Introduction

Long ago, a man, in the name of passion, brought a curse upon himself and all his descendants. The man is my grandfather, someone whom I, in the naiveté of my insulated childhood, came to hold very high in the innocent world of my imagination. So that, for quite some time, awed by what I thought I was seeing through the prism of shear innocence, I accepted my grandfather as the one man I deeply wanted to resemble: a powerful man, respected and feared by all, a man in control –that was after all how I used to see him. Now that all of his children have failed to escape their lot, I hear that he’s lonely, sick, blind, and weak. Now that his name has been sullied and stripped of all the relevance it once carried in the heart of his countrymen, I hear that all he’s got left to show for is stubbornness -that same stubbornness that got each and every one of us in this mess in the first place.