Here I am in the Motherland, Africa, in a marvellous five-star hotel, seeking to grapple with the problems of Africa, as part of my work as Chairman of the Martin Luther King International. We soon will gather to discuss the problems of the Sudan, and this among other things is what has brought me to Africa. The Sudan was/is quite a problem. The leader of the Revolution there, John Garang, whom I had met in the States and introduced to the work of CLR James, was doing quite well as leader of the Sudanese Liberation Army and establishing revolutionary villages. A hastily arranged meeting with some of his people and others had been arranged.

The United States was painting the struggle in Sudan as a Religious War, between the Christian Blacks of the South and the Muslim Arabs of the North. In appearance, but only in appearance, it looked that way. In substance it was a struggle over oil. Vast and unknown deposits of oil. European oil companies had lined up with the Muslim government to gain access to this all-important industrial product, oil. No matter how we are in the Information Revolution, oil was still all-important to global capitalism, and the hegemony over the whole of US multinationals.

At this critical juncture in revolutionary time the Christian Right, had latched on to Joseph Garang’s Sudanese Liberation Army. The U.S. Christian Right was now backing the revolutionary Left. Huge numbers of Sudanese, mainly blacks, Christians, were refugees running from genocide. The slave trade was at work in the Sudan, in much the old form. Blacks captured, the young mainly, mostly female, were being sold into slavery in the 21st century. The traffic is extensive, across Africa, into Europe and on to the Middle East, the Holy Land. The Christian Right in the U.S. as the forerunner of Oil multinationals, and in the name of Human Rights, had adopted the Left, the Revolutionary struggle, against the Muslim government in Khartoum. In a way, a cynical way of seeing, it would appear that any side, which won, the people of Sudan would lose. And the oil multinationals would win, whichever side won.

But Sudan is the largest country in Africa. There could, or can be, no African solution without a liberated Sudan. So too, is the case with Nigeria the most populous country on the continent. Likewise, Zaire, potentially the wealthiest. Africa, in our time, after its liberation from colonialism, a domination set in motion by the 19th century European ‘scramble for Africa’, was now, in our post-independence time, being torn apart in the ‘scramble’ for diamonds, and, of course oil, not to speak of Zaire’s vast mineral wealth. This then was the last great battle of the west for Africa, and the last great battle of Africa for itself.

How to bring progressive forces in black America mainly and progressive white Americans to replace the U.S. Christian Right? And the Christian Right has President George W. Bush II’s ear. He was about to make the Sudan a U.S. top priority foreign policy issue. At the back of this U.S. concern was not the genocide being inflicted on Blacks by the Khartoum government, but oil?

We, our small group, were up against tremendous odds. Could we replace the Christian Right in its supplies of medicines, food, salt and Bibles? Not infrequently in the past, as now, the supply of Bibles opened the way for the sword of imperialism. This time the sword appears as smart bombs. It is happening again in the 21st century much as in the time of that historical monster Cecil Rhodes, off whom African countries, Zimbabwe and Zambia, were once named the Rhodesias, and for whom too scholarships, the Rhodes scholarships, were still incredibly named! Not few monsters were ennobled in the Colonisers’ view of history. In consequence, we, in Antigua and Barbuda, had streets named after those who enslaved us like, Hawkins, Drake, and that piratical gang, plus names like Newgate and Popeshead. Maybe the piracy of our politicians came as historical osmosis from that enemy source of sinspiration. We have imbibed the ways and practices of the enemy, having been educated in them, against ourselves.

But the struggle in the Sudan is not my theme here. On the way to Africa, there was the inevitable stop in London. I was, as usual, on a less than shoe-string budget. I warned myself over and over again on the plane: "Tim no books, buy no books." And then right there at the airport, there was this huge Waterstone’s Bookstore, and right in front, inviting, inveigling me, inveighing against my pocket and my own resolution on the plane, was Alice Walker’s new novel: The Way Forward Is With A Broken Heart.

Alice Walker is to me not a great female writer, but among the top ten writers in the world today. Anyone of her works refutes Philip Larkin’s definition of a novel, which goes like this "A beginning, then a muddle, and an end" is a literary work, or novel.

On the contrary, Alice Walker teases out of the muddle and struggle of Black life, a new essence, in her not so traditional beginning, and middle and endings.

I had to buy this book by Alice Walker. Had to. Especially in the light of her daughter’s new book, which, too, I had not read. To do this I had to forego breakfast at the sumptuous and enticing sea-food choose-your-morsel restaurant beckoning insistently to me. Breakfast lost. And lost badly.

That decision was all the more striking since Alice Walker and I had a quarrel of sorts, and since her In the Temple of My Familiar, I had not read her. The quarrel of sorts still smarted.

Strange how things happen. Alice Walker, Angela Davis, several others and I were in the early 90’s in a conference about apartheid and the struggle against it. Both Alice and Angela were wearing dreads, then not so fashionable as now. At lunch Alice Walker, Angela Davis and I were at the same table, but we were not together in the foregoing session or seminar group. I was over the moon to dine with two of my heroes.

But some macho West Indian must have ticked them both off, and they turned on me with a vengeance. The raw vinegar of their wrath, at the offender, they sprayed astringent on me like a fireman’s hose at a hugely, life-threatening fire. I was stunned. I did not deserve the volley of anti-macho rhetoric, which came my way. Nor did I want to state my feminist credentials. After all, I was raised a lone boy, fatherless, among grandmother, mother, four aunts. A feminist way of seeing was native, if not natural. For my grandfather, then old, also lived with us. He was racked and wrecked by strokes. Against whom my grandmother was then asserting herself, for the 40 preceding years of authoritarian patriarchal dominance. And sexual profligacy too, in which he proved his manhood. His manhood stifled under the yoke of colonial subjection, as a policeman, serving and protecting colonial plantation and property. He was, by occupation, set against himself. It was pay-back time for my grandmother, not with malice, but to restore him to himself, and indirectly me, the only other male in this all woman house. A house in which, according to Alice Walker, the man was at the wheel, but the woman did the steering. At any rate, at that time.

Alice Walker and Angela Davis, no doubt had every right to assail the West Indian politico who probably voiced a view of a woman’s place, not too different from that prevailing in Noah’s time, well before the flood. Not a few of my male acquaintances, in or out of politics, held fast to Old Testament views of women or even the Pauline view, it being holy writ, and supportive of their patriarchy. But why me, as the butt of Alice’s and Angela’s fury. Something quite alien to me, held me in dead silence. I, equally volatile, said not a word in retort. I have, though, not seen them since. Missed, was my opportunity to say how I thought that by living their work, they were making a decisive difference, to women and men, and the struggle of the poor and wretched of the earth to overcome. Overcome the Third Life of Grange Copeland, Alice Walker’s first novel. I was, to tell the truth, stung. And my own memory of my silence did not help. I had opted out in the face of greater fire power, I reflected. Cowardice, I assailed myself long after the quarrel of sorts. It, however, left matters between us, outstanding, and therefore, enervating.

Anyway, and somehow, unknown to me, the name of Alice Walker’s new work captivated. And foregoing the seafood delights as breakfast, I sat down to read. Forewarning myself that I must listen to my flight call. The world of a writer often conjures me away, especially this only child, from immediate surroundings. Books were my early playmates. Back then I was the boy who looked from the window, like a good girl. Sternly forbidden, as a "nash", "sickly" child, to venture out among what I suppose, were the more robust and active girls and boys. All but my last Aunt, the youngest, Aunt Gwen, enforced to the letter, this caged child order: Church and school, and straight back home. Five minutes late and the wrath of God would descend, on my small back and bottom, which, apparently, were no longer ‘nash’.

Anyway, I waded into Alice Walker’s The Way Forward Is With A Broken Heart. Are we all broken-hearted after that first, defining, all-encompassing, all consuming love? And do we not all, go forward, sadder and wise after the first deep love, somehow nostalgic for love’s delights lost? And, if not lost, only in part recovered, but not paradise regained?

Alice Walker’s The Way Forward Is With A Broken Heart, prompted such thoughts and ruminations from the first line, an incredibly simple, earnest, sincere but provocative beginning, not to speak of a middle, never in a muddle.

"A few days ago I went to see the little house on R Street where we were so happy." Alice Walker began. The entire stage was set and lit too, in one sentence.

The struggle for happiness, especially by slaves, African slaves, bought and sold, born and bred in misery is one of the incredible romantic or unromantic epics of our time. Alice was happy in marriage. In an interracial marriage with a Jew, in the Southern United States, of all places, in the 60’s!

And then we learn, quickly learn, with succinct speed, that this house once "vibrant", filled with the special warmth and luminescence of love, contained as well "Days when the white white walls, cool against the brutal summer heat, were more bars than walls."

What remarkable, clear, clean prose, without contrivance and pyrotechnics, rejecting the opacity so beloved of not a few famous writers, all of whom need deciphering. Not so Alice Walker. Alice was in that top drawer, with a realism so real, as itself to be magical.

I wondered if it was a particular of black speech, this double adjective, without comma, "white white walls". Was the alliteration "white white walls" intended ending the linear movement of ‘bars and walls’ of domestic war? I think not. It just happened, appropriately. And the cool of the walls against the summer heat, also transliterates, into these cool walls becoming, hot bars – prison, in normal domestic life. Is this the fate of all marriages "in the time of cholera" because of private property? Maybe, for Alice is very subtle and not preachy.

The fact undisputed is that Alice, as narrator, is divorced from her husband. Returning to the little house on R Street the memories came tumbling down, and out, and in, too. The curiosities flash, the joy cackles, the pain sears, and remembrance of times past mingles with acceptance of things as they are.

Alice and her husband are, perhaps, like most modern divorcees. But not quite. There is neither enmity nor friendship, and civility is civil only.

"You do not talk to me now, a fate I could not have imagined twenty years ago. It is true we say the usual greetings, when we have to, over the phone: How are you? Have you heard from Our Child? But beyond that really nothing. Nothing of the secrets, memories, good and bad that we shared. Nothing of the laughter that used to creep up on us as we ate together late at night at the kitchen table – perhaps after one of your poker games – and then wash over us in a cackling wave. You were always helpless before anything that struck you as funny, and I revelled in the ease with which, urging each other on, sometimes in our own voices, more often in a welter of black and white Southern and Brooklyn and Yiddish accents – which always felt as if our grandparents were joking with each other – we’d crumple over our plates laughing, as tears came to our eyes. After tallying up your winnings – you usually did win – and taking a shower – as I chatted with you through the glass – you’d crawl wearily into bed. We’d roll toward each other’s outstretched arms, still chuckling, and sleep the sleep of the deeply amused."

There is no sleep better than the sleep of two deeply amused lovers. And Alice Walker renders it so beautifully. There is perhaps one other sleep better than it. It is the sleep that comes, unbeknownst to you, after you had mentally prepared to make love, and then you awake after long sleep. She un-fussing. No, satisfied. Knowing that he had slept the sleep of the warrior after long sleeplessness. Both laughing at the spirit being most able but the weary flesh unwittingly, unwilling. And after the initial embarrassment, both just laugh and laugh. Laugh through the copious apologises for the shadow falling between the contemplation and the reality. Not T.S. Eliot’s laceration of laughter, which ceases to amuse. But the laugh, the un-self-conscious laugh of love.

But back to Alice. For pages she refers to her ex-husband as just "You" and "Our Child". But neither husband nor child are disembodied allegories. As reader you come to know "You" and "Our Child" even substituting yourself for either, and too, for the narrator, Alice. Either way, you lose your "maleness" or your "femaleness" or your "grown-up-ness" and you see into the light of things, black and Jewish, or even shrewish. There is nothing like Alice Walker to make you see what you would not otherwise have – or thought you knew.

And in the same story, Alice Walker, draws a picture of a beggar, a female beggar, who is again nameless, but who "would not accept dollars, only pennies and, reluctantly, it seemed, silver money." She was a beggar, "this woman’s unrelenting begging, but with stoic restraint," "neatly dressed" but "never sweaty when she appeared at the door." She, is, to my mind, drawn in cameo, but one of the unforgettable characters in all literature. I shall more remember her, the nameless beggar, who refused dollars, refused water, than I would any of Guy de Maupassant’s characters – rated the best short-story writer, though some like CLR prefer Chekov’s – and more remember Alice Walker’s well-dressed beggar than Melville’s Bartleby with his famous "I prefer not" in constant refrain even to his boss in the office.

For then, there is Alice’s profound rumination on this stiff-necked, neatly-dressed beggar, not for dollars, but pennies preferably, or ‘silver money’.

"There is a bitterness," wrote Alice, "that does not dissolve when I think of black women begging. I feel their rage, and it is mine too. I am here and you are there, we say to the well fed. Why are we both not on the side of plenty? That is what I want to know as I look into the eyes of someone who has given everything, if only symbolically, and is left with nothing."

I thought of the beggars I knew at home. Long ago, twenty or more years ago those I knew were in Alice’s category: Those who had given everything, even if symbolically, but now had nothing. Those I know now are young, begging before giving of anything, early or late, their lives cracked, total breakdown, mirroring a society, as they rifle rubbish bins, overturning them, if need be. Symbolically, I wonder now if they wish to overturn this society which pauperised them and made them, bored, dispossessed and powerless, go in eternal search of a "high", which, "high" has been cruelly been added to the four things which come not back. And still they relentlessly go in search, day in day out. Ready if need be, to use Earl Lovelace’s inimitable phrase, to stick a knife in God’s ribs. Maybe, just maybe, their ruthless relentlessness is payback for the ennui, the dispossession, we no less ruthlessly impose on them, day in and day out. The ennui of this non-participatory society, in dog-eat-dog daily scuffle, for Madison Avenue goodies on which we too get high! No more of that.

If perchance you got the impression that Alice Walker is relating some idyll of intense love cooling in divorce, I wish to disabuse you of that notion. Alice and her "You" – who we learn in the next story was named Ivan – lived in Mississippi at the height of the Civil Rights Movement – which I now think was a full-blown revolution. More on that sometime later, much later.

Alice and her "You", her significant "You", of enduring significance, lived out their married lives in the red hot heat of the Civil Rights revolution in of all places, racist Mississippi. When to be Black and White married, was to evoke the cross-burning passions, if not the actuality, of the lynch mob. Her significant "You", was a lawyer, fighting the causes of black share-croppers, of blacks denied the vote, of blacks reduced to some fraction of a person. Personhood being confined to whites only. Even department stores where black women could not try on dresses with a view to purchase, or blacks could not use public libraries, we, being, other and less than persons and so not ‘the public’. What a thing, to be excluded from that all embracing category known as ‘the public’ for whom all good ought to be done, but never is, by the high and mighty.

So intense is the situation in which Alice and "You" live, that out of fear and love, "You" has to lock her in when "you" goes out to his legal office in the cause of Civil Rights – the second American Revolution, not yet over. In time, this gesture of self-defence, of love, becomes for Alice, in a genuine and necessary sense, a lock-up, a prison! And, Alice, not given to going gently into that dark night, rages. And the rage, and the attendant insensitivity from an otherwise very sensitive man, unravels a fine marriage. If Alice Walker’s story "To My Young Husband" were written as a play it would be a great modern tragedy. Despite the great critic George Sterner’s confident analysis that tragedy itself is dead in the modern world. It would, properly handled as a play, far outclass Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf’s comic pain. Because Alice Walker’s love and catastrophic break-up takes place against the back-drop or foreground of the momentous civil rights upheaval, and not the inconsequential of bourgeois life as in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. The revolutionary context adds a whole new dimension, a partnership in struggle is wholly and soul-ly different from a ‘to have and hold’, nuclear arrangement to pass on more and more private property.

To be sure, even now, in the next ten or so years, there will be doctoral dissertations written in great volume, to locate the motive for the break-up between Alice and "You", just as scholars have sought to situate the source of Iago’s motiveless malignity in Shakespeare’s Othello. Alice and "You" are a higher order of being authentic being, in a higher order of marriage, in a higher order of break up – a break up of a love based on revolutionary fervour, but undone by revolutionary constraints, which constricts and then de-constricts their abiding love.

Here in Alice Walker’s story "To Her Young Husband", there is no discernible malignity, for she is not mean to her "You" even after the divorce. Though "You" did not even call her after quickly following surgery, or call on her mother’s death. "You" became a closed shop, as if without antecedent, ‘post-cedent’ and, in a way, without precedent. Silent. Double-blank. A hard-working corporate lawyer in designer shoes and suits. Making it. His present entirely different from his revolutionary marriage. Jekyll and Hyde?

But there is even more in the same story. It is a long quotation. It necessarily has to be long. It is, to me at any rate, one of the great passages in modern literature, if not in all literature. As is her other passage about the chocolate ice cream, between She and "You" which for sheer eroticism is of an extraordinary genre, but which I cannot give you. Not because of the eroticism, but only because of space. Here is the non-erotic passage. She, Alice Walker, was at a party for the great Langston Hughes, who, incidentally, wrote some great short stories, fit to rank with Anton Chekov’s, or Guy de Maupassant’s.

"I was too shy to notice anyone else, or even to hazard a thought about the politics of the gathering. Writers and poets and agents and editors, I know now. Some famous, some not. But what was fame to me? It seemed too far away, even to contemplate. It was winter, I was, as always, longing for a father. How odd life is: Now one of my brothers is very ill. He tells me, when I visited him in the hospital, that the father I always wanted was the one he actually had. He remembers my father organising in our community to build the first consolidated school for blacks in the country, which was burned to the ground by whites. Then, starting again, humbly, asking a local white man – who might indeed be one of those who torched the first school – to let the community rent an old falling down shed of his, until a second school could be built. He tells me my father travelled to other counties looking for teachers, because our county was so poor and black people kept in such ignorance there were no teachers to be chosen among us. It was my father who found the woman who would become my first grade teacher. My brother’s words are both fire and balm to my heart. Now in my fifth decade, I know what it is to be deeply exhausted from the struggle to ‘uplift’ the race. To see the tender faces of our youth turned stupid with disappointment and the ravages of poverty and disgrace. To think of the labour of Sisyphus to get his boulder to the top of the hill as the only fit symbol for our struggle. I am thankful that, when I went North to college, one of my teachers introduced me to Camus. Sisyphus, he said, transcends the humiliation of his endless task because he just keeps pushing the boulder up the hill, knowing it will fall down again, but pushing it anyway and forever."

I want you not so much to remember the end, about Sisyphus, but the end that was in the beginning. The sheer heroism of her father, about whom she did not know, and therefore wanted other than the father she knew, but already really had. It is well to note, how we of the succeeding generation are often unaware of those acts of genuine heroism in the struggle to uplift the race, accomplished unsung, by our foremothers and our forefathers, or our very mothers innocuously going about their seemingly innocuous lives. How in our lofty ignorance, we may in judgement hold them in contempt for seemingly going along to get along, never hearing them talk or boast on St Crispin’s day, of their truly human acts, of struggle and of love. When fiendish oppression caged them in, in to less than grave size confines and prisons, with daily fines exacted from what they did not have. And yet, they persevered.

Look at the image of her father building the first Consolidated School, watching it burn in the racists’ bid to ensure eternal black ignorance. See her father, no doubt working for a pittance, travelling far and yon to other counties to recruit teachers, even Alice’s very first grade teacher. See, as well, that from this effort, this Sisyphian effort, seemingly, there came a great writer, such as Alice Walker. See too, that even the great writer who sees into the nature of things was totally unaware of this, until now, at the hour of her brother’s illness. She, therefore, longingly longed for the unknown father she already had. And get the image of the father, humbly, I remind, asking a local white who may have been among those who torched the first school, for the use of his broken down shed until a second school could be built. And then you know with certainty, rather with certitude, that there is nothing Sisyphian about working for the revolution. For it is made up too, not just of the meteoric flights of the leaders, but of those simple, but no less glorious acts of service in the cause, by little unknown women and men, who, without fanfare, and in striking humility, did what they had to do: Making an un-noticed quantum leap transcending the repetitive humiliation of oppression.

I therefore thank Alice Walker for this immortal gift to literature and to revolutionary understanding.

I freely confess, that I too, now in my fifth decade like Alice, have felt the pangs of Sisyphian futility. Especially so, watching the coming generation fall into the ways of indifference, the apathy which is the fuel on which the ancién regime motors along. I too, watched Outlet burn. Burn as a means to ensure black ignorance. But I witnessed first hand, the unspoken resolve of women and men around Outlet, to rebuild. To keep pushing the huge boulder up the ever steepling hill. And, forever. And I now know, for sure, that deep in the heart of ordinary women and men, who would not consider themselves ideologues, is a passion for a truly liberated Black Order. And too, for truly human history.

This is more than Camus’ Hegelian transcendence. It is the essential stuff of which rebels with a cause, the real but ordinary Prometheuses are made.

(Just for the record and more than the record, my favourite love stories in Alice Walker’s new book are not the two I have mentioned here, but the new classic "Uncle Loaf and Auntie Putt-Putt". "Orclia and John", including, "Olive Oil", "Cuddling", "Charms." These are my favourites. And I have read not a few love stories, from my Aunt Gwen’s True Confessions round about 8-10, romantic comics, Mills and Boons, many a Western, through to Lady Chatterly’s Lover. Wuthering Heights, Giovanni’s Room to A Farewell to Arms. But these by Alice are among the best. I do not think that one can love unless one reads or watches movies about love. Love is not all instinctive. Much of it is acquired, by effort. Alice Walker will help many to live, struggle and live, struggle and love. And that is what great writers do, teach by enjoyment.) Check this out.

"They [a narrator of Alice Walker’s Aunt Lily and family] had moved to Florida years ago, looking for a better life somewhere else in the South that wasn’t so full of Southerners’. Finding ‘good white people’ to work for had seemed Aunt Lily’s talent. Though looking at her now, Rosa thought her aunt, by her imperial bearing, directness of speech and great height, had probably made them so. She could not imagine anyone having the nerve to condescend to Aunt Lily, or, worse, attempt to cheat her. And so once again she was amazed at the white man’s arrogance and racist laws. Ten years earlier this sweet-smelling, squeaky-clean aunt of hers would not have been permitted to try on a dress in local department stores. She could not have drunk at certain fountains. The main restaurants of the city would have been closed to her. The public library. The vast majority of the city’s toilets."

This was a vast sea-change wrought in the lives of people in the wealthiest and mightiest country in all history. And this came to pass, by struggle, in the last third of the 20th century. A revolution is more than power passing from the oppressor class to the oppressed classes. It is a profound change in the being of people. The Civil Rights movement wrought such a change in people like Aunt Lily and Rosa, and their off-spring, white and black in the U.S. That struggle, that Civil Rights revolution, reverberated beyond the national shores. All revolutions, being revolutions in the nature of humankind, are automatically exportable. Regardless of the effort of the ancién regime to contain them. The Civil Rights Revolution, still unfinished, was one such, which had no small effect on the African Revolution culminating in the defeat of apartheid. In which triumph too, we in the Caribbean played no small part. For the triumph in Johannesburg with Mandela, was signed, though not sealed, since the victory of the Cubans and the Angolans at Cuito Cuanavale, against the over-armed soldiers of apartheid.

The Christian Right, belatedly, tried to attach itself to the revolutionary triumph over racism, otherwise known as apartheid in South Africa. Even though that very Christianity had helped to spawn apartheid, quoting chapter and verse of the Bible, Sunday after Sunday and on weekends too, in support of what they presumed to be the "Lord’s Chosen People". And, as such, divinely ordained to enforce white supremacy in all lands into which they went preaching the Gospel, with or without a capital g. The small "g" was it for guns. Guns and Gospel, Master and Slave, went together like a horse and carriage.

In spite of this, Mandela, the ANC and the people of South Africa overcame. We too, shall overcome, man. So too will John Garang, of the Sudanese Liberation Army. And the people of Sudan, despite the machinations of the Christian Right, in pursuit of multinational oil, behind the burning Bush, will overcome, bush burning or Bush, bushed.

I proceed then, and now, to my meeting, armed with Alice Walker’s The Way Forward Is With A Broken Heart in my bag, knowing that a broken heart, through past failures and tragedies in the struggle for liberation, is not only sadder but wiser, but also loves again. For life, like love is eternal and a revolution widens the expanse of life, and therefore, of love. And a broken heart is essential company along the way forward in love and revolution.

(By way of postscript, the waiter who just provided me with room service – I hate eating alone in restaurants. Eating is an affair of taste and commune or communion – is a Sudanese, Elamin Abbas Nokor Jrow. He is a follower of Garang, scattered from a family of 14. He knew not where any of the 14 are. All scattered. Most presumed dead. Victims of a relentless genocide, as Arab sought to Islamise by ethnically cleansing the Blacks. No one tells that tale. It is like the genocide of 1492. And there is no Las Casas in the U.S. Christian Right. He wished me well as we quickly cut through the Waiter and Guest relation, to brotherhood, and I had him write his name in my copy of Alice Walker’s The Way Forward Is With A Broken Heart. When I meet her next, the quarrel of sorts completely forgiven now, I will tell her about Elamin, of his broken heart for the 14, his other loves lost and his autograph of the book in place of her. She will be pleased, I am sure.)