Junot Díaz, quoted this morning in theread.
“Nations are very antagonistic, they pick enemies, they pick borders, they create borders, they create characters and mythologies that exclude. And, I always think that the nation is its silences, the nation is its exclusion, and for someone like me, in the art that I do, its disavowed dead. Because the nations’ love to create stenographs for its good dead, the dead that it recognizes, the dead that wanna help perpetuate its project of the nation. But, there is also an enormous population of its disavowed dead, the victims of this national project, the people who are decimated because of the national project.
I tend to define the nation by who’s on the other side of the bayonet. And, who doesn’t get a tomb, and who doesn’t get memorialized, and who doesn’t get mourned. And, yet, that’s as much a part of what a nation is as whoever we decide to toast on whatever holiday.”
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