Time & Perspective Quote by Kamisese Mara

Panic rarely arrives with poetry; it comes as logistics. Mara’s line is clipped, breathless, all propulsion: numbers, motion, orders, a boat. “There is 80 of us” isn’t a statistic so much as a claim to collective presence - a small community asserting that it exists, that it can mobilize, that it has agency. Then the sentence is yanked away from him. “The next thing I knew” signals the moment power changes hands, when events stop being narrated by the person living them and start being dictated to them.

The appearance of Jo Brown as the messenger matters. Brown doesn’t debate; he “dashed in” with a fait accompli: your family has already moved. The most intimate decision - home, kin, where you sleep - is presented as already settled somewhere else. That’s displacement rendered as bureaucracy: not a dramatic expulsion, but a rushed instruction attached to a timetable. “The boat is ready” is its own kind of violence, a deadline masquerading as assistance.

Mara’s final admission is the dagger: “I didn’t have time to ask, even ask a question.” It’s not just confusion; it’s the stripping of political voice. Questions are the first tool of consent, and the quote stages a world where urgency is used to cancel inquiry. Coming from a statesman, the memory reads as origin story: the lesson that sovereignty can be lost not only through conquest, but through hurried, unquestionable “arrangements” made in your name.