Best Of Tania De Rozario's Dinner On Monster Island

Here is a selection of memorable quotes from Dinner on Monster Island: Essays by Tania De Rozario 

There is nothing like a horror film to reveal the culture anxieties of one’s time and place. And if horror has taught me anything, it is that nothing has been as enduringly terrifying across time and place as women’s bodies, as the bodies of all marginalized genders. 

p.6

This body is not yours. This flesh is not yours. Beauty not as invitation, but as warning.

p.76

Hair - usually long, black, and unruly — is a common motif in Asian Horror. It pours out of faucets in deep, dark waves. It descends from the ceiling like a noose. It clogs drains and pipes, blankets children in their sleep, floats limp in cups of tea.

p.77

The sweet shorthand of Singlish, every expression of which fills an empty place in my heart. The intimacy of never having to explain that which is untranslatable. The fact that I never feel as articulate as I do when I code-switch between the “proper” English I was taught in class and at home and the Singlish I learned everywhere else. That I’m never as funny without it. That I’m never as eloquent with my anger without it. That even if I spoke Singlish to my Canadian friends, and even if they understood, the lack of reciprocity would always feel like a wall.

p.157

A friend once told me that anger and disappointment were two sides of the same coin—she said that anger was disappointment in disguise. Anger is bigger, louder, a force that pushes outward.

Disappointment runs deeper, closer to collapse, to the parts of us that are soft, vulnerable.

p.166