Why can't black women on stage tell stories that can affect white men in the audience?
Danai GuriraRead
I often feel like a nutty professor, like I'm going to try this experiment and see if it works. My hypothesis is, people in the West can absorb African women stories without any shaken or stirred mixer. It can come directly from the source.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects the author's curiosity and experimental approach to storytelling, particularly in sharing African women's narratives with a Western audience.
Danai Gurira expresses her experimental mindset towards storytelling, likening herself to a 'nutty professor' who is eager to see how her hypothesis unfolds. She believes that the authentic stories of African women can be embraced by Western audiences directly, without the need for overly complex presentation or alteration, highlighting the power and importance of genuine narrative sharing across cultures.
Themes
StorytellingCultureExperimentationNarrativesAfricaWomen
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about cultural exchange, this quote can emphasize the importance of sharing authentic stories.
More from Danai Gurira
All quotes →I want to see women of African descent shine.
Danai GuriraRead
There’s a saying in Africa, if you give a woman empowerment, you empower a community, you empower men, you empower man. When women become empowered and live in their strength it’s beneficiary to others, and I think as young women today we sometimes forget that we are standing on the struggle of other women. Those women had to stand up to make a change, and they were not popular, and now we’re making them unpopular again.
Danai GuriraRead
I work with writers whom I believe to be true storytellers. And because I'm a writer, I pay very keen attention to their vision. I find that so fueling creatively because, in telling those stories, you use everything you've got. You come away with battle scars. It's gratifying and invigorating.
Danai GuriraRead
I'm not only a person of color, I'm also a woman. And I'm not only a woman, I'm also a woman from the Third World. All those elements put together means I have a lot to do.
Danai GuriraRead
Similar quotes
I work as an artist, and I think the audience of one, which is the self, and I have to satisfy myself as an artist. So I always say that I write for the same people that Picasso painted for. I think he painted for himself.
August WilsonRead
The fundamental aspect of video is not the image, even though you can stand in amazement at what can be done electronically, how images can be manipulated and the really extraordinary creative possibilities. For me the essential basis of video is the movement - something that exists at the moment and changes in the next moment.
Bill ViolaRead
In no other sport is the connection between performer and observer so intimate, so frequently painful, so unresolved
Joyce Carol OatesRead
As artists, we have an opportunity to help the public evolve, raise consciousness and awareness, teach, heal, enlighten and inspire in ways the democratic process may not be able to touch. So we keep it moving.
Lauryn HillRead
Clothing is . . . an exercise in memory. It makes me explore the past: how did I feel when I wore that. They are like signposts in the search for the past.
Louise BourgeoisRead
Drink wine, drink poetry, drink virtue.
Charles BaudelaireRead