Maybe this wide country just stretches your life to a thinness just trying to take it in, trying to calculate in it what you must do, the airy bay at its head scatters your thoughts like someone going mad from science and birds pulling your hair, ice invades your nostrils in chunks, land fills your throat, you are so busy with collecting the north, scrambling to the Arctic so wilfully, so busy getting a handle to steady you to this place you get blown into bays and lakes and fissures you have yet to see, except on a map in a schoolroom long ago but you have a sense that whole parts of you are floating in heavy lake water heading for what you suspect is some other life that lives there, and you, you only trust moving water and water that reveals itself in colour. It always takes long to come to what you have to say, you have to sweep this stretch of land up around your feet and point to the signs, pleat whole histories with pins in your mouth and guess at the fall of words.

—Dionne Brand,
Land To Light On.