One might legitimately ask how, from my considerable distance in place and time from the events I am describing, I can know all that I claim to be a part of my brother's story…. And the answer, of course, is that I do not, in the conventional sense, know many of these things. I am not making them up, however. I am imagining them. Memory, intuition, interrogation and reflection have given me a vision, and it is this vision that I am telling here.

There is not one simple, “animal,” response to hunger…. “Riot”… is not a “natural” or “obvious” response to hunger but a sophisticated pattern of collective behaviour, a collective alternative to individualistic and familial strategies of survival. Of course hunger rioters were hungry, but hunger does not dictate that they must riot nor does it determine riot's forms.