A Shadow of Myself. Mike Phillips
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MIKE PHILLIPS
A SHADOW OF MYSELF
HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
This edition 2001
First published in Great Britain by Collins Crime 2000
Copyright © Mike Phillips 2000
Mike Phillips asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780006511977
Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2016 ISBN: 9780007400362 Version: 2016-01-04
For Jenny, Kip and Kwesi
In memory of Ronald Ivor Phillips
With gratitude to the Arts Foundation for its support and to John Akomfrah, and David Upshal for the vital sparks,
and with heartfelt thanks to Tereza Brdeckova, Trevor Carter, Grigory Chartishvili, Daria Chrin, Sacha Dugdale, William Elliott, Masha Gessen, Henri Jansova, Maria Kozlovskaya, Yelena Krishtof, Julia Latynina, Milada Novakova, Martina Moravcová, Kevin O’Flynn, Sergeant Stiina Rajala, as well as all the others who so generously contributed their memories and experiences … and last but not least, Radka, for lending me her name.
Then I told him to let me go away from their church and I do not want to marry again, because I could not bear to be baptised with fire and hot water any longer, but when all of them heard so, they shouted, ‘Since you have entered this church you are to be baptised with fire and hot water before you will get out of the church, willing or not you ought to wait and complete the baptism.’ But when I heard so from them again, I exclaimed with a terrible voice that, ‘I will die in their church.’ So all of them exclaimed again that, ‘You may die if you like, nobody knows you here.’
AMOS TUTUOLA – My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts
The whole people in the village saw us but as we were strange to them although they recognised us, they gathered together and were following us with wonder. They were also shouting on us as they were following us: ‘Why the moneys you bring from your journey are nearly to kill you? Why? Are these lumps of iron which you carry now the moneys you bring? Wonderful.’ It was like that the whole people of the village were making mockery of us.
AMOS TUTUOLA – Ajaiyi And His Inherited Poverty
… it is not that I would forbid the making of statues, shaped in marble or bronze, but that as the human face, so is its copy, futile and perishing, while the form of the mind is eternal, to be expressed, not through the alien medium of art and its material, but severally by each man in the fashion of his own life.
TACITUS – from the Epilogue of Agricola
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