Precious Williams

"PRECIOUS: A TRUE STORY is heartbreaking, powerful and so,so beautifully written. I could not put it..."

Sun, 19 Feb 2012 05:58:30 -0500

“PRECIOUS: A TRUE STORY is heartbreaking, powerful and so,so beautifully written. I could not put it down.”

- Chika Unigwe, author of On Black Sisters’ Street

Photo

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 19:17:42 -0500

Video

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 13:22:59 -0500

"A people is as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves"

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 19:53:45 -0500

“A people is as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves”

- Ben Okri

"Zen is the only religion in the world that teaches sudden enlightenment. It says that enlightenment..."

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 22:05:26 -0500

“Zen is the only religion in the world that teaches sudden enlightenment. It says that enlightenment takes no time, it can happen in a single, split second.”

- Osho (via lazyyogi)

18-15n-77-30w: thesoulfulkid: :) http://18-15n-77-30w.tumblr.c...

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 15:09:57 -0500

18-15n-77-30w:

thesoulfulkid:

:)

http://18-15n-77-30w.tumblr.com/

"Wanting to reform the world without discovering one’s true self is like trying to cover the world..."

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 19:11:11 -0400

“Wanting to reform the world without discovering one’s true self is like trying to cover the world with leather to avoid the pain of walking on stones and thorns. It is much simpler to wear shoes.”

- Ramana Maharshi (via lazyyogi)

"He who is contented is rich."

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 19:10:03 -0400

“He who is contented is rich.”

- Lao Tzu (via lazyyogi)

"Baba Segi held his penis as if it was a hefty bill he had not expected to pay"

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 10:55:54 -0400

“Baba Segi held his penis as if it was a hefty bill he had not expected to pay”

- Lola Shoneyin, The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives

Malcolm X and Maya Angelou in Ghana, 1964

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 09:33:57 -0400

Malcolm X and Maya Angelou in Ghana, 1964

"If we teach women that there are only certain ways they may acceptably behave, we should not be..."

Wed, 02 Nov 2011 06:35:25 -0400

“

If we teach women that there are only certain ways they may acceptably behave, we should not be surprised when they behave in those ways.

And we should not be surprised when they behave these ways during attempted or completed rapes.

Women who are taught not to speak up too loudly or too forcefully or too adamantly or too demandingly are not going to shout “NO” at the top of their goddamn lungs just because some guy is getting uncomfortably close.

Women who are taught not to keep arguing are not going to keep saying “NO.”

Women who are taught that their needs and desires are not to be trusted, are fickle and wrong and are not to be interpreted by the woman herself, are not going to know how to argue with “but you liked kissing, I just thought…”

Women who are taught that physical confrontations make them look crazy will not start hitting, kicking, and screaming until it’s too late, if they do at all.

Women who are taught that a display of their emotional state will have them labeled hysterical and crazy (which is how their perception of events will be discounted) will not be willing to run from a room disheveled and screaming and crying.

Women who are taught that certain established boundaries are frowned upon as too rigid and unnecessary are going to find themselves in situations that move further faster before they realize that their first impression was right, and they are in a dangerous room with a dangerous person.

Women who are taught that refusing to flirt back results in an immediately hostile environment will continue to unwillingly and unhappily flirt with somebody who is invading their space and giving them creep alerts.

People wonder why women don’t “fight back,” but they don’t wonder about it when women back down in arguments, are interrupted, purposefully lower and modulate their voices to express less emotion, make obvious signals that they are uninterested in conversation or being in closer physical proximity and are ignored. They don’t wonder about all those daily social interactions in which women are quieter, ignored, or invisible, because those social interactions seem normal. They seem normal to women, and they seem normal to men, because we were all raised in the same cultural pond, drinking the same Kool-Aid.

And then, all of a sudden, when women are raped, all these natural and invisible social interactions become evidence that the woman wasn’t truly raped. Because she didn’t fight back, or yell loudly, or run, or kick, or punch. She let him into her room when it was obvious what he wanted. She flirted with him, she kissed him. She stopped saying no, after a while.

”

-
Harriet J on Another post about rape (via archenemies)

Oh my god, this. All of this.

(via one-bite-at-a-time)

Oh look, another way in which women are royally fucked by constructs of femininity.

(via whynotshesaid)

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Tue, 01 Nov 2011 22:00:05 -0400

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the..."

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 21:59:18 -0400

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”

- Mark Twain (via atavus)

Precious Williams (@preciousthebook) in roundup: Memoirs - USATODAY.com

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 21:24:00 -0400

Precious Williams (@preciousthebook) in roundup: Memoirs - USATODAY.com:

Color Blind: A Memoir
By Precious Williams
Bloomsbury, 241 pp., $24

British journalist Precious Williams upends every expectation about race, class, gender and ambition in her startlingly powerful memoir. It opens in 1971, when, at the age of 10 weeks, the author is deposited by her tall, aristocratic Nigerian mother into the arms of “Nanny,” a tiny 57-year-old white woman in Sussex. (Upwardly mobile Africans often privately boarded their children with rural U.K. whites.) Though loved by Nanny and her family, Williams spent an odd, unsettled childhood in a white housing project, always struggling to find her place as a black woman and to understand her absent, glamorous mother in London. Of note: Williams’ subtle, devastating depiction of early sexual abuse. — Deirdre Donahue

"Cultural identity is particularly significant for an adopted child because they have already lost a..."

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 20:29:00 -0400

““Cultural identity is particularly significant for an adopted child because they have already lost a large chunk of their identity through being removed from their birth families…””

- Kate Hilpern, The Guardian

Gorgeous hair!

Sun, 30 Oct 2011 15:55:26 -0400

Gorgeous hair!

"One should always be drunk. That’s all that matters… But with what? With wine, with poetry, or with..."

Sun, 30 Oct 2011 15:51:45 -0400

“One should always be drunk. That’s all that matters… But with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you chose. But get drunk.”

- Charles Baudelaire (via decrepito)

There are lots of books that make me think: I don’t care what’s...

Sun, 30 Oct 2011 15:49:58 -0400

There are lots of books that make me think: I don’t care what’s in them as long as they’re written beautifully.

—Lydia Davis, BOMB 60, 1997

Lianne La Havas

Sun, 30 Oct 2011 09:41:00 -0400

Lianne La Havas

"I needed words because unhappy families are conspiracies of silence. The one who breaks the silence..."

Sun, 30 Oct 2011 07:21:52 -0400

“I needed words because unhappy families are conspiracies of silence. The one who breaks the silence is never forgiven. He or she has to learn to forgive him or herself.”

- Jeanette Winterson