You cannot go back home again, start all over again – you have to deal with the hand dealt you by fate wherever you may find yourself… a rather hard way to learn a simple truth, a rather normal, almost pedestrian way if you are a dauphin, a pioneer, a path-maker like Roy… a question of diplomacy borne of studied expediency in a dire emergency… the Zeituna way… can’t bite the hand that fed you for so long and then bit the sullen dust of betrayal… still, Aunt Zeituna is the sagacious one, the cold, calculating keeper of our faith, one that must be obeyed or default and forever be doomed – “If everyone is family, then no one is family,” indeed – if everybody is one’s kinsman or clanswoman, in the end, one alone can become one’s best friend…. Sarah, star-crossed and temporally strangled and dream- denuded and too smart for a patriarchal mule… Sarah of the shanty-pocked slum, abandoned by the fruit of time and space, embittered by shriveled dreams and expectations, doomed to shadow-box and falsify – truth too is a falsifier, trader of bitter tales, friendless clanswoman… truth is a triangulating conflict-monger, truth is a loner, truth is the naked self afront a looking glass… 11/21/10 By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr.