The Birthright
His words always fit my heart and soul like a glove, his books “an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside“.
“…our presence there was legal but illegitimate. We had an abstract right to be there, a birthright, but the basis of that right was fraudulent. Our presence was grounded in a crime, namely colonial conquest, perpetuated by apartheid. Whatever the opposite is of native or rooted, that was what we felt ourselves to be. We thought of ourselves as sojourners, temporary residents, and to that extent without a home, without a homeland.” ~J.M Coetzee
Summertime, 2009, Penguin books, 209-210