For Kenya: we have a chance to start again each time we meet one another. The ghosts do not need to define the future.

Burma evoked the lost Kenyan soldiers who served in the war. You never hear about them. There were a significant number of casualties, men who never came back home. But they're never commemorated.

I think every morning we wake up offers a new beginning, a new way of stepping into the day. I think every conversation could be a new chance.

The young readers I have interacted with carry old concerns repackaged in the skin of a new generation: puzzlement over continuous national moral failings, contradictions with the elders, nostalgia for a nonexistent Kenyan past.

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.

Novel-writing is a settling, lovely space. I call it self-indulgent - I feel mildly guilty about it.

Recording stories is a way of honoring the faculty of memory, even if it's recorded, outsourcing memory to technology.