But there is no story to tell, no one story anyway, not since that day in 1505 when the fidalgo Don Laurenco de Almeida, resplendent in gold braid and epaulettes and hat plumed with all the birds of paradise, landed on our shores and broke us from our history. No one story, with a beginning and an end, no story that picks up from where the past left off — only bits and shards of stories, and those of the people I knew, and that only in passing, my own parents and son, or heard tell of, for there was no staying in a place or in a time to gather a story whole, only an imagined time and place. And no story of the country — or, if of the country, not our story, but theirs, the parangis‘. Except that we all bore the imprint of that history, like a stigma, internalized it even, made it our own, against our will, calling to memory the while to lose it by losing memory itself.

– Sivanandan, A. When Memory Dies. London: Arcadia Books, 1997. 5-6.