Momma said that ghosts couldn't move over water. That's why Africans got trapped in the Americas.. They kept moving us over the water, stealing us away from our ghosts and ancestors, who cried salty rivers into the sand. That's where Momma was now, wailing at the water's edge, while her girls were pulled out of sight under white sails that cracked in the wind.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the pain of separation from one's roots and culture, specifically regarding the African diaspora.
In this quote, Laurie Halse Anderson uses the metaphor of ghosts and water to convey the deep emotional and historical trauma experienced by Africans who were enslaved and transported across the ocean to the Americas. The imagery of 'salty rivers' symbolizes the tears of ancestors who mourn the loss of their descendants, suggesting that the act of moving people over water was not only a physical displacement but also a severing of spiritual and cultural connections.
In practice
This quote can be used to highlight the importance of remembering one's roots during a cultural awareness event.
Memory cuts both ways; it can either provide you with tremendous strength and a foundation to carry you through your life, or it can be a demon that just ruins your present and your future because you can’t let go of the past.
Here stands a girl clutching a knife. There is grease on the stove, blood in the air, and angry words piled in the corners. We are trained not to see it, not to see any of it. . . . Someone just ripped off my eyelids.
This girl shivers and crawls under the covers with all her clothes on and falls into an overdue library book, a faerie story with rats and marrow and burning curses. The sentences build a fence around her, a Times Roman 10-point barricade, to keep the thorny voices in her head from getting too close.
A breath of steam trickles out, filled with the sobs of a grown woman breaking into girl-sized pieces.
I open a paperclip and scratch it across the inside of my left wrist. Pitiful. If a suicide attempt is a cry for help, then what is this. A whimper, a peep? I draw little window cracks of blood, etching line after line until it stops hurting.
If I can write a book that will help the world make a little more sense to a teen, then that's why I was put on the planet.
When I started giving talks about women's history, one of the things that bothered me was the tendency to say, 'Well, everybody was totally oppressed and suddenly in 1964 we rose up, got our freedom, and here we are.' It dismisses the women who fought for rights for several hundred years of our history up to that point.
There are some places where history just grabs you by the jugular. This is one of them.
The very notion of Great Britain's 'greatness' is bound up with empire. Euro-scepticism and Little Englander nationalism could hardly survive if people understood whose sugar flowed through English blood and rotted English teeth.
You all must realize that Mandela was not the only man who suffered. There were many others - hundreds who languished in prison and died. Many unsung and unknown heroes of the struggle.
The historian does simply not come in to replenish the gaps of memory. He constantly challenges even those memories that have survived intact.
In the new Georgia, Stalin is no longer Georgian. He's a Russian emperor.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.