Brother, I’m Dying: A subtle, clear documentation of love and loss.

In reading Brother I’m Dying, it’s easy to see how Danticat won so many awards and acclaims with this book. If one just pitched the premise- a story of a Haitian immigrant family, separated by immigration, the death of a father and uncle-father, one by the hands of the INS, while their daughter is pregnant- it might not have made it to Random House or another big publisher. But Danticat’s storyteller’s voice is so clear, it elevates and leavens this story. It is a voice that’s also allowed her to win acclaim writing hard stories of diaspora, murder, torture and rape, as with The Farming of Bones and The Dew Breaker.

Danticat feels both present and absent from this book as a narrator. Of course she is there- she’s the one living the life, getting pregnant, trying to figure out what is going on with her dad’s health- but she also feels removed. In Fierce Attachments, Vivan Gornick is fiercely attached, emotionally present in every scene. Danticat feels removed. It doesn’t feel cold, but it does feel as if she is reporting on and describing the events in the book from a distance.  I feel that this must’;ve made it easier for her to write this emotionall wrenching book. It also makes it easier for us to enter into the book’s heavy subjects as readers. Even the cover of the book is a light yellow, and that’s how the book feels to me- the clear yellow light of a kitchen or a spring day.

This is a late blog, so I’m cheating a bit by using thoughts we discussed in class. In class, we talked about whether we ever doubted Danticat as a narrator. The answer, overwhelmingly, was no. We don’t disbelieve that her parents were near perfect, that her siblings all love each other. This is, indeed, a perfect immigrant family story with no dirt, no betrayal. It makes her characters likable to the ‘average’ reader, and also leavens a story that others might be turned off by (Haiti! So depressing, so much death and body parts and Black bodies.) I was one of the many who didn’t disbelieve her. I wanted a beautiful family story of immigration and diaspora. I understood this book as Danticat’s testimony to her family. I saw her on the deaths of her father and uncle, the birth of her child, vowing to write this story down-  to get the facts down on paper for future generations; to make sure that the struggles and losses of her family, and the everyday realities of Haitain life, were recorded; and, most importantly, to avenge the death of her uncle at the hands of Immigration and Homeland Security.  Nowhere in the text does Danticat say this is what she is doing- (something she might’ve felt would’ve marred the text as well?) but it’s clear.

In the chapters that document her uncle’s death at the hands of the INS, I know it’s been said before, but her use of Freedom of Information Act documents to document what happened is brilliant. This is a case where we will never know the full story. INS and Homeland Security routinely deny famillies of immigrants who die in custody the truth about what happened to them.  This was on the front cover of the New York Times yesterday, but it is a truth known by  immigrants and those who care to know for years. Danticat could’ve told the story by putting it in first person -  talking just about what she did when waiting for her uncle to arrive, what they were told and what they wondered. But instead, she lets the documents talk for her. It’s the starkest and most damning part of the book.

colonial voice: Ake

Ake is not one of the books you just jump into, jumping around, swimming freely in the narrative. It’s more like a mud-think river with hippopotomouses and catfish swimming in the muck. Slow. Thick. Taking it’s time. The voice reminds me of Naipul-   it’s very much one of those male, brown, Post British Colonial I Went to Convent School Serious voices. As such, I’m atttracted to it and I also am frustrated with the limits of the rigid voice.

My library copy dates back a ways and was published in Britain. My first contact with the book was reading the jacket copy and the liner notes, and I was struck by how the writer of the liner notes was attempting to shape, and sell the content to British writers. I no longer have the book in front of me so I can’t quote directly, but it went something like, “Here you will find (name) a quaint and blah-blah village headman; here you will find the ominous and magical world of Ifa, where spriits are real! Here in Ake, everything is so exotic, everything is so familliar.” (That last is a direct quote.) The writer of the notes is trying to both sell the book as ooh, mysterious and exotic! African religion! Whoa, and as a book that;s “just like any other family narrative.”

These liner notes made me think of the pressures and choices Solyinka faced when writing his childhood story. He was writing in English for an audience not made up soley of his Nigerian communities- this was a book that would go into the West and the world. And he was writing about Yoruban religion and Nigerian christiniaty, as well as his family and his boyhood. What did it feel like to think about writing those secrets,t to a world that exoticizes, fears and poo-poos that African spirituality? I wonder if he was blocked often in writing, or if it came easy.

In the end, the liner notes are the liner notes. Solyinka does not write his spirituality or his inner knowledge in an exotifying or pandering way. It is indeed ordinary because it is. He simply tells his stories of egun as they happened, because they did happen that way. But how much unseen work lays behind that writing?

The Soldier in the Poet

For me reading Soldier was about experiencing the actual life of such a prolific writer. Since Jordan’s death much has been said about her life, personality, and writing. I think people often forget that June Jordan isn’t just another african american writer but that she is a child of immigrant parents. When considering the pool of writers of color we have to accept them for all the different facets. Audre Lorde is not just a gay writer neither is Adrienne Rich they are all multifaceted. In terms of her writing this memoir it was extraodinary to experience such a painful life and I feel this book was necessary. And I also think it was impossible (without offering explanation) for her to go back into a lot of her early childhood experiences like before birth and directly after. I also really believe its no wonder that she grew up fighting so much in school and in her life it seems to have been the only true currency she had throughout her young life and also into adulthood with men.  I think that when we as writers and used to be children ourselves we have to consider when our innocense changes completely I think from birth something starts fading. I think it was necessary she stopped the memoir before the pre-teen years.  I think what was most clear to me was that Jordan’s parents were very effected by their own upbringing.  I think Jordan’s memory of her childhood is pretty amazing to have pieced together their is no way I could be this specific about my own memories. 

Catfish,Memory, Poetry, Race, and Pain

“I am soaked in self-pity. Then it rains and I begin to shiver. Cornered, I do what I always do  in absolute desperation: I bite my lip and plunge into the street. Pham 43

Andrew Pham is clearly a poet his stunning imagery and powerful content along with amazing verbs punch a hole into the readers gut. We are pulled into this story of a writer so much like ourselves lost in immigration, war, family ties and so much more. I found solace that he like so many earlier writers before him chose to write a traveling memoir but the difference here is in the way Pham travels through the space of the page and through his own personal journey on merely a bike. I don’t even know how he was able to remanipulate these accounts of conversations so clearly and with such emotion, I think that must be the hardest part of memoir is figuring out how to write down the pain and all these things we’ve experienced with a clear set of rules and ideals about who we’re protecting what we’re putting out there and how we do it. I loved that at the end of this book Pham is asking for forgiveness for writing the book. It is the hardest thing to do as people of color to air our dirty laundry and expect our families to still love us. I am still nervous about releasing my first book I am lucky I do not have a literary family I hope my words will slide underneath their radar.

I was tied to his mother’s story of being a sex worker and the being the force holding the whole family together. t was this secret that protected the family and it was also what made the family’s overall tone especially between his mother and father such a different tone.

 I appreciated Pham’s ability to always be searching for that lost sister. For me Pham is a poet creating beautiful statements from an experience that is hard to cradle into comment and perfect story line but he does it. Clearly my favorite part of this book is the consistent wondering about his sister who he always calls his sister who was actually born a boy.

Unlike other traveling memoirs or 30 minutes shows often seen today about how fun it is to travel and how we can boost the economy this memoir is based in heart and heritage. I also really appreciate that he brings up the problem of people of color traveling we are always having to defend our race we are only as far as our stereotyped american image take us when we leave this country; “I like you,” Paul said, walking round behind me and putting a hand on my shoulder, which I didn’t like.  “I like you people. Orientals are good workers. Good students, too. Great in math, the engineering stuff.” He smiled at me, reassuring, beaming. “Oh, I think you’ll do just fine here. We won’t have any trouble at all.” Pham 25

This is someone who is constantly talking about money, about our own personal familial feelings of insecurity about race,  “Pinch it, like this,” Mom told me, grabbing the ridge of my nose between her thumb and index finger, “and pull. It’ll make your nose longer, thinner, and better looking.” Sometimes I think we could publish a whole anthology just about our racial and indigenous insecurities about our noses, this statement made me feel like I was sitting at his dinner table. And what amazing toll this journey takes on his emotional body, physical psyche, and mind. To tell the story of what its like to see your home country with the weight of personal turmoil about what happened on this land how your own family was supposed to die and how they lived on this very soil and these patches of ground and to tell the story your father could never tell, about being able to say as a writer I spent my time writing anything for anyone; birth certificates, eulogies, clearly I’m in love with his writing. This is the writer’s life to waste all our energy creating money so we can one day  have just enough money to sit down for weeks, months, years on end if need be and write our own goddamn words one day.

I love the way he travels through time I always feel safe with Pham, even when he is in and out of sequence with his memories they feel rooted in the right place because we’re pulled to a very purposeful memory and then it helps it makes sense. He usually utilizes one line to make the reader understand the time frame then he goes with the story and then comes back to now. Like he does on pg 235 with the opening of his high school days and the race wars at school. And his linking this story to when Saigon fell and what it all meant for his father, his family, himself.

For your enjoyment…

Here’s a review of Eat Pray Love that I found to be pretty right-on. Articulates a lot of the things we all talked about, and also gets to why I too found this “a book I loved and hated at once.”

http://www.notitles.com/?page_id=29

elegy for a soldier

Elegy for a Soldier
June Jordan, 1936-2002

by Marilyn Hacker

I.

The city where I knew you was swift.
A lover cabbed to Brooklyn
(broke, but so what) after the night shift
in a Second Avenue
diner. The lover was a Quaker,
a poet, an anti-war
activist. Was blonde, was twenty-four.
Wet snow fell on the access
road to the Manhattan Bridge. I was
neither lover, slept uptown.
But the arteries, streetlights, headlines,
phonelines, feminine plural
links ran silver through the night city
as dawn and the yellow cab
passed on the frost-blurred bridge, headed for
that day’s last or first coffee.

The city where I knew you was rich
in bookshops, potlucks, ad hoc
debates, demos, parades and picnics.
There were walks I liked to take.
I was on good terms with two rivers.
You turned, burned, flame-wheel of words
lighting the page, good neighbor on your
homely street in Park Slope, whose
Russian zaydes, Jamaican grocers,
dyke vegetarians, young
gifted everyone, claimed some changes
-at least a new food co-op.
In the laundromat, ordinary
women talked revolution.
We knew we wouldn’t live forever
but it seemed as if we could.

The city where I knew you was yours
and mine by birthright: Harlem,
the Bronx. Separately we left it
and came separately back.
There’s no afterlife for dialogue,
divergences we never
teased apart to weave back together.
Death slams down in the midst of
all your unfinished conversations.
Whom do I address when I
address you, larger than life as you
always were, not alive now?
Words are not you, poems are not you,
ashes on the Pacific
tide, you least of all. I talk to my-
self to keep the line open.

The city where I knew you is gone.
Pink icing roses spelled out
PASSION on a book-shaped chocolate cake.
The bookshop’s a sushi bar
now, and Passion is long out of print.
Would you know the changed street that
cab swerved down toward you through cold white mist?
We have a Republican
mayor. Threats keep citizens in line:
anthrax; suicide attacks.
A scar festers where towers once were;
dissent festers unexpressed.
You are dead of a woman’s disease.
Who gets to choose what battle
takes her down? Down to the ocean, friends
mourn you, with no time to mourn.

II.

You, who stood alone in the tall bay window
of a Brooklyn brownstone, conjuring morning
with free-flying words, knew the power, terror
in words, in flying;

knew the high of solitude while the early
light prowled Seventh Avenue, lupine, hungry
like you, your spoils raisins and almonds, ballpoint
pen, yellow foolscap.

You, who stood alone in your courage, never
hesitant to underline the connections
(between rape, exclusion and occupation…)
and separations

were alone and were not alone when morning
blotted the last spark of you out, around you
voices you no longer had voice to answer,
eyes you were blind to.

All your loves were singular: you scorned labels.
Claimed black; woman, and for the rest eluded
limits, quicksilver (Caribbean), staked out
self-definition

Now your death, as if it were “yours”: your house, your
dog, your friends, your son, your serial lovers.
Death’s not “yours,” what’s yours are a thousand poems
alive on paper,

in the present tense of a thousand students’
active gaze at printed pages and blank ones
which you gave permission to blacken into
outrage and passion.

You, at once an optimist, a Cassandra,
Lilith in the wilderness of her lyric,
were a black American, born in Harlem,
citizen soldier

If you had to die-and I don’t admit it-
who dared “What if, each time they kill a black man/
we kill a cop?” couldn’t you take down with you
a few prime villains

in the capitol, who are also mortal?
June, you should be living, the states are bleeding.
Leaden words like “Homeland” translate abandoned
dissident discourse.

Twenty years ago, you denounced the war crimes
still in progress now, as Jenin, Ramallah
dominate, then disappear from the headlines.
Palestine: your war.

“To each nation, its Jews,” wrote Primo Levi.
“Palestinians are Jews to Israelis.”
Afterwards, he died in despair, or so we
infer, despairing.

To each nation its Jews, its blacks, its Arabs,
Palestinians, immigrants, its women.
From each nation, its poets: Mahmoud Darwish,
Kavanagh, Sháhid

(who, beloved witness for silenced Kashmir,
cautioned, shift the accent, and he was “martyr”),
Audre Lorde, Neruda, Amichai, Senghor,
and you, June Jordan.

Double vision: High walls, lush garden, open space of story

(Note: Please excuse the lateness of this. I beg birthday, having turned 33 last night.)

Oh, I had the slow burn on this one at first. Another 400 page person of color second generation homeland narrative? But I have deadlines and my birthday and a keynote speech to write and blahhhh. Do I have to? The first few pages didn’t grab me. And then I skipped ahead 100 pages and whoosh! I plunged into Tara’s world and the pages flew by under my fingers. I couldn’t wait to see what happened.

I feel like nothing I say in response to To See and See Again may be a new sentiment. But yes, the present tense made the story alive and fresh without seeming trite (something I think I worry about in using first person.) Bahrampour’s storyteller’s voice is so natural, calm and compelling. She doesn’t need to rely on tricks to move the book forward. While some memoirs we read seemed so carefully constructed in their structures – you could feel how the author had written a treatment and thought out how to make it work - this book just felt big and rich with story. The structure that Bahrampour emplyed of big… I think they’re too long for chapters- sections of text?  -containing multiple stories spanning long chunks of time (the beautiful calm garden of the old days in Iran; her childhood in Iran; her time in America; her return), is one I loved. While Neccesary Attachments sometimes felt “too much” and claustrophobic in its big, relentless chunks of story, and  Eat Pray Love felt on a different, cutesy, bite-sized plane where one can never forget that the structure has been carefully constructed to sell and entertain, To See and See Again rested on the strength and honesty of its writers’ voice and stories. I felt like I was floating in a big ocean of stories and I wanted one more, and then one more.

Bahrampour’s book is one I want to compare with Andrew Pham’s. Both are 1.5 generation immigrant memoirs, of growing up til 9 or 10 in “home” and being forced to leave due to war or revolution, growing up all the way in America, then coming back to the homeland to answer one’s questions about it in adulthood. How are they alike and different? Pham’s is another carefully structured book- his structure of alternating chapters of sequentially remembered past and adventure in the present, punctuated by the occasional flashback of early floating memory, works to fuel and push his book. Bahrampour uses huge chunks of story but they’re animated and made light by her details, her questioning, her intimacy. I loved how she brought us into the world of all her characters. Her family members and friends felt more in focus, more close-up than Pham’s characters did. She felt like she relied more on the strength of her observations, from her marriage of storyteller’s voice and journalist’s observing eye, to fuel that book than any artfully conceived structure.

And this is one thing. Nowhere did I not believe Barampour, but I did find myself shaking my head. How did she capture all these stories and dialogue?! They’re so rendered, don’t feel reconstructed, she gets all the details and they fill up her chunks of storytelling… This is one book where I found myself wanting an Afterword, where Barampour could talk about how methodology. But in my guessing, I think: maybe she just remembered like many people remember family stories, word for word without reporters notebooks, tape recorders or strategies learned from books. Maybe she is just the storyteller of the family. (Though being a journalist, having said “reporter’s notebook”, must’ve helped her.) I love the marriage of journalism and story in this book.

I would write more about what I love here, but perhaps it’s out of place in a blog that is supposed to be about detailed examinations of structure and craft. But bear with me and let me gush for a moment: I love, love, love how Barampour takes her time with telling many stories about Iran. How she examines multiple women’s stories. How she tells multiple kind of stories of diverse, resisting, alive and lively and lovely women. How she is not afraid to ask questions, about the life she didn’t lead, about what was lsot and gained in leaving Iran, and not having one Right Answer. The scene on p.248 of her mother insisting on taking a wounded kitten to the vet in the middle of heavy fighting, a room full of calm people with their pets, insisting on continuing life as normal, so the center will hold. How clear her love is for her family, and for all the small beauties of Iranian life. Fereshteh and Kambiz and their third way in Iran, of loving the traditional music and art and cultur of Iran, their apartment with its bright walls and books.

Two other big things I appreciated : One,  that Bahrampour was able to write a narrative of growing up multiracial that gets into all the small nitty gritty moments of being seen, seeing, and constructing identity. I think this is incredibly hard to do. It’s something I reach for in my own writing and don’t always feel I get to. It’s rare to find a narrative of multiracial existence that is neither trite (“the best of both worlds” “kimchi and collard greens!”) or weighed down by pain. Many mixed-race narratives need to talk about the pain we experience as mixed-race people, but I really appreciated that Bahranpour chose to tell other stories.  Second, I loved that this was a happy family story that was still real. I loved seeing the love and closeness between Mama, Baba and Tara and her siblings, that was still imperfect and real. There aren’t enough happy family stories out there that aren’t bullshitting, and it was nice to read this one. It made me want to make a version of her family, or go and live with hers, or both.

Finally, this may be a cheap shot, but, as much as I loved Persepolis, how much more I was surprised to find myself loving this book! As rich as Satrapi’s narrative of Iran is, it’s filled with grief and more grief. Even the small moments of resistance Satrapi documents feel futile. How amazing to see more hope, more choices, more rebellion everywhere in Barampour’s book. It made me question Satrapi’s narrative as THE feminist book about Iran. As much as she breaks stereotypes and shows that Iranian women are communists, feminists, intellectuals, fighters, in the end, all resistance is crushed and the loneliness of exile is the only solution. There is no return. I’ve accepted that narrative as the feminist woman of color gospel on Iran, and Barampour’s narrative makes me question the ease with which I come to believe there can be just one.

Present perfect

Tara Bahrampour writes her memoir in present tense, a technique employed by Elizabeth Gilbert in “Eat, Pray, Love” and who knows how many other brilliant wizards of non-fiction craft. I think I want to write my final paper on this approach and its myriad benefits for both writer and reader. I only wish I’d been aware of it sooner, or I would have applied it to my own writing. The present tense is perfect for so many reasons!

But to focus on “To See and See Again” specifically, Bahrampour is unique in the scope of her story because she literally writes from first memory up to present day adulthood (presumably–who knows how old she was when the memoir was published?) In order to write herself at every age, she had to capture her childhood sense of things, her angsty adolescent voice, the burgeoning self-awareness that college brings, all the way up to the revelatory wisdom of adulthood. I think the present tense aided her immensely in keeping these voices clear, distinct, and authentic.

Not only is she able to write moments without concerning herself or the reader about everything else (some of which she inserts later—like, “oh yeah, I spent **years** living abroad in college), but it keeps the linear nature of her life’s progression  organized by what is happening right now, instead of how it fell in the time line of the distant past. Because everything is told to us as it happens, we experience the stories almost like we piggybacking Tara through her life. There is no distance between her understanding and our understanding. This then impacts her ability to relate the political, cultural, and social intricacies and permutations of Iranian life without it getting confusing or condescending in its explanations. In a brilliant manifestation of “seeing and seeing again”, Bahrampour relates her understanding of Iran’s political situation from her childhood perspective, collegiate understanding, and then a first-hand homeland excavation. At each point, the sophistication and depth of the revelation matches her age and voice. This works because we are reading it in the now. Her voice and her dicoveries are not tainted by hindsight; past understanding is not muddied by current understanding.

The present tense has an interesting effect on the pacing of the story. For me, it slowed it waaaay down. Each moment/story/glimpse is stacked upon each other, building the days, weeks and years of a life. Her writing is not abstract or intricate, but striaghtforward and fairly literal when compared to some of the other memoir writing we have studied. We as the readers are along for the ride, and it is an even, measured walk. Very rarely are we cantering, or even galloping, in this book. And that is utterly okay. The beauty of this story isn’t in high drama and hijinks. Instead, we are witnessing the unfolding of understanding, of considering and reconsidering, of arriving at a middle place of identity and self-awareness. And I have  to say, my attachment to and understanding of Tara is increased exponentionally by the enforced experiencing of everything right alongside her character/narrator. I don’t know how this book would work if written in the past tense, but I have a funny feeling it wouldn’t.

 

Bahrampour’s Inner Child

Other than the use of fluid, straightforward diction, succinct, yet lush structure, and beautiful familiarity with storytelling, I found Bahrampour’s comprehension and way of portraying childhood through prose to be absolutely brilliant.  Sometimes I forgot that I was reading the words of an adult writing from the POV of a little girl.  The language was so lavish, the scenes so vivid, but yet I felt as if I was still seeing through the eyes of a younger soul, delineating moments in time so lucidly that it could have only been accessed through a solid recollection of old memories.  Just the way that Tara always describes Baba and her mother, the two of them becoming more representative of moments in her life as opposed to characters she knows how to identify with.  They are elusive, yet always present, kind of like deities on an elevated platform dolling out warmth from above.  I love what little Tara notices about her mother, how she locates pride in her.  For example, when she brings the photographs over to the neighbor’s house, there is a certain love for her exotic beauty, her difference, and in particular, a certain importance in how she reveals the author’s mixed individuality.  We don’t get a lot of self-convicted reflection from the author, instead we receive an array of scenes, moments in time, places where we are meant to look upon this child from above and understand her.  

  The scene with Miryam, I believe, happens to be really key in exploiting Bahrampour’s skill at depicting childhood.  The main character begins by ruminating upon germs, the function of them, and how they exist in the real world.  However, her child’s POV makes them wondrous, dangerous, and unexplainable.  When she follows Miryam we get a glimpse of her conscious being overrided by the authorities of her parents, relatives, the world, but still she journeys on, under the unknown threat of something bigger than her that she is far too young to understand.  Instances like this in the book make Tara’s childhood believable.  The author has gone the distance to make us understand her life in Iran as an elucidated dreamscape of childhood recollections.  Even the revolution seems distant, foreign, because she remains inside under the protection of her parents, only seeing the passing of footsteps through the basement window.  When she finally gets to go to the demonstration, the world floods in and she is elated, if not just absorbing the scene.  Overall, she is more of a harbinger of life than a judge upon it, like most children seem to be.  Rather than giving us an opinion, she presents a tapestry, something for us to assemble for ourselves.  Wonderful book!!  

simplicity

To See and See Again.

Where does a story start? Where does it end? How do you tell a story?

What I really like about this particular memoir is that Bahrampour revisits the same moment with different perspectives. For example, the author first describes her childhood recollections of revolution (and what a revolution it is too!) and later she revisits these moments from the perspective a college student. She can fill in the large gaps of her memory with a fuller picture. This adds depth to my understanding of the revolution and her experience.

But Bahrampour has a way of retelling her history, which is also Iran’s History, in a way that is neither boring nor condescending. She has the gift of easy and conversational writing. At times the reading of a few pages took me awhile to get through, not because I was not seriously interested in her story (I was) and entertained (I was) but because I could hear her talking to me. And listening to so much recollecting of one’s life is consuming work.

Eat, Pray, Love was also written in a conversational tone, but in a different manner. In Eat, Pray, Love the author seemed to be trying to entertain me. Whereas in To See and See Again the author is responding to my question about her life. Or so it felt. In Catfish and Mandala the author writes beautifully. There is so much to memorize and quote. Pham’s writing is delicious on its own, and then it has meaning. But in To See and See Again Bahrampour is less poetic and more…informative. This is an interesting way to tell a story. I’m not certain that any writer could pull off this style, but Bahrampour does it well. I feel like I am hearing her, getting to know who she is without any sort of intent (be it artistic, humorous, etc). I feel that she simply wants to tell me her story, and that is what I get. Somehow this completely succeeded for me.

The simplicity of the novel is its trademark.

(I don’t know how to blog anymore. How many different ways can I say I love a book? All the books we’ve read have taught me something I wanted to know about, sometimes in cases when I didn’t know I wanted to know. The path of identity seems to be a theme in the memoirs we’ve chosen, at least in the ones I fell so hard for. The way Bahrampour switches back and forth from being Iranian or American, or somewhere in between, is fascinating and honest. I am struck over and over again by the way she expresses her identity, when it is whole, when it is not, when it is sharing two worlds. And how is that my identity can be reflected in parts of hers? This human connection thing is so obvious. I think the narratives we’ve read in this class illustrate that, and this last one is Damn Amazing).

oh life.