Ariel Saramandi on the sinking of the MV Wakashio off the coast of Mauritius.
‘Why does serotonin make you happy? How does it affect mood? What is mood? What is depression? How does any of this stuff work?’
‘While writing we recover memories, recover moods, and we start to interpret them.’
‘The reader doesn’t need to have answers, but they do need to have theories.’
‘In a sense, we had been waiting for the Ripper to visit for months, even years.’
I was possessed, for a year, by a woman whose name I do not know.
‘The great pleasure of archive work lies in searching for these secrets known and unknown.’
‘What does it say about capitalism that we have money and want to spend it but we can’t find anything worth buying?’
‘The moment in childhood when one realizes that one is Black is profoundly disorienting.’
‘This makes more sense to me as a bodily practice: that desire to push one’s physical limits well beyond their natural bounds.’
‘During the pandemic, birds (along with many insects and wild plants) have landed in my life and poems again.’
‘I have read them so often that sometimes I cannot remember what is mine and what is hers’
‘This book is about how to navigate the thorny valley of dead dreams. Some will survive the ordeal; others will tip over the edge, irredeemable.’
‘Zola’s characters are, in every sense of the term, art monsters.’
