"Eventually, I came to understand how liberating fiction would be. I would be free to let my imagination soar. I could include the stories of my family and add to the many stories I was given by friends and students who shared their lives with me as well. Fiction gave me the freedom to adjust, invent, build bridges, raise my figurative voice and superimpose a structure on the images I had been collecting all along. It gave me permission to omit the extraneous and sharpen the essential. I could inhabit my characters' thoughts, explore their innermost feelings and tell their stories from various perspectives. I could experiment with language, both English and Spanish, using the rich vernacular of my youth, in both the Bronx and rural Puerto Rico, creating a bilingual, bicultural, biracial world. I had a whole set of tools at my disposal that would allow me to tell many stories my way. In fact, I could write metaphorical narrative of the Afro-Puerto Rican journey from 19th century Africa to colonial Puerto Rico to contemporary urban America, something I knew had never been done in American letters. In a sense, I could become the storyteller for all of them, a modern day griot of Afro-Puerto Rican tradition. For years, I had been a receptor, collecting stories and holding them in trust. Now I knew why. Seeing my work within the framework of narrative fiction, was like pushing aside a curtain and seeing the world for the first time. Writing this novel became my primary goal."