Текст книги "I Was Born There, I Was Born Here"

Автор книги: Mourid Barghouti

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Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 13 страниц)

The ambulance brings us to the place where the road divides.

The right arrow points to Ramallah.

The left arrow to Jerusalem.

This then is our promised ‘Qalandahar.’

No one knows when the checkpoint will be working and when they will close it. Clearly, today it is working.

“We’re lucky, Faisal. Inferno is open today. Prepare for the pleasure of entry, my friend.”

“We have a long time ahead of us in Purgatory, Signor Alighieri.”

“This Comedy is in no way divine. It’s covered in mud, as you can see.”

“Don’t forget that this is the mud of the Holy Land. We can call it The Muddy Divine Comedy.”

“And this is your crossing point to Paradise, Poet.”

“Paradise Regained or Paradise Lost, Mr. Milton?”

“We’re starting to talk nonsense.”

“Yes, we’re talking nonsense.”

“Are we really?”

“No, the Holy Land is talking nonsense.”

“The Holy Land or us?”

“We are the Holy Land.”

“The Holy Land that’s landed up in an ambulance.”

“We’re talking nonsense again.”

“Yes, we’re talking nonsense.”

“But we aren’t talking nonsense.”

“If you want to be serious, we aren’t talking nonsense.”

“What are we doing now?”

“Talking nonsense.”

“Do you think we’ll go mad?”

“No. Don’t worry. We’re too cowardly for that.”

“Long live courage.”

“Long live cowardice.”

“We’re talking nonsense again.”

“So what? What’s wrong with that?”

“And what’s right?”

“You’re a man with a cause and a big-shot writer and you’re talking nonsense?”

“What else do you expect from me when I’m creeping across the border in an ambulance like a mouse? Do you want me to roar? What do you want from me?”

“I want Godot.”

“You’re waiting for Godot and what you’ll get is his brother, Shlomo.”

Our travel companions thought that we really had gone mad, or become temporarily deranged. “Writers, dear God, and poets!” commented the doctor. “We deal with guts and scalpels but you’re in a different universe. Watch out. We’re close to the checkpoint. You never know, they may get it into their heads to check the mental capacities of people crossing at Qalandya as well.”

The wait begins here. Hundreds of human beings standing outside their cars waiting their turn to be inspected. Car horns in short, sharp, pointless, stupid bursts. Some people smoke, some eat sandwiches wrapped in newspaper. Some curse and yell, and we still haven’t reached the crossroads. Children and old people, the disabled and the sick, youths in jeans, girls wearing head coverings with jeans, fully veiled women, chic and would-be chic women with Gucci bags and high heels, peasants and old men and priests and business men and government employees and students. Psychologists say that crowding produces a ‘hatred of the Other’ and that that Other is the person standing in front of you in the line. You want him to get out of your way, to give you his place; in a word, you want him to disappear. This happens to humans and cars at rush hour and in front of cashiers’ windows at the bank, the post office, and in airports. At Qalandya, the crowding makes you furious at yourself, at your countryman, and at the Occupation all at the same time. Boarding the buses at the bridge or getting off them, and in the bag inspection lines, your criticisms of your fellow citizens fly.

Why is she so fat? Why are they traveling with all that luggage?

Look, she’s carrying a basket too! Why does that old woman have to bring blankets with her from Amman – aren’t there any blankets in Palestine?

Why doesn’t that idiotic child stop crying?

While all this is going through your head, you have no idea what the person standing behind you in the same line is saying about you. He too thinks you’re dawdling deliberately and gets angry at you, not the one who’s holding you up.

The long wait in the crush creates a need for many things, and needs create people to meet them. Purveyors of strange services multiply: there’s a wheel chair to transport the old, the sick, and the pregnant, or a porter with strong muscles who will do the job, and there’s a lively donkey for hire too. These services are agreed to after tedious bargaining. A whole vegetable market has been spread out here, along with carts selling food, drinks, ice cream, tea, coffee, socks, cheap clothes, hats, falafel, kebab, children’s toys, colored balloons, and more.

I realize we’ve arrived when I see the first tank, the barrel of its gun almost touching the mirror of our ambulance. Little by little, the entire martial scene reveals itself before us. More tanks are distributed on either side of the crossing point. Earthworks, rocks, and artificial mounds on either side of the road prevent anyone from leaving the asphalt. Everyone has to pass between the cement blocks, and over the heads of these hundreds flutters the flag of Israel with its six-pointed star. As though raising it in the air were not enough, they have also drawn it on the cement blocks.

The rows of cars have no end and there is nothing to gauge time by. Time here isn’t measured by your wristwatch; it’s measured by your ability to be patient. So long as you have the ability to be patient, time passes; when you lose it, it doesn’t. The waiting leaves you rooted to the spot in front of its own dumb stupidity, like someone without eyes gazing at a non-existent picture of a billy goat hung on a non-existent wall.

Finally, we reach the heart of the checkpoint. We reach the ‘heart of darkness.’

Fine rain has started to fall. One soldier stands close to us with his huge police dog while another asks for the driver’s papers. He orders him quietly to open the door.

The scene is repeated. The soldier can’t bring himself to look at the woman’s face, with its open eyes and bared teeth. He allows us to go on our way.

We pass through the checkpoint.

We stop behind a car at the side of the road with its parking lights on. Abu Saji is waiting for us with his private car.

We get down from the ambulance with our bags. We say goodbye to the doctor, the driver, and the nurse. We thank them. They will continue their way to Ramallah Hospital to carry out tests on the woman. Faisal and I join Abu Saji in a hug.

“Welcome back. Hey! Big adventures at your age?”

“A lovely feeling of being wilier than the Occupation. We’re just writers. We resist them with games like this and are happy when they don’t catch us. What a journey!”

Abu Saji drives me to my hotel and takes Faisal with him. We’ve agreed to meet later at his house.

At the Royal Court Hotel, which looks out over Ramallah’s park with its three cypresses in front, I take my sleeping clothes out of my bag, submerge myself in the warm water of the bathtub, lie stretched out luxuriating in the soap suds, close my eyes for a few instants, and see the woman laid out next to me on the stretcher staring at me with her wide-open eyes exactly as she was when we kept one another company in the ambulance. The nurse’s voice rings in my ear: “There’s a chance she’ll be cured, God willing.”

7. Saramago

On my way to the Khalil al-Sakakini Cultural Center, I catch a brief glimpse of him on the opposite pavement. It’s Namiq al-Tijani. At first I feel depressed, then pessimistic, and finally alarmed at what may happen on a day that starts with a sighting of this hateful, slimy character.

He isn’t one of the Authority’s most corrupt figures. He’s just a small one, a beginner, the likes of whom are to be found in their thousands everywhere. The sight of the big ones arouses only indifference now. Their corruption is firm, deeply rooted, and beyond redemption. There’s no hope of their going straight: their corruption is classic, period. He, though, is a young graduate at the beginning of his career and it wasn’t a given that he would become corrupt. The first group ended up corrupt and he began corrupt. His corruption is a blooming, fresh, rosy-cheeked corruption. A corruption strong of limb. A corruption that practices body-building. A corruption that massages itself if it can’t find anyone else to do so. A corruption that works out in the morning and lunches well, not waiving its right to dessert (kanafeh from Nablus or tiramisu, baklava or cheesecake – anything sticky will fit the bill) to top off the already rich main course. It is a corruption with supple joints, strong bones, sharp vision, and a well-developed sense of smell that can catch the whiff of an opportunity from afar. A corruption that knows the directions and the roads and is quick on its feet. It is also an infectious corruption, quick to spread among those with the disposition and the propensity. The Namiq demeans himself in order to dominate. If you spit in his face, he will ponder the matter at his own speed, at his own sweet pace. Then, if the spittle has value, he’ll collect it. He’ll smile at you and if it was an act of gratuitous contempt, he’ll count himself the winner and thank his good luck because you didn’t kill him this time but contented yourself with spitting. When, however, in your absence, he’s feeling secure, he’ll allow himself all the time he needs to set a trap for you. This young man wants to get ahead, to make money, by any and all means. He no longer attracts attention because the line between ambition and greed has become thin and barely visible, but this young man’s most vicious aspects are a tongue that extols and then betrays, a mouth that kisses and then bites, and a hand that embraces and then stabs. The likes of him are preparing themselves to be our future with the approval of the Authority. Against this, young people with clean hearts and heads are preparing themselves to be our future in spite of the Authority.

The Namiq crosses the street, approaching fast.

While a passing truck halts his forward rush, I enter the Center, climb the ancient stairs that lead to Mahmoud Darwish’s room, and escape.

We had arranged this meeting in Amman, where I’d discussed with Darwish the program for a visit of the International Parliament of Writers and getting the building’s conference hall ready for a planned press conference. The writers came, spoke, listened to the Palestinian writers, and expressed their solidarity with them and their desire to see the situation live, on the ground. We took them on a tour of the al-Am‘ari refugee camp, which is in the center of Ramallah.

One of us had to explain to them who was taking refuge with whom, and how there came to be Palestinian refugee camps in Ramallah, which was Palestinian. Some of them weren’t aware that these refugees were from the villages and cities of the Palestinian coast who had come here after their homes and possessions were destroyed following the Nakba of 1948. In other words, they had taken refuge in cities elsewhere in their homeland that were not occupied in the Nakba, and fled to the Bank and Gaza. They settled in nineteen camps in the Bank (a little later I shall explain the problem I have with the deliberately misleading term ‘West Bank,’ which poses a hidden danger): Balata, Tulkarm, Jenin, ‘Askar, al-Diheishah, Shu‘afat, al-Jalazon, Qalandya, al-‘Arroub, Nur Shams, al-Fawwar, al-Far‘a, Camp No. 1, ‘Aqbat Jabar, ‘Ayda, Deir ‘Ammar, ‘Ayn al-Sultan, Beit Jibrin, and the al-Am‘ari Camp. This, of course, omits the Gaza camps, which will later take center stage in news bulletins because of the repeated Israeli attacks on their inhabitants; these are Jabalya, Rafah, Beach Camp, Nuseirat, Khan Yunis, al-Bureij, al-Maghazi, and Deir al-Balah. Others took refuge in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and elsewhere. Each bombardment or attack on these camps is, to their inhabitants, a second, third, or fourth Nakba. Israel’s destruction machine drove them out of western Palestine, so they took refuge in its east.

What devilish thinking, then, led to eastern Palestine being called ‘the West Bank’?

If you open the map of historic Palestine, you will find it located between the Mediterranean Sea on the west and the River Jordan on the east. The Zionist gangs occupied western Palestine, the country’s Mediterranean coast, and most of its inhabitants took refuge in eastern Palestine, which extends to the River Jordan. Since the aim was to wipe the name ‘Palestine’ from the map, from history, and from memory, this area was attached to the River Jordan and called, in Arabic and every other language, ‘the West Bank.’ With this, the name ‘Palestine’ finally disappeared from the maps of the world.

If the west of the country is now called ‘Israel’ and the east is called ‘the West Bank,’ where is Palestine?

For Palestine to be lost as a land, it had to be lost as a word too.

Every time I hear the term ‘West Bank,’ I think of the enormous and deliberate pollution of language that has led to the assassination of the word ‘Palestine.’

This is something the Chinese poet Bei Dao didn’t know when he ran into a wall of denial in front of the Israeli Consulate in San Francisco. He told the young man standing there that he wanted to go to Palestine. The young man told him, “There is no such country on the map, sir!”

Later, PEN International Magazine will publish on its front cover – an undoubted honor – a complete poem of mine entitled “Interpretations”:

A poet sits in a coffee shop, writing:

the old lady

thinks he is writing a letter to his mother,

the young woman

thinks he is writing a letter to his girlfriend,

the child

thinks he is drawing,

the businessman

thinks he is considering a deal,

the tourist

thinks he is writing a postcard,

the employee

thinks he is calculating his debts,

the secret policeman

walks slowly, toward him.

However, instead of writing in the list of contents ‘Mourid Barghouti – Palestine,” the magazine wrote “Mourid Barghouti – Palestinian Authority”!

When I asked them to explain, they said there was no country called Palestine, to which my response was, “Is the Palestinian Authority a country?”

Israel, then, is not the only party responsible for rubbing out the name of Palestine; it is the world. The Arab dictatorships have played, and go on playing, a larger role in this linguistic assassination than any other countries, including those of Europe and Israel’s western allies. They are at least as much criminals in this as Israel.

I didn’t explain all this to the writers’ delegation as there wasn’t enough time. I just wanted to point out that for sixty years the State of Israel has continued to pursue the refugees in their places of refuge. As a result, the massacres of the refugee camps bearing the names Jenin, Sabra and Shatila, Burj al-Barajneh, Tall al-Za‘tar, and others have become a part of the background of the victim’s double dispossession and murder. Yes! Double dispossession – otherwise, what is the meaning of the Occupation?

Here, in the al-Am‘ari refugee camp, our guests and we saw the tactics the Israeli army had used to take it.

They would enter a house, arrest all its occupants, tie them up with rubber straps, and then use special explosives developed by Israel for such raids to make a huge hole in the wall shared with the next house and charge into that one. Palestinian families would be surprised by soldiers bursting through the wall, as in nightmares. Then they’d demolish another wall so as to break into the next house, killing those they wanted to kill and arresting those they wanted to arrest, and continue in this way from house to house and from hole to hole, the walls splitting open to reveal soldiers of the ‘Defense Force’ like in some Rambo film or Hollywood war. We and our guests passed through one of these holes like the soldiers and heard the local people’s accounts of this repeatedly practiced form of attack. Some of them showed us the holes in the walls left by earlier attacks, which they had roughly repaired using basic materials.

When we toured the alleyways of the camp, one of the writers compared the Palestinian mothers standing in rows in front of their houses to the “chorus of women … of the Greek tragedies.”

I thought to myself, this is the camp of the driver, Mahmoud. The moment we entered the place, his words “I’m from al-Am‘ari camp” came to my ears. What had happened to him and his family? I thought I’d ask about him at his workplace the following morning, but in fact I didn’t want to ask, so that I wouldn’t hear an answer I didn’t want to hear.

Army raids on houses in the cities are carried out by abducting someone and using him as a human shield. They force him to get into the tank – this once happened to my friend Husam – and then under the threat of their weapons make him press the bell of the house of a neighbor they want to arrest and call out his name. When the neighbors trustingly open the door, the soldiers burst in. All Husam could do was to go with his wife the next day to visit his neighbors and explain what had happened. He discovered that he didn’t need to explain. The neighbors, like all the inhabitants of the city, had grown used to this method because it was used so often. On earlier occasions they had been used as he had.

We entered a school that functioned as al-Am‘ari’s computer training center and found the floor piled high with papers, plastic, wires, and cables. The computers were smashed and ripped open, the chairs smashed, and there were bullet holes in the walls. When we asked what had happened to the children, we were told that the army had taken them outside first and done them no harm. The objective had been to destroy the school and the computers, nothing else. Only someone who has experienced or heard of the experience of the Palestinians with education can understand what the destruction of a school in a camp means to the refugees. After the mass displacement in 1948 as a result of the Nakba, the refugees lived in tents set up for them in Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon by UNRWA, the refugee relief agency belonging to the United Nations, which provided them with just enough flour, cracked wheat, and sugar to keep them alive, plus some clothes. All of this was distributed in jute sacks, from which the refugees in turn made tatty robes and underwear. You would see the children in front of their tents with the flags of America, Britain, Canada, and other countries on their bottoms, over ‘A Gift from Canada’ or ‘From the American People’ or ‘Point Four’ (with its famous symbol of two hands clasping). Anyway, UNRWA refused to build schools for these children in spite of the insistence of their parents, who, though driven into poverty, had no desire to be driven into ignorance and illiteracy too. One of the first school teachers in the camps told me that he’d only managed to establish the first school there two full years after the Nakba, in 1950, when he put sixty pupils in a single tent. All UNRWA gave him for them were the chalk and the backboard. He brought a wooden notice board, wrote ‘School’ on it in Arabic and then again beneath it in English, and fixed the board to the top of a wooden pole, which he hammered into the ground outside. The children were fascinated by and fell in love with the school, which was paradise for them compared to the monotonous life of the camp.

The people of al-Am‘ari camp were genuinely pained by the destruction of the computer center, though they quickly overcame that pain, as experience has taught them to do. In long conflicts, the weaker party experiences what might be called ‘historical pain.’ In such conflicts, the incident, the word, and the teardrop repeat themselves. Everything is repeated. Despair is repeated and hope is repeated. Heroism and treachery are repeated. Blood recurs and elegies recur. In long conflicts we don’t have to wait for the massacre to experience the pain that will follow or for reality to come into being for art to be created. What we wrote in the past will always provide material that fits the future perfectly.

The cruelest degree of exile is invisibility, being forbidden to tell one’s story for oneself. We, the Palestinian people, are narrated by our enemies, in keeping with their presence and our absence. They label us as it suits them. The weaker party in any conflict is allowed to scream, allowed to complain, allowed to weep, but never allowed to tell his own story. The conflict over the land becomes the conflict over the story and little by little the weak discovers that his enemy will not allow himself to be wronged. The enemy permits him only to be in the wrong, defective, and deserving of pain because he has brought that pain upon himself through his defects and his faults; it is not his enemy’s doing. This is the cruelest form of injustice, and injustice is a form of exile, just as stereotyping is exile and misunderstanding is exile. In this sense, the entire Palestinian people is exiled through the absence of its story. On this visit a few of the writers of the world saw a few of the features of the Palestinian narrative and our exile became a little less acute.

I was walking with the writers and saw the mothers, the women’s chorus of Greek tragedy, trying to protest to these foreigners, in a language they didn’t know, against the cruelties of loss and the continuous repetition of killing.

In an interview with a radio station, Saramago said,

All the information I thought I had concerning the situation in Palestine has been destroyed. Information and pictures are one thing and reality is another. You have to put your feet on the ground to really understand what is happening there. All the world’s bells have to be rung so that it can know that what is happening here is a crime that must stop. The Palestinian people are being subjected to unforgivable things.

But the world leapt to its feet – and still hasn’t sat down again – in protest at Saramago’s comparison in this interview of the crimes of the Israeli occupation with those of the Nazis, when he said that the Palestinians were living in a big concentration camp and compared Ramallah to Auschwitz.

Breyten Breytenbach was comfortable in comparing the situation to his experiences under the apartheid regime in his own country of South Africa, and the American novelist Russell Banks was angered by the fact that the soldiers of the Occupation looked like well-turned-out teenagers. “Look,” he said, “that boy is doing his work more thoroughly than he needs to.” (The well-turned-out soldier is examining the writer’s IDs at the military checkpoint, his features empty of all expression.) What really got people worked up, though, was José Saramago and his comparison of Ramallah to Auschwitz.

Israeli politicians and literary figures, such as Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshuah, along with most Israeli intellectuals (peace advocates until such time as their government makes war on us, when they become war advocates) went on the attack and accused him of anti-Semitism and ‘moral blindness’ while, far away, the Hungarian novelist Imre Kertesz popped his head up to add his voice, crowned with the laurels of the Nobel Prize, to that of those who had decided that Saramago was a “mediocre and failed” writer to begin with and anti-Semitic to the core. Some demanded the removal of his novels from the library shelves and a boycott of his publications, while the Israeli Foreign Ministry said that “Mr. Saramago has fallen victim to cheap Palestinian propaganda.”

What was Saramago’s response?

Saramago said,

“I’d rather fall victim to cheap Palestinian propaganda than to Israel’s extremely expensive propaganda!”

Later, a few days after the writers’ visit, when the Israeli army invades Jenin camp, and because of the presence of a limited number of Palestinian resistance fighters inside it, it will be bombed by Apaches and F-16s, which will succeed in wiping it off the face of the earth and the earth-movers and bulldozers will move in to demolish its houses over the heads of those inside.

The whole world will leap to its feet to protest the Jenin massacre but the moment America tells it to sit down, it sits.

The Security Council decides to send an international committee of investigation to uncover what happened in the camp.

The committee members reach Geneva on their way to Israel.

Israel announces it will refuse to receive them.

Things stop there. Just like that. It’s over. And the delegation goes back home.

We go to Birzeit to visit the university. We cross the Surda checkpoint on foot, like the faculty and students of the university and the government employees, craftsmen, merchants, and sick of the neighboring villages. At the university we meet with the faculty members. After the meeting, the president asks us to write a few words and sign our names on a commemorative whiteboard. I’m standing next to Saramago, waiting for him to finish writing his contribution so that I can write mine. I see him draw a rose and under it, in Portuguese, “The Palestinian State.” Beneath that he writes, “A drop of water for this rose.”

He signs it “José Saramago.”

Dinner passes as big dinners do: side conversations that are never completed because they are interrupted by polite handshakes, words of introduction, and compliments, comments on the food, and a fair amount of gossip, including anecdotes concerning the behavior of this or that writer. The following day a meeting is organized at short notice with Yasser Arafat at his besieged headquarters in the Muqata‘a building. Nothing new comes up, but the delegation notes the simplicity of his office and his frequent use of metaphors in his answers to their questions.

The office of the ‘Palestinian President’ is oblong and contains a number of seats, with an ordinary wooden desk to the right as one enters. This is piled with papers, files, medicines, and pens. Behind the desk is a plain wooden safe, on top of which numerous objects have been untidily thrown.

This is the third time I have entered a headquarters in which Yasser Arafat was living. The first was about a quarter of a century before, when I did so simply to perform a social duty: I was in Beirut and had to go with friends to offer condolences to Abu Lutf on the death of his brother. Arafat had opened his house for the occasion as a gesture of respect to his fellow PLO Executive Council member. The second time was when I came from Budapest to participate with the poets of the Arab countries in the Shaqif Poetry Festival in Beirut, held to salute the anniversary of the liberation from Israeli occupation of the fortress of al-Shaqif in southern Lebanon by the Lebanese-Palestinian Joint Forces – a truly heroic operation, in which the young men overran the towering citadel from their positions in the valleys and on the mountainsides. Among the writers invited were Sa‘di Yusuf, Amal Dongol, Mamdouh ‘Udwan, Elias Khoury, Lami‘a ‘Abbas ‘Amara, Yahya Yakhlif, and Radwa ‘Ashour, who came from Cairo accompanied by Tamim, who was less than three. We were all invited to have lunch at Arafat’s house. We took Tamim with us and Abu ‘Ammar kept him on his lap the entire time; to this day, Tamim has the photo of him on his lap with poets Amal Dongol and Sa‘di Yusuf and other Arab writers and Palestinian and Lebanese political leaders on either side. Today is my third visit.

This might seem normal were it not for the fact that Arafat kept open house for cadres of the PLO, Fatah, and other factions and parties. His house was also open for genuine fighters and people with serious political issues besides those who always sought financial help, a loan, an air ticket, money to cover the costs of a wedding, or an installment of a son’s or daughter’s university fees, all of whom wanted at the same time to gossip, slander, and tell tales. One of the main reasons for visiting him was to present financial requests and get them signed. Everyone knew his most famous expression, used when signing off on requests for assistance: “To be paid,” above his signature.

Arafat liked to be asked for things and he liked those who asked. He suspected anyone who didn’t want something material. I never attended an internal election that wasn’t ‘cooked,’ openly, in front of my eyes and those of others, before it took place, always in order to arrive at a result that would please the president. When such electoral cookery was to take place, the president would know which cadres he could rely on; he gave to you and didn’t forget, knowing that one day he would be able to count on you.

To this may be attributed the care he took to maintain his grip on the financial portfolio in any Fatah or PLO cabinet, in addition to being president of both organizations. I didn’t approve of many of his policies, of his swapping kisses with the Arab rulers and his tendency to carry out their dictates, or of his reliance on bad elements to serve a cause that deserves the service of the best elements of our people. Despite all that, though, I, like the rest of the Palestinian people, viewed his mistakes not as those of a criminal but of a victim. He faced difficulties that would have crushed mountains.

In a kind of self-criticism, I say to myself: This was a leader of a liberation movement in exile, surrounded by twenty Arab regimes who viewed him as a threat, wanted him to fail, made alliances with his enemies, and tried to prevent him from speaking, acting, or moving. Who repeatedly waved their weapons in his face and chased his cadres and fighters from Jordan to Lebanon and from there to Yemen, Libya, Syria, and Sudan until the entire revolution was holed up in the Salwa Hotel in Tunis. He dodged and weaved and made all the right noises, offering a concession here to win a point there, and inevitably making mistakes – the mistakes, I repeat, of a victim and not of a criminal. Now here he was, living in the Muqata‘a, under Israeli tank shelling and abandoned by every Arab ruler, some of whom refused even to take his calls, and I felt he belonged to me. I still ask myself the question asked by Naji al-‘Ali’s creation Hanthala – the question with which I concluded a poem of mine dedicated to the great artist twenty-five years before:

Father, O my father, how did you bring me to this place?

Father, O my father, how did you bring us to this place?