How we cite our quotes: Act.Line
Quote #7
It is the death of war that kills the valiant,
Death of water is how the swimmer goes
It is the death of markets that kills the trader
And death of indecision takes the idle away
The trade of the cutlass blunts its edge
And the beautiful die the death of beauty.
It takes an Elesin to die the death of death…
Only Elesin… dies the unknowable death of death…
Gracefully, gracefully does the horseman regain
The stables at the end of the day, gracefully… (3.95)
Here, Iyaloja describes the unique kind of death that the Elesin is slated to die, suggesting that there are several different types depending on who is involved.
Quote #8
JANE: Your calm acceptance for instance, can you explain that? It was so unnatural. I don't understand that at all. I feel a need to understand all I can.
OLUNDE: But you explained it yourself. My medical training perhaps. I have seen death too often. And the soldiers who returned from the front, they died on our hands all the time. (4.147-148)
When Olunde is calm about the notion that his father has died, Jane can't handle it—his reaction is way too foreign for her, and she asks him how he could possibly feel this way. He claims it's because he's been working as a doctor in England during the war, but Jane is cautious about buying that explanation.
Quote #9
My young bride, did you hear the ghostly one? You sit and sob in your silent heart but say nothing to all this. First I blamed the white man, then I blamed my gods for deserting me. Now I feel I want to blame you for the mystery of the sapping of my will. But blame is a strange peace offering for a man to bring a world he has deeply wronged, and to its innocent dwellers. Oh little mother, I have taken countless women in my life but you were more than a desire of the flesh. I needed you as the abyss across which my body must be drawn, I filled it with earth and dropped my seed in it at the moment of preparedness for my crossing. You were the final gift of the living to their emissary to the land of the ancestors, and perhaps your warmth and youth brought new insights of this world to me and turned my feet leaden on this side of the abyss. For I confess to you, daughter, my weakness came not merely from the abomination of the white man who came violently into my fading presence, there was also a weight of longing on my earth-held limbs. I would have shaken it off, already my foot had begun to lift but then, the white ghost entered and all was defiled. (5.42)
Here, Elesin is trying to figure out and express exactly what happened to him when he started moving toward the "abyss"—or at least, what happened within himself that gave the British the window they needed to stop him.