The word "my" brings pleasure.  The word "my" brings pain.  These are true words for masters as well as slaves.  When they are drunk, we become invisible to them.  Their talk turns to owning, or to profit, or loss, or buying, or selling, or stealing, or hiring, or renting, or swindling.  For white men, to live is to own, or to try to own more, or to die trying to own more. Their appetites are astonishing! They own wardrobes, slaves, carriages, houses, warehouses, and ships.  They own ports, cities, plantations, valleys, mountains, chains of islands.  They own this world, its jungles, its skies, and its seas.  Yet they complain that Dejima is a prison.  They complain they are not free.  Only Dr. Marinus is free from these complaints.  His skin is a white man's, but through his eyes you can see his soul is not a white man's soul. His soul is much older.  On Weh, we would call him a kwaio.  A kwaio is an ancestor who does not stay on the island of ancestors. A kwaio returns and returns and returns, each time in a new child.  A good kwaio may become a shaman, but nothing in this world is worse than a bad kwaio. 

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet
David Mitchell