Multicultural Literature Quotes

We ache with the yearning that turns half into whole and offer no excuses for the beauty of our souls.

In life, we all have a cross to bear and a unique story to tell. We just hope that someone will take the time to listen.

When a country has a strong spirit, foreign and exotic influences do not debilitated that spirit, they strengthen it. - German Literature in the Age of Bach

Immigration is an opaque glass box whose front door opens outwards.

The militants of ethnicity contend that a main objective of public education should be the protection, strengthening, celebration, and perpetuation of ethnic origins and identities. Separatism, however, nourishes prejudices, magnifies differences, and stirs antagonisms. The consequent increase in ethnic and racial conflict lies behind the hullabaloo over "multiculturalism" and "political correctness", over the inequities of the "Eurocentric" curriculum, and over the notion that history and literature should be taught not as intellectual disciplines but as therapies whose function is to raise minority self-esteem.

One argument of Uniqueness is that it is not any particular renaissance, revolution, or liberal institution that marks out the West, but its far higher levels of achievement in all the intellectual and artistic spheres of life. I relied on Charles Murray’s book, Human Accomplishment: Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950, to make this argument.[1] This book is the first effort to quantify ‘as facts’ the accomplishments of individuals and countries across the world in the arts and sciences, by calculating the amount of space allocated to these individuals in reference works, encyclopaedias, and dictionaries. Murray concludes that ‘whether measured in people or events, 97% of accomplishment in the scientific inventories occurred in Europe and North America’ from 800 BC to 1950.[2] Murray also notes the far higher accomplishments of Europeans in the arts, particularly after 1400. Although Murray does not compare their achievements but compiles separate lists for each civilisation, he notes that the sheer number of ‘significant figures’ in the arts is higher in the West in comparison to the combined number of the other civilisations.[3] In literature, the number in the West is 835; whereas in India, the Arab World, China, and Japan combined, the number is 293. In the visual arts, it is 479 for the West as compared to 192 for China and Japan combined (with no significant figures listed for India and the Arab World). In music, ‘the lack of a tradition of named composers in non-Western civilization means that the Western total of 522 significant figures has no real competition at all’.

But it was nothing remotely multicultural that induced Judah Maccabeus to reconsecrate the Temple in Jerusalem in 165 BC, and to establish the date which the soft celebrants of Hannukah now so emptily commemorate. The Maccabees, who founded the Hasmonean dynasty, were forcibly restoring Mosaic fundamentalism against the many Jews of Palestine and elsewhere who had become attracted by Hellenism. These true early multiculturalists had become bored by “the law,” offended by circumcision, interested by Greek literature, drawn by the physical and intellectual exercises of the gymnasium, and rather adept at philosophy. They could feel the pull exerted by Athens, even if only by way of Rome and by the memory of Alexander’s time, and were impatient with the stark fear and superstition mandated by the Pentateuch. They obviously seemed too cosmopolitan to the votaries of the old Temple—and it must have been easy to accuse them of “dual loyalty” when they agreed to have a temple of Zeus on the site where smoky and bloody altars used to propitiate the unsmiling deity of yore. At any rate, when the father of Judah Maccabeus saw a Jew about to make a Hellenic offering on the old altar, he lost no time in murdering him. Over the next few years of the Maccabean “revolt,” many more assimilated Jews were slain, or forcibly circumcised, or both, and the women who had flirted with the new Hellenic dispensation suffered even worse. Since the Romans eventually preferred the violent and dogmatic Maccabees to the less militarized and fanatical Jews who had shone in their togas in the Mediterranean light, the scene was set for the uneasy collusion between the old-garb ultra-Orthodox Sanhedrin and the imperial governorate. This lugubrious relationship was eventually to lead to Christianity (yet another Jewish heresy) and thus ineluctably to the birth of Islam. We could have been spared the whole thing.

If one could nominate an absolutely tragic day in human history, it would be the occasion that is now commemorated by the vapid and annoying holiday known as “Hannukah.” For once, instead of Christianity plagiarizing from Judaism, the Jews borrow shamelessly from Christians in the pathetic hope of a celebration that coincides with “Christmas,” which is itself a quasi-Christian annexation, complete with burning logs and holly and mistletoe, of a pagan Northland solstice originally illuminated by the Aurora Borealis. Here is the terminus to which banal “multiculturalism” has brought us. But it was nothing remotely multicultural that induced Judah Maccabeus to reconsecrate the Temple in Jerusalem in 165 BC, and to establish the date which the soft celebrants of Hannukah now so emptily commemorate. The Maccabees, who founded the Hasmonean dynasty, were forcibly restoring Mosaic fundamentalism against the many Jews of Palestine and elsewhere who had become attracted by Hellenism. These true early multiculturalists had become bored by “the law,” offended by circumcision, interested by Greek literature, drawn by the physical and intellectual exercises of the gymnasium, and rather adept at philosophy. They could feel the pull exerted by Athens, even if only by way of Rome and by the memory of Alexander’s time, and were impatient with the stark fear and superstition mandated by the Pentateuch. They obviously seemed too cosmopolitan to the votaries of the old Temple—and it must have been easy to accuse them of “dual loyalty” when they agreed to have a temple of Zeus on the site where smoky and bloody altars used to propitiate the unsmiling deity of yore. At any rate, when the father of Judah Maccabeus saw a Jew about to make a Hellenic offering on the old altar, he lost no time in murdering him. Over the next few years of the Maccabean “revolt,” many more assimilated Jews were slain, or forcibly circumcised, or both, and the women who had flirted with the new Hellenic dispensation suffered even worse. Since the Romans eventually preferred the violent and dogmatic Maccabees to the less militarized and fanatical Jews who had shone in their togas in the Mediterranean light, the scene was set for the uneasy collusion between the old-garb ultra-Orthodox Sanhedrin and the imperial governorate. This lugubrious relationship was eventually to lead to Christianity (yet another Jewish heresy) and thus ineluctably to the birth of Islam. We could have been spared the whole thing.

I have no desire to die as just another writer like that bard fella. If I must die as a writer, I will die as the first multi-cultural writer in history.

All through history every culture on earth has produced its distinct literature - American literature, British literature, Latino Literature, Arabic literature, Turkish literature, European literature, Bengali literature and so on. I am none of these, because I am all of these - Naskar is the amalgamation of all of world's cultures. Naskar is the first epitome of integrated Earth literature - where there is no inferior, no superior - no greater, no lesser. Soulfulness of Rumiland, heartfulness of Martíland, correctiveness of MLKland, sweetness of Tagoreland - merge them all in the fire of love, and lo emerges Naskarland - merge them all in the fire of love, and lo emerges lightland.

If I must die as a writer, I will die as the first multi-cultural writer in history.

Failing to be American (The Sonnet) I've tried to rekindle the American sentiment of my early days of writing, but in vain. Once you wake up to the vastness of the world, it is impossible to revert to the tribal lane. I broke into the world scene as a westerner but, Naskar the American writer exists no longer. Today Naskar is but an Earth philosopher, There is only Naskar the Earth reformer. In the early years when I wrote on America, I used to write as an American writer. Today when I write on any nation, I write as an Earth writer. The whole world is my diary, I am the world's destiny. Try as they might to maintain prejudice, I am the line between humanity and nationality.

My prose are call of the immeasurable, My poetry are melody of the immeasurable. My life is legacy of the immeasurable, My sonnets are proof of the immeasurable.

He had liked to listen to the exotic (to a Belsey) chatter of business and money and practical politics; to hear that Equality was a myth, and Multiculturalism a fatuous dream; he thrilled at the suggestion that Art was a gift from God, blessing only a handful of masters, and most Literature merely a veil for poorly reasoned left-wing ideologies. He had put up a weak show of fighting these ideas, but only so that he might enjoy all the more the sensation of the family’s ridicule – to hear once again how typically liberal, academic and wishy-washy were his own thoughts. When Monty suggested that minority groups too often demand equal rights they haven’t earned, Jerome had allowed this strange new idea to penetrate him without complaint and sunk further back into the receiving sofa. When Michael argued that being black was not an identity but an accidental matter of pigment, Jerome had not given a traditionally hysterical Belsey answer – ‘Try telling that to the Klansman coming at you with a burning cross’ – but rather vowed to think less of his identity

He had liked to listen to the exotic (to a Belsey) chatter of business and money and practical politics; to hear that Equality was a myth, and Multiculturalism was a fatuous dream; he thrilled at the suggestion that Art was a gift from God, blessing only a handful of masters, and most Literature merely a veil for poorly reasoned left-wing ideologies.

Since I began teaching I’ve wanted to expand the curriculum, but my first year was mostly about surviving rather than looking critically at what I teach and why I was teaching it. American literature conjures up a strong multicultural image for me. I’ve followed Sherman Alexie’s characters on the struggle to find them themselves; I’ve explored the New Mexican desert of Rudolfo Anaya’s novels; I’ve traveled down Harlem streets with Hughes and experienced Hurston’s southern lifestyle. I imagined, when I received my first teaching assignment of American literature, that these authors would be the ones to grace my classroom. However, the way that my English 10 colleagues read the new state standards and the common assessments required by my district made it almost impossible to fit these authors into a “dead white guy” curriculum. I began to struggle through a year of teaching the curriculum as it was, feeling that I was doing a disservice to my students and my educational upbringing. I was required to stay on track with what other teachers in my grade level were doing, when they were testing, and how much time they were spending on units.

All China’s minorities lack outlets of expression. Even in the multi-cultural UK, the views of the ethnic British are heard less frequently than everyone else’s. In China, it is far worse. The minorities are absent from TV shows, movies, literature, popular discourse and are mostly excluded from politics. Now what little dialogue that takes place in Tibet between the locals and the Han is being replaced by death. And despite my ambivalence towards Tibetans, that left me both depressed and unsure of what I was really doing here.

Don't memorize, live my sonnets.

As an Iranian woman in the West, I see and share a lot of concern about the fate of my country’s women. But I’m also disturbed at how commonly the Western people I know view female Iranians as either helpless victims or brainwashed enemies—even if they personally know vibrant, successful, multicultural Persian women. In both Iran and the West it’s still widely assumed that males have always been the authors of Iranian culture, business, law, religion, art, education, literature, agriculture, science, architecture, philosophy, social mores, and the writing of history. But of course Iranian women have always been creative, influential players in all of these fields. They’ve always had their own goals, values, passions, and accomplishments, whatever challenges they've faced, and their contributions have enriched the world. As I recall the commonly obscured female half of my heritage, I want to paint a big picture of women’s initiatives in every period of Iranian history. Of course many excellent authors and scholars have been working on that for decades, and their work has helped to dispel traditional bias. But I and my Western male co-author hope to make our own contribution. We want to link the insights and accounts of many Iranian women together, show their significance for the world, and do it through a stream of stories that people of all cultures might enjoy.

I am not a poetry factory, I am humanitarian poetry factory, I'm not what's normally called poetry, I'm a new paradigm of inoculating poetry. I am inoculation against hate, I am inoculation against rigidity. In a world infested with etymologies, I am living testament to impossible inclusivity.

I thought about the slippery dream of nationalism. We’ve always been clannish, but nationalism is surprisingly modern, growing from the Romanticism of the eighteenth century when an idea emerged that there was a national soul, akin here to ‘The Myanmar Spirit’. The spirit of a nation is tied to its art, literature and traditions, and to the mishmash of things we call culture. Nationalism helped mould identities and was crucial in spelling the end of colonialism and in reinforcing the right to self-governance. But it is, of course, a lie. Everywhere is, and always has been, multicultural.

Perché mi interessa, da adulta, da scrittrice, questa nuova relazione con l’imperfezione? Cosa mi offre? Direi una chiarezza sbalorditiva, una consapevolezza più profonda di me stessa. L’imperfezione dà lo spunto all’invenzione, all’immaginazione, alla creatività. Stimola. Più mi sento imperfetta, più mi sento viva. Scrivo fin da piccola per dimenticare le mie imperfezioni, per nascondermi sullo sfondo della vita. In un certo senso la scrittura è un omaggio prolungato all’imperfezione.

Once I feel the language and culture in my veins, I can deliver my ideas in any language I want. I can write in any language, because I want to. And no, I don't use some fancy AI tools. In fact, I have an uncompromising principle against the use of AI in literature. Heck, I opted not to use something so trivial as an image containing yours truly with a mace, as cover image of "Bulletproof Backbone", because it collided with the book's anti-weaponry vision - so you can imagine my stance on fraudulent material generated by AI! What I do use, while writing in other languages, is old-fashioned dictionary - online dictionary that is, to fix things like spelling, missing vocabulary and other broken bits - which makes me a broken polyglot. And believe you me, broken polyglots are potent polyglots. I may not be fluent in a lot of languages, but after I am long gone, each of these languages and cultures will have something distinctly personal left by me to call their own. For example, I may not speak fluent German, yet if I write even one page in the German language, it'll forever become an indelible part of the German culture. It'll not be some off-key German translation of an original Naskar, rather it'll be a German literature from the vast Naskarean oeuvre. Sure, I know my limits in each of these languages, that's why I keep my sentence structure simple, which I am not compelled to do in Turkish and Spanish. But more than my limits, I am aware of my limitlessness. And once the being transcends the limits of language, culture, border and tradition, puny apparatus like intellect is bound to follow.

Iman Insaniyat, Mazhab Muhabbat (Pani, Agua, Water Sonnet) In some circles, I am called a genius, Yet the only genius I know of is service. In other circles, I am branded fraud, Yet the only fraud I know of is prejudice. Saying, you've explored my work, after spending an evening scrolling through a few quotes, is like saying, you've climbed Mount Everest, after spending an evening scrolling through pictures of the Himalayas. Yet I can tell you who I am, I don't need a million lines but one. Iman insaniyat, mazhab muhabbat*; Pani, agua, water, it's all one. Take my Bible, Koran & Vedas, Take my Origin of Species. Throw me to the fires of hell, My life will still smell of roses. (*faith humanity, religion love)

When I crossed the hundred books mark, I genuinely thought, "I'm done". But something happened! I don't know why, but my drive towards other languages became stronger than ever. I felt, now is the time to make parts of my legacy more accessible to other languages. I have never relied on anyone in my life for the realization of my legacy, so it was obvious that I was not gonna wait for somebody else to translate my works for me. Besides, when somebody else translates an original literature into another language, it always remains a translation - it can never become an original literature of that language and culture. This I absolutely did not want. Sure, other than Turkish and Spanish, I have difficulty with other languages - that is, I am not at all fluent in them. But the point is, once I feel the language and culture in my veins, I can deliver my ideas in any language I want. And I've been doing exactly that over the years - absorbing as many cultures and languages into my bloodstream as I can that is. If you tear my heart open, you can find every single culture in the world, caringly placed and nurtured. Some call it gift, I call it intention.

The loss of white ethno-cultural confidence manifests itself in other ways. Among the most important is a growing unwillingness to indulge the anti-white ideology of the cultural left. When whites were an overwhelming majority, empirically unsupported generalizations about whites could be brushed off as amusing and mischievous but ultimately harmless. As whites decline, fewer are willing to abide such attacks. At the same time, white decline emboldens the cultural left, with its dream of radical social transformation. ... From a modern perspective, the most important figure to emerge from this milieu is Randolph Bourne. Viewed as a spokesman for the new youth culture in upper-middle-class New York, Bourne burst onto the intellectual scene with an influential essay in the respected Atlantic Monthly in July 1916 entitled ‘Trans-National America’. Here Bourne was influenced by Jewish-American philosopher Horace Kallen. Kallen was both a Zionist and a multiculturalist. Yet he criticized the Liberal Progressive worldview whose cosmopolitan zeal sought to consign ethnicity to the dustbin of history. Instead, Kallen argued that ‘men cannot change their grandfathers’. Rather than all groups giving and receiving cultural influence, as in Dewey’s vision, or fusing together, as mooted by fellow Zionist Israel Zangwill in his play The Melting Pot (1910), Kallen spoke of America as a ‘federation for international colonies’ in which each group, including the Anglo-Saxons, could maintain their corporate existence. There are many problems with Kallen’s model, but there can be no doubt that he treated all groups consistently. Bourne, on the other hand, infused Kallen’s structure with WASP self-loathing. As a rebel against his own group, Bourne combined the Liberal Progressives’ desire to transcend ‘New Englandism’ and Protestantism with Kallen’s call for minority groups to maintain their ethnic boundaries. The end product was what I term asymmetrical multiculturalism, whereby minorities identify with their groups while Anglo-Protestants morph into cosmopolites. Thus Bourne at once congratulates the Jew ‘who sticks proudly to the faith of his fathers and boasts of that venerable culture of his’, while encouraging his fellow Anglo-Saxons to: "Breathe a larger air . . . [for] in his [young Anglo-Saxon’s] new enthusiasms for continental literature, for unplumbed Russian depths, for French clarity of thought, for Teuton philosophies of power, he feels himself a citizen of a larger world. He may be absurdly superficial, his outward-reaching wonder may ignore all the stiller and homelier virtues of his Anglo-Saxon home, but he has at least found the clue to that international mind which will be essential to all men and women of good-will if they are ever to save this Western world of ours from suicide." Bourne, not Kallen, is the founding father of today’s multiculturalist left because he combines rebellion against his own culture and Liberal Progressive cosmopolitanism with an endorsement – for minorities only – of Kallen’s ethnic conservatism. In other words, ethnic minorities should preserve themselves while the majority should dissolve itself.

My earliest perceptions about Iran under the Pahlavis, as a young student of Middle Eastern history and social sciences in the 1990s, were absorbed in these contradictory (and often confusing) evaluations on the backdrop of overwhelming paradigm shifts and critical theories, especially those provided by subaltern studies, and the legitimation of the academic study of popular culture genres by feminist scholarship. Calls for a necessary de-westernization of Orientalist frameworks coupled with the introduction of multi(s) and posts- in contemporary literature gave way to rethinking about identity and multi-culturalism, feminisms, and post-feminism instead of feminism, gender as a replacement for sexual differences, modernity in terms of “multiple-modernities,” post-modernity or late modernity, and the conceptualization of the world’s nations as “imagined communities.