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1 " You is the kind of man who could reach well far in the civil service,’ the supervisor said, probably recognising in Ozzie a pretentiousness and the kind of focused and intractable anal-retentiveness that is often mistaken for intelligence. "
― Kei Miller , The Same Earth
2 " There is a kind of love so intense it will cause men to kill dragons, to risk their lives on the edge of precipices. To wage war. But there is a kind of love, even more intense, that will cause a man to do absolutely nothing. It will sit on his shoulders like twenty sacks of bricks, and render him utterly immobile. Days turned into weeks and then they turned into months, and Joseph could not work up the courage to speak to Imelda. "
3 " For colour’s sake alone, Purletta Johnson belonged to the Jamaican bourgeoisie. She was fair-skinned, had light grey eyes, and worse, she spoke the kind of upper-St Andrew English culled from the BBC news which radios in middle- and upper-class Jamaican houses were always tuned to. In America at the time they would have described her as ‘yellow’. In Jamaica, she had been ‘red’. In a future England they would call her mixed-race, but at the time Purletta arrived in the country there was no such denominator, so she was simply coloured. Only briefly did this new assignment of class and race disturb her. Others in her position did everything to pass for white; they straightened their hair even more and then lightened it; they bleached their faces. These young women would have counselled Purletta to do the same, arguing that she had a distinct advantage with her grey eyes. She had arrived in England in the late 1960s, burdened by her mother’s idea that she should live there long enough to transform the UK-Right of Abode stamped into her Jamaican Passport (a gift from her father who was a citizen), into a full UK passport. No doubt Purletta’s mother also wanted her daughter to come back a cultivated English woman. But Purletta did the opposite. In the land of the BBC she suddenly abandoned her BBC accent. Away from Jamaica, she learned to talk Jamaican. She braided her hair close to her scalp and thereafter gave in to every possible stereotype, whether negative or positive. She became loud and colourful. Learned how to laugh from her gut, clapping her hands, leaning over and placing the palms of her hands on her thighs, shouting wooooooooiiii. She became fat and started to walk a kind of walk that was all hips. She got a gold tooth. Then she transformed herself into the kind of person who, as they said in Jamaica, any pan knock she was there!, so she started to go to every reggae show and would boogie all night until she was sticky with sweat. Purletta began to grow ganja on her balcony. She smoked, especially on evenings when she was getting ready to go out, and this would make her even louder, even more outrageous. A bona "