“In time I drifted into a tolerable alienness. Living day to day, this alienness became a sort of emblem, indeterminate about its origins. Soon I began to say black people and white people, like everyone else, uttering the lie with increasing ease, conceding the sameness of our difference, deferring to a deadening vision of a racialized world. For by agreeing to be black and white, we also agree to limit the complexity of possibility, we agree to mendacities that for centuries served and will continue to serve crude hungers for power and pathological self-affirmation in raucous songs of grievance and rebellion…”
—
Abdulrazak Gurnah
Desertion
