Yazz Quotes

Waris said it's crazy that people are so stupid to think over one and a half billion Muslims all think and act the same way, a Muslim man carries out a mass shooting or blows people up and he's called a terrorist, a white man does the same thing and he's called a mad man both sets are mad, Yazz

Yazz was the miracle she never thought she wanted, and having a child really did complete her, something she rarely confided because it somehow seemed anti-feminist

Amma misses her daughter now she’s away at university Not the spiteful snake that slithers out of her tongue to hurt her mother, because in Yazz’s world young people are the only ones with feelings

People won’t see you as just another woman any more, but as a white woman who hangs with brownies, and you’ll lose a bit of your privilege, you should still check it, though, have you heard the expression, check your privilege, babe? Courtney replied that seeing as Yazz is the daughter of a professor and a very well-known theatre director, she’s hardly underprivileged herself, whereas she, Courtney, comes from a really poor community where it’s normal to be working in a factory at sixteen and have your first child as a single mother at seventeen, and that her father’s farm is effectively owned by the bank Yes but I’m black, Courts, which makes me more oppressed than anyone who isn’t, except Waris who is the most oppressed of all of them (although don’t tell her that) In five categories, black, Muslim, female, poor, hijab bed She’s the only one Yazz can’t tell to check her privilege Courtney replied that Roxane Gay warned against the idea of playing ‘privilege Olympics’ and wrote in Bad Feminist that privilege is relative and contextual, and I agree, Yazz, I mean, where does it all end? Is Obama less privileged than a white hillbilly growing up in a trailer park with a junkie single mother and a jailbird father? Is a severely disabled person more privileged than a Syrian asylum-seeker who’s been tortured? Roxane argues that we have to find a new discourse for discussing inequality Yazz doesn’t know what to say, when did Court read Roxane Gay - who’s amaaaazing? Was this a student outwitting the master moment? #whitegirltrumpsblackgirl

She’s tied her amazingly wild, energetic, strong and voluminous Afro back because people sitting behind her in venues complain they can’t see the stage When her afro’d compatriots accuse people of racism or microaggressions for this very reason, Yazz asks them how they’d feel if an unruly topiary hedge blocked their view of the stage at a concert?

the house breathes differently when Yazz isn't there

Yazz sometimes has sleepless nights worrying she’ll be alone for the whole of her life if she can’t get a proper boyfriend at nineteen what hope is there for when she’s older?

That afternoon they ended up dancing to Amr Diab in Yazz’s room Yazz tells Waris it’s important to counterbalance the state of being cerebral with the state of being corporeal Waris asks her if she means they need to do physical activity because they spend too much time thinking? Yes, that’s it, Yazz says, making elaborate movements with her arms as she dances Why didn’t you just say that then?

was never told off for speaking her mind, although she was told off for swearing because she needed to develop her vocabulary (Yazz, say you find Marissa unpleasant or unlikeable rather than describing her as a shit-faced smelly bottom) and although she didn’t always get what she wanted, if she argued her case strongly enough, she was in with a chance Amma wanted her daughter to be free, feminist and powerful

a muslim man carries out a mass shooting...and he's called a terrorist, a white man does exactly the same thing and he's called a madman both sets are mad, Yazz I know, Warris I know -p58, from Girl, Woman, Other

Yazz wondered if sharing the same corridor in halls and being one of the few brown girls on a white campus was really enough to keep the Unfunkwithables together post-university, or even into their second year, come to think of it

made the mistake of asking Waris why she wore a headscarf Yazz looked up from her muesli expecting to see Waris kick off, instead, she dug her spoon in her thick porridge and said in a surprisingly mild voice that it’s Number One – cultural, Number

Amma wanted her daughter to be free, feminist and powerful Later she took her on personal development courses for children to give her the confidence and articulacy to flourish in any setting Big mistake Mum, Yazz said at fourteen when she was pitching to go to Reading Music Festival with her friends, it would be to the detriment of my juvenile development if you curtailed my activities at this critical stage in my journey towards becoming the independent-minded and fully self-expressed adult you expect me to be, I mean, do you really want me rebelling against your old-fashioned rules by running away from the safety of my home to live on the streets and having to resort to prostitution to survive and thereafter drug addiction, crime, anorexia and abusive relationships with exploitative bastards twice my age before my early demise in a crack house? Amma fretted the whole weekend her little girl way away

when Yazz talks about her unusual upbringing to people, the unworldly ones expect her to be emotionally damaged from it, like how can you not be when your mum’s a polyamorous lesbian and your father’s a gay narcissist (as she describes him), and you were shunted between both their homes and dumped with various godparents while your parents pursued their careers? this annoys Yazz who can’t stand people saying anything negative about her parents that’s her prerogative

Courtney replied that Roxane Gay warned against the idea of playing ‘privilege Olympics’ and wrote in Bad Feminist that privilege is relative and contextual, and I agree, Yazz, I mean, where does it all end? is Obama less privileged than a white hillbilly growing up in a trailer park with a junkie single mother and a jailbird father? is a severely disabled person more privileged than a Syrian asylum-seeker who’s been tortured? Roxane argues that we have to find a new discourse for discussing inequality

the thing is, if she and her father are going to have a healthy relationship into the future, it’s up to her to keep him in check because no one else is going to do it, he surrounds himself with what Mum calls his ‘court sycophants’, the people Yazz meets at his parties, mainly famous white people off the telly who see him as an honorary one of them she’s almost got there with Mum, although it was a hard slog, especially when she was fourteen or fifteen and Mum was prone to hysteria when she didn’t get her own way now she knows better than to try to control or contradict her daughter all Yazz needs to say these days is, don’t sass me, Mumsy! and she shuts up Dad’s on that learning curve too he’ll thank her in the end