If you aren't willing to fight for your work, no one else will either. If you feel you have an important story to tell, you have to be willing to go … - Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa

(Writing motto:) "You'll never know what happened in the hunt until the lion's story."

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.

When physical reality becomes unbearable, then an alternative is needed. My characters don't escape from objective reality, they simply exist in a more complex worldview than is the norm in the world they are forced to inhabit. Their perception of the world goes beyond that of the Western imaginary. Whether you call it magic or mysticism or religion or spirituality, it is that which binds the characters and allows for their survival in spite of the violence of their lives.