To have a young person speak back, to hand him the microphone for his first-person utterances, you'd have to have an imagined architecture, otherwise people would say you're putting words in their mouths.

My grandfather is Portuguese. He betrayed what was expected of him and married my grandmother of African descent on my father's side.

I was on the wrong side of colonization. My ancestry is mostly mired in having the colonial experience as colonized subjects, first as slaves and then as independent subjects with a post-colonial experience.

There's an imperative to make sure you distinguish fiction from the fact, because if the fact is doing the work, why did you do fiction? And once you raise the question of why - why do fiction? - then you have to answer it in your text as a kind of enactment of the answer.

Much of the visualizing is imaginative.

At bottom, I'm a cheerful person.

People who are suffering have to visualize ways out of tragedy to actually get out of it.