got here. In the absence of an audience, I will write down my story so that it waits like a restful beast with lungs breathing and heart beating.

To gaze into another persons face is to do two things: to recognise their humanity and to assert your own.

Today you live, child. Tomorrow, you dream.

I had chosen freedom, with all its insecurities, and nothing in the world would make me turn away from it.

That, I decided, was what it meant to be a slave: your past didn't matter, in the present you were invisible and you had no claim on the future.

WHEN I WAS VERY YOUNG, Papa used to tell me that words fly on wild winds from the mouths of sly people. When the winds pick up, he said, sand blows into your ears and bites your eyes. Storms build overhead like a lake with a spout, but you can’t see or hear. Only when you are safely sheltered, Papa said, can you tell which way the wind is blowing. Only from the calm, he said, can you see how to protect yourself from trouble.

Mama is beautiful,” I said.“Mama is strong,” he said. “Beauty comes and goes. Strength, you keep forever.

I would have to confess that in the land of the toubabu, I had managed to save only myself.

I wouldn't wish beauty on any woman who has not her own freedom, and who chooses not the hands that claim her.

To make it a crime for public institutions to serve the undocumented simply isolated people and drove them into poverty, she wrote. From then on, people who came looking for a library card received one, regardless of whether their papers were in order.