Even if we want to eradicate our ghosts, our dead, our murdered, even if you erase a name and the record of the existence of a person, somebody remembers.

One day, I was running to the river. Along the way there was the most exquisite butterfly, a tiny little thing, on the pavement. I kind of jumped over it. And then two days later I woke up in the middle of the night with a character running, jumping over butterflies on the streets of Nairobi. After that, I followed the story. The story wrote itself.

I come from a culture that has refined the art of the dirge to a sublime level.

Every Kenyan writer has offered me something to hold onto, something to believe in.

I am indebted to anyone who has ever written anything. I am indebted to the unknown carver of pictograms on a gallery of stone panels, which I encountered and stood in silence before on top of a distant odd-shaped hill in northern Kenya. For whatever reason the muses have most unexpectedly invited me to join this immense procession. I am humbled and delighted.

It may not seem that way, but I am an absolute optimist, an unrepentant optimist.

Matters of the subconscious affect reality in ways we don't quite realize.