Presenting This Is Uncomfortable: Writer Hanif Abdurraqib on what it means to “make it”

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Kai Wright: Hey there, it's Kai. I want to share a really special conversation with you today. It comes from our friends at This Is Uncomfortable, which is a podcast from Marketplace. It's a show about the ways money messes with our lives. As you can imagine, their episodes go in a lot of different directions. The one we'll hear now is a great reminder that, how much money we have or don't or what we do or don't do with it, none of that is a very good way to judge our values or our character.

Poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib joins host Reema Khrais to talk about his life and the ways money has messed with it. If you enjoy this episode, there are many more like it available wherever you get your podcast. Let's get into This Is Uncomfortable.

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Hanif Abdurraqib: There is a real difference between being broke and being poor. For me to say I'm broke means, I had a couple bad days at the diner. I don't really got it right now, but I'm working on Saturday, and I'm certainly going to make something. To be poor, for me, when I was unhoused and it was like, "I can maybe get a little bit of a meal today, but I don't know if I can get one tomorrow." That is a prolonged experience. You know what I mean?

Reema Khrais: That's writer Hanif Abdurraqib. Around the time he was 23, he lost his job and got evicted from his apartment in Columbus, Ohio. He didn't have anywhere to go, so he had to get creative.

Hanif Abdurraqib: When I was evicted, I had enough money to get a storage unit for three months. I didn't have much. It was only what I could carry, really. I took a nightstand and I dragged a mattress over and a lamp and a box of clothes, and that was what I had. That was all I had. Of course, you're not supposed to sleep in the storage units. I think it's illegal, or it's illegal in the sense that it puts the storage facility in a position of liability, that is.

Reema Khrais: Makes them liable.

Hanif Abdurraqib: Which is understandable. I would have to wait until they closed, and then I'd have to sneak into my unit and I would sleep there.

Reema Khrais: I'm curious, at that time, did the people in your life know or did you keep it a secret?

Hanif Abdurraqib: I kept it largely a secret. It was easy to keep secret in part because my storage unit was right by my old apartment. I could just still have people drop me off at my apartment or whatever, and then I would just walk over to the unit.

Reema Khrais: Wow. When they're driving away, you would just wait.

Hanif Abdurraqib: Yes. No one really knew. I still had a gym membership so I could shower every now and then. It made my life a lot more challenging, but there was ways I could hide it and maneuver it. I think when people talk about eviction, what doesn't often get talked about is how much it takes to rebuild a life after eviction. It takes a lot to rebuild a life. It takes a lot to say, "I had many things and now I have nothing. I have to find a way to crawl back towards having things again." That part is hard. That part is a real challenge.

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Reema Khrais: Welcome to This Is Uncomfortable. I'm Reema Khrais. On today's show, a wide-ranging conversation with Hanif Abdurraqib. Hanif is an award-winning poet and author proudly from Columbus, Ohio. He's written six books, several of them bestsellers, including his latest book, There's Always This Year. In 2021, he was named a MacArthur Fellow, which is often called the Genius Award. I've spent the last few months reading Hanif's work and so much of it has resonated with me.

I found myself underlining nearly every page. He writes about things like basketball, music, pop culture, but whatever the topic, you'll usually find themes around grief, beauty, and love. Everything is filtered through the lens of his personal life and community. On this week's episode, the first of our 10th season, I sit down with Hanif to learn more about his life. We chat about the moral judgments we're quick to make about people's financial circumstances, his philosophies around giving, and we both get personal about our relationship with home and what it means to invest in it. I took a lot away from our conversation and I hope you all do too.

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Reema Khrais: Can you tell me about what else was going on in your life around the time that you got evicted?

Hanif Abdurraqib: Yes. I spent a lot of my early 20s, and I would say mid-20s, in and out of Franklin County Corrections. I was in legal trouble a lot, usually for theft and things associated with theft. That was challenging for me because a lot of it was just due to needing resources and needing money. My 20s were an infinity loop of this kind of struggle. My earliest issues stemmed from stealing things from the house. There was a way where I put myself in a position where my family, it was like excommunication, but it was for their own protection.

It was like, "We just can't have you around if this is how you're going to be behaving," which of course now makes all the sense in the world to me. Even though I knew that my behavior was causing this, I remember being young and feeling deeply wronged.

Reema Khrais: Yes, of course.

Hanif Abdurraqib: Which is ridiculous in hindsight, but that's--

Reema Khrais: At the time, what was the story you told yourself about why you were stealing from your family or wherever else?

Hanif Abdurraqib: I remember just needing and wanting more things in order to keep up with my friends because once I got outside of the realm of my neighborhood, once I was 18, 19, these kind of things, and I was outside of the realm of the people I grew up around, I was spending time with a different class of people who had different access to different things and I didn't want to feel left out. All of these things feel foolish now as a 40-year-old.

Reema Khrais: Sure.

Hanif Abdurraqib: As a 19-year-old, feeling like you're on the outside of something and wanting to find the quickest possible way to get on the inside of something-

Reema Khrais: That's real that.

Hanif Abdurraqib: -and knowing that I couldn't ask my father to buy me a $300 coat or whatever.

Reema Khrais: Is that what you would spend the money on sometimes or on things, materialistic stuff?

Hanif Abdurraqib: Oh, always materialistic. It's not like I was saving. It was always materialistic things and just wanting to keep up with the people around me because honestly, I think I felt left out a lot, and that accelerated in my 20s. I came up on the punk scene and I lost a lot of friends in my early 20s. A lot of them passed away and I felt left out. I just wanted to embed myself in a world where I mattered to some degree. I think the mistake that I fell into was thinking that-- Mistake, but also there's a reality to it. Thinking that access to materials was the only way that I could embed myself in a world that mattered.

Reema Khrais: Did it actually lead to any fulfillment?

Hanif Abdurraqib: Not really.

Reema Khrais: Did it the need that you were craving?

Hanif Abdurraqib: I think in the immediate, sure, but it also led to friendships that were not sustainable. It's not like I still talk to those friends now because when friendships, I think, are governed by material access, that's just not a sustainable-- There's no emotional connection or attachment. There's no growth or understanding around who people are. There's growth and understanding around what you have and what you don't have. When you begin to not have that, you're not in that orbit anymore.

It's just a flaw of childhood or youthful thinking. My approach was pretty immature at the time. I think that's where my head was at.

Reema Khrais: I relate to that. I feel like I did stupid stuff in my early 20s too. You're right. It's all in pursuit of just getting what you want without thinking of the consequences or the potential fallout. You're just trying to get that immediate gratification. When did the shift away from that start happening for you and how did it happen?

Hanif Abdurraqib: What happens is you're not a better person. For me at least, I think so much of the stuff around this book are people reading it and thinking, "Oh, you were bad and now you're good. Okay." That's not actually how it works. You become more resourced. It puts me in this position where I do have to operate against this notion of a bad-kid-made-good story that I think people so easily and eagerly want to attach to my life, because one, that binary fails everyone, but two, I don't know that I was bad then.

I don't know that I'm good now. I think that I have more access to things now. I have more access to resources across entire spectrums now. That access allows me to live a life that is different than the life I lived when I did not have that access. If I did not have that access right now, I don't know what ends I would go to to acquire that access. Here's the very last time I was ever arrested. I was arrested for stealing deodorant and toothpaste out of a Kroger.

Now, I was arrested for stealing deodorant and toothpaste out of a Kroger because I had a job interview the next day and I didn't have the things I needed to take care of myself. Now, that arrest for most people would be nothing, but because I had an extensive record at that point, it became a thing. What I'm saying is that was a theft in the pursuit of acquiring necessities that might lead to a drastic changing of my life.

There is no telling if I were unhoused today and I had a potentially life-changing job interview tomorrow and I didn't have access to the things I needed to show up to the interview as my best self in terms of presentation, I very well may go into a store and attempt to walk out with those things again today. I don't think that makes me a bad person or a good person. I think it makes me a person who is invested in the best possible survival for myself. I'm grateful to be significantly more resourced now than I was.

Reema Khrais: When did you start to feel more resourced? Was there a point that you reached where it felt like a shift for you? Like, "I never imagined I would make X amount and now I do and I can breathe a little bit easier?"

Hanif Abdurraqib: There was never an amount, I think, but I remember signing my first book deal with Random House and at this point, I don't even remember what it was for money-wise, but I remember thinking, "Gosh, this is a different experience to get this much money at once." It wasn't huge. Certainly not a million-dollar type thing. It wasn't anything like that. I think it was 200,000 or something like that, but I remember I signed it and I got 50,000 on signing.

I remember thinking, "Oh wow, this is all in my bank account at once?" That's a lot of money at once in a bank account. Of course, for me, I was like, "All right, well, taxes and whatnot, whatnot." Even with that, it was like, "This is still a lot of money in my bank account at once." Throughout my career, I've won things and that. I remember I won the US Artist Grant, which was the first thing I won that had a substantial financial gain, which was also $50,000.

That was another thing where I was like, "Well, this is a lot of money in my account at once." With that $50,000, I gave it all away except for five.

Reema Khrais: Oh. Wait, tell me about that. Why did you make that decision?

Hanif Abdurraqib: The USA Artist Grant is funded by certain orgs in some ways. My grant was funded by a Muslim organization and a local masjid in Ohio that I knew and had spent time in, its floor had collapsed. I'm not very religious. I guess identify as Muslim, but I don't practice in any substantial way.

Reema Khrais: We have a similar relationship. I also grew up Muslim.

Hanif Abdurraqib: I like to do Ramadan. I fast and all that.

Reema Khrais: I'm the same.

Hanif Abdurraqib: It felt important to me at the time to be like, "This money came from a Muslim organization. I would like to just relocate it and get this community's floor taken care of so that people can come and pray in here. I'm not going to go pray in there probably often at all, but people should." I redistributed that money. I kept 5,000. Then I did similar--

Reema Khrais: Wait, that's pretty remarkable, though, to get that lump sum of money and then decide to give most of it away. Was there a trade-off that you were making? If you didn't donate that money, how else would you have spent it, do you think?

Hanif Abdurraqib: I didn't have anything in mind at the time and that was the thing where it was like, so much of my decision-making around how I redistribute money and why and to whom, and all this stuff is just really on some baseline stuff where it's like, "What would I be doing with this otherwise?" The second big thing I got was the Landon Foundation Fellowship, which I don't remember. I think that was 125,000.

I kept more of that, but I broke up a lot of that and redistributed large chunks of it to local Columbus organizations that I believed in. Be Quick was one of them. Black Queer, Intersectional Collective, these organizations that are doing on-the-ground work, that are uplifting people at the margins. To me, that is more important than-- I don't really need another pair of sneakers. At this point, I have more sneakers. I have a literal sneaker room in my house.

There's things where it's like, I have [crosstalk]. I found out very early on that, especially coming out of a situation where I was unhoused, I don't really need a lot. The amount that I actually require to survive, even to survive well financially, still leaves me with a lot of eye towards thinking about what my community needs and how I can make a more equitable community that I feel proud to love and live in, and that everyone has at least the opportunity to attempt to feel proud to love and live in.

Reema Khrais: I think your philosophy is very common, but I think for someone to actually act on it is a different thing, because I understand that you have all of your needs fulfilled, but there are plenty of people out there who'd use that disposable income to travel to Bali or Japan or wherever, or buy a second home and just build wealth, but that doesn't drive you.

Hanif Abdurraqib: No. I'd be at the house. I like being at the house.

Reema Khrais: You're like, "No."

Hanif Abdurraqib: I travel substantially for work, and I try to make the most of my time when I'm on the road. I absolutely do not want to be responsible for a second home. My single home causes me-- I live in one of the last historically Black neighborhoods in the city. The houses are just old. They're just ancient. I adore my house, but it's a house from--

Reema Khrais: It's a lot of work.

Hanif Abdurraqib: It's like 1902.

Reema Khrais: I know. I live in a house that's old. It's too much work.

Hanif Abdurraqib: It's just so much work. Whenever people are like, "You should get a second home." I'm like, "Do y'all understand?"

Reema Khrais: How about retirement?

Hanif Abdurraqib: I save for retirement. I actually recently started saving for retirement after my first MacArthur year. I went to a--

Reema Khrais: That's a big chunk of money, that award?

Hanif Abdurraqib: Yes. It's gradual. You get it through five years. I went to a financial--

Reema Khrais: How much is it?

Hanif Abdurraqib: Ah, gosh, I don't know what the total is, but I know that four times a year, I get $32,500-

Reema Khrais: That's amazing.

Hanif Abdurraqib: -for five years. Whatever the math on that is. I think it's--

Reema Khrais: A lot of money.

Hanif Abdurraqib: Yes. I started saving for retirement, and I don't know anything about the investment space. So much of what I hear and understand about investments feels a little gross to me. All I really need is retirement. I still save. I don't want to paint it as though I don't spend money for pleasure.

Reema Khrais: Sure.

Hanif Abdurraqib: People have to understand I literally own 300 pairs of sneakers. For me, it feels important to, Instead of saying, "When can I take my next vacation," or "Can I invest in crypto or whatever," that it's like-

Reema Khrais: Don't do that.

Hanif Abdurraqib: -"What are the immediate needs of my community?" It's not even entirely selfless if I can be real, because I love Columbus and I want to be in Columbus for my whole life. If this community is equitable and if the people who are at the margins of this community that I love have opportunities to make art and live a little bit more free than they are right now and have the ability to care for themselves, that makes it a more livable city for me, too.

If I wanted to look at this in a completely selfish way, that makes it a more exciting, more thrilling, more livable city for me, and a city that also inspires me to create more fully. Now, granted, I'm not looking at it like this fully, but in a way, I'm just investing in the future of a place that I want to be in for a long time. I'm just doing it differently than, say, the powers that be might, because the powers that be are like, "Let's build high-rise condos that no one can afford." I have to operate against that if I have the means to operate against that.

Reema Khrais: I see. That's a big theme in your writing and your reflections, just your investment in your hometown. I'm curious to hear you talk a little bit more about your decision to stay in Columbus and how it connects to how you define success and what it means to "make it." You write in your book that oftentimes people equate leaving a hometown, leaving where you're from, as making it. You're trying to challenge that notion.

Hanif Abdurraqib: Yes, I suppose so. It's funny. My decision to stay in Columbus is really not spectacular. When my marriage ended in 2016, I could have lived anywhere, but I just wanted to come home. I wanted to be in the confines and comforts of this place where I was-- It's disorienting to go through that magnitude of a heartbreak at that velocity and that volume, and to come home is a way for me at least, to return to myself. Coming back to Columbus is the only thing that made sense.

Staying here has been the only thing that makes sense. Buying my house where I bought my house was very intentional. I wanted to live in this neighborhood where Black artists had created art for a great many years before I was even born. The neighborhood I live in has a legacy attached to it and a lineage attached to it. All of these were really distinct decisions that I made to build the kind of life that I thought I could live in for a long time.

To me, that felt like making it. To have the ability to do that felt like making it. To have the ability to be settled and comfortable while saying, "I think I'm making the right decision here for these specific reasons," that felt to me like a form of making it.

Reema Khrais: I appreciate that reflection. I think for a long time, especially in my 20s, the story I fed myself was that staying in your hometown will dim you. Your home is this vortex that'll sap you of your ambition or of any prospect of successful life or whatever that means. I remember feeling that very distinctly in my early 20s. I lived in DC and New York for a bit, and then afterwards, the only job I could find was in my home state in North Carolina.

I just remember rolling my suitcase into my childhood bedroom, just sobbing, feeling like I'd reverted. It took me a while before I started to reframe it like, "No, this is an opportunity for me," not to the degree that you are, but, "To invest in my community and my family, to develop a stronger relationship with my little brother." It really did cultivate, I think, a deeper love and curiosity for a place that informs so much of who I am today.

Hanif Abdurraqib: Listen, to have a good relationship with your hometown is not promised at all. It feels like a privilege to me that I love where I'm from, and even when I'm enraged by it, as I am often, but I think that rage is propelled by a kind of affection. I would like everyone to have an opportunity to love this place as I love it. Even if they end up not loving it as I do, I would love them to have the opportunity to.

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Reema Khrais: After the break, Hanif and I talk about community, Gaza, and grief.

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Reema Khrais: Hanif Abdurraqib will tell you that he never intended to become a writer. He came into it in his early 20s during that tough period in his life. He started out journaling and then found his way to poetry open mics, then landed a writing gig for MTV News. He published his first book in 2016, thinking it would be a one-off, but five more followed. Today, if you walk around his hometown of Columbus, Ohio, you'll find Hanif's face on a huge mural downtown.

One writer even described him as the Mr. Rogers of Columbus. The city shows up a lot in Hanif's work. It's a place with a history of racial inequality and also a rich legacy of Black art. I asked Hanif what it was like growing up there.

Hanif Abdurraqib: I grew up on the east side of Columbus, which was very much on the other side of the tracks from a wealthy and affluent suburb. That self-imposed border made it as though there was a city within a city. It was a corner of the city that was often neglected by those on the outside of it, but I think what people don't tend to understand is what then happens in that container of neglect, if you will, is that the people who remain deeply care for each other. That is the earliest way that I understood community was through that neighborhood.

Reema Khrais: Especially a place that I think you write in your book how politicians in the past have characterized the east side of Columbus, where you grew up, as a war zone.

Hanif Abdurraqib: Yes.

Reema Khrais: Can you talk about why it was important for you to write about that and the impact those kinds of statements can have on a community?

Hanif Abdurraqib: Yes, because when you name the conditions of war, you can define where it happens, and then when you define where it happens, you are also defining the kind of people who are living among it, as you at least see it. What is actually happening is you, in the eyes of the people who do not live there, are diminishing the actual value of a place. Not necessarily material value, but sure material value as well, because what you're doing is setting a path for gentrification.

You're saying, "This place is not worthwhile and wouldn't it be better if we just made some changes to it?" What's also happening is you are diminishing the lived reality of the people who live in that place and love in that place. When I was growing up, my neighborhood did not seem uniquely violent to me because we took care of each other, but one way we took care of each other was we just kept the police out and that operates as a threat to the state.

Then the place becomes a war zone because the police cannot govern it. It's also a failure of imagination because you don't imagine that the people are governing themselves because you don't imagine that there is an elder on a porch somewhere governing the children running through the street, and there's an elder two blocks down who's teaching a lesson on a porch to some kids who have lost their way a bit. That is a type of governance, and it is a governance that is rooted in actual care.

To extract that from a place where there is deep affection and deep care and deep thoughtfulness and say, "Since the state cannot enter here, it is too dangerous, and this is where war happens. This place has to be demolished and rebuilt in a different image," that is treasonous to the realities of affection that really undergird people living in communities that are insular and that are often neglected until they can be uprooted.

Reema Khrais: Hearing you talk about this, it's hard for me to not hear that and think about Gaza. I've shared this with our listeners. I'm Palestinian-American. My parents grew up in Gaza and immigrated to the States when I was born. Most of our relatives are still there. Hearing your reflections, I'm making these connections of how I think those in power were quick to cast the place as evil or as dangerous, a place devoid of any nuance or texture. I think to your point, when you attach such uncompromising labels to a place, then it's like what you said, that becomes how you describe the people as well.

It justifies violence, and those, I think, who survive become the exception. It's really just on a personal level maddening, upsetting. As someone who's spent time in Gaza, someone with people I love in Gaza, for it to be perceived in such a crude light, we don't hear about the joy, about the communion, about their unbelievable generosity, or the beauty of their neighborhoods before they collapsed into rubble. appreciate all of your reflections around this because I feel like a theme of your writing has been finding and naming the beauty in places like Gaza or Columbus.

Hanif Abdurraqib: One, thank you for sharing that. I'm sorry to hear about your family.

Reema Khrais: Thanks.

Hanif Abdurraqib: When I was getting put on to just the Palestinian resistance movement and life in Palestine and Gaza specifically, a homie of mine, and this was years and years ago, passed me, the book Enemy of the Sun, which is the other book of Palestinian resistance poetry. I remember loving that book because it reframed for me, yes, it is certainly a book of resistance poetry, for sure, but a lot of those poems are also just like, "Look at my beautiful neighborhood. I will walk you to the edge of what my neighborhood looked like once, or how beautiful that I get to wake up and make a meal with someone I love."

It's this very interiority of a life, this interior life that says, "Things were not always as you imagine them, or things are not always as you witness them, and therefore we are a full people." I think one of the many things that has devastated me in the past several months is the decimation of land that people have cared for because when you love a place, you care for it.

Reema Khrais: Something that your work has made me think more deeply about is just how these places can live within us, even as the scenery or the architecture changes. In the case of Gaza, despite how many homes and hospitals and schools, and places of worship have been demolished, I've been thinking about how you can't destroy a person's connection to a place. I think I saw you wrote somewhere that a place where is the legacy of what happened there. That the people who live there wear that legacy. I thought that was really beautiful, that the architecture of a place or the people. I've been holding on to that idea. I find it very comforting.

Hanif Abdurraqib: I think people survive even when they don't survive. There are ways that people survive in a place even when they have been built atop of or erased. I think people survive even when they don't survive. I think it is on the living in some ways to make sure that people survive even when they don't. Yes, in Gaza, but also everywhere.

Reema Khrais: Everywhere.

Hanif Abdurraqib: Of course, I'm not comparing gentrification to any--

Reema Khrais: No.

Hanif Abdurraqib: I'm saying there are ways that I feel responsible in my writing to keep alive the people who have died or who have been pushed even further to margins that they cannot-- to the point where they've been almost erased. People have to survive even when they don't physically survive in a place.

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Reema Khrais: This is a bit of a pivot, but somewhat connected to what we're talking about. You write a lot about the passage of time and our mortality, which are things that have especially been on my mind lately. I'm curious how the fact that you reflect so deeply on how our time on this earth is limited, how that impacts your approach to your work.

Hanif Abdurraqib: It does imbue it with a real urgency, I think. I love the writer Greg Tate, who I miss dearly. He wrote everything like it was his last thing. Every review, every email. There was this real understanding of whether or not you like it, you are operating in a lineage. That means that you, as a culture worker, artist, writer, whatever, have a responsibility to someone beyond yourself, and you have a responsibility that will trail behind you, ideally, when you're gone. To me, that is a great task to live up to.

I could not live up to that task if I were frivolous or flippant about the passage of time. Instead, I have to tell myself that any day could be the last day, which doesn't mean that I'm moping around thinking about death all the time, but it does mean that I have a real interest in living a life that will allow me to go to the grave satisfied, knowing that if I step back and look at the full body of work of my life, not just my artistic work, my actual living, if I have risen to the occasion where I loved people the best I could, to the best of my ability, more often than not, that is a level of satisfaction I can be cool with.

Reema Khrais: I think it's something that's been on my mind just experiencing so much grief this last year. I think it has shifted a lot within me. I think anytime you lose people you love, it has the potential to shift your perspective on what matters. It's cliche, but it's true. I personally just don't feel as hungry as I did before to achieve the more conventional markers of success. It feels more important to me that I'm driven by internal motivators, that I act in a way that are in accordance with my values.

I read somewhere that you have an ambivalent relationship with success. What do you mean by that?

Hanif Abdurraqib: I just don't think about it a lot. I can't control how well my books do. I can't control what jobs come up for me or what jobs don't come up for me. I can't control any awards. To get caught up in that would be, I think, somewhat treasonous to my ability to write freely, to think freely, to take actual risks in my work. I think if I think too heavily about success and I become beholden to these ideas of success, that I think would diminish my ability to connect with people. So much of my work is, I think, driven towards connecting with people.

Reema Khrais: That's what's important to you.

Hanif Abdurraqib: Absolutely.

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Reema Khrais: This has been a great conversation. I really appreciate you going to so many different places with me.

Hanif Abdurraqib: For sure. Thanks for the time.

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Reema Khrais: That was poet and writer Hanif Abdurraqib. You should check out his latest book. It's called There's Always This Year. That is all for our show this week. If you have any thoughts about this episode or just want to shoot us a note, you can always email me and the team at uncomfortable@marketplace.org. We love hearing from you all. Also, don't forget to sign up for our weekly newsletter if you haven't already. There's always great recommendations in there for things to listen to or cook or watch.

This week I'm writing about what we have in store this season, so be sure to check that out. We have a special Defend Your Splurge from Hanif on how he budgets a nice treat for himself every month. You can sign up for the newsletter at marketplace.org/comfort. This episode was lead-produced by Zoe Saunders and hosted by me, Reema Khrais. We wrote the script together. The episode got additional support from producer Alice Wilder. Zoe Saunders is our senior producer.

Our editor is Jasmine Romero, sound design and audio engineering by Drew Jostad. Bridget Bodner is Marketplace's director of podcasts. Caitlin Esch is our supervising senior producer. Francesca Levy is the executive director of Digital. Neil Scarborough is vice president and general manager of Marketplace. Our theme music is by Wonderly. We'll catch you all next week.

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Hanif Abdurraqib: No. I'd be at the house. I like being at the house.

Reema Khrais: You're like, "No."

 

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