 want to ask what to do with words that can harm. In March I was invited to Kigali Rwanda to talk about my work at the first ever spoken word festival and I read from my title story and this was a short a few sentences I read where a young Ugandan girl is invited by an older white man and she says I'll go with my tall Tootsie friend Miriam. She has a bold stare and brush laugh and looks they like. She even smokes in public. I'll be safe. Now I had read these words in Uganda here in Kenya in many parts of the world and it hadn't struck me until I read them in Kigali how problematic and loaded they were. In actual fact I was stereotyping naming an ethnicity and going on to say these are the characteristics and behavior of that ethnicity and we all know the history of Rwanda how extremist Hooters were mass mobilized through radio through the power of the word to you know cause a genocide. I also know how as a result right now it is strongly discouraged to discuss ethnicity in fact one of the poets who was invited was given a list of things that he shouldn't talk about and there's a part of me that does understand that how do you come out of a period like that. So I had to ask myself two things should I have read this piece in Kigali. Should I even have written it. It's opinions like this that can lead to violence that take into extreme violence murder. It's also a question of context. I'll give another example. This was my niece in a student in in Canada. She was with a group of friends and one of the friends happened to use the N word and another friend said don't use the N word when an N word is in the room. Now these are her friends. She had in a sense it seems to imply that perhaps censorship is okay in certain situations meaning that these words are okay in other situations and maybe they are not maybe they always are offensive and I as a fiction writer can say well I'm just putting these words in the voice of my narrator my character. I'm creating a full character whose flawed has opinions that most of us do spout actually privately or publicly. Should they be portrayed in that way. I actually had to ask myself seriously whether there are instances where censorship or self-censorship is valuable. I came to the conclusion that I am still against the banning of words the banning of ideas the banning of books. Let's interrogate them instead. I was wondering after my reading actually there were questions and answers but nobody asked me about that and I just wondered what if someone had confronted me and said you know why are you stereotyping or something like that maybe it could have led to a discussion of how Randi's have been treated in Uganda for so many years that might have you know brought us a step forward to understanding what kinds of things we do to each other before we go to even before we go to extremes. How can we create spaces where we can talk about these things in a helpful manner in a more meaningful manner. How can we encourage conversation where we can actually take these words that can cause harm change them and make them actually make us think deeper about who we are create new identities. Language is a tool that anyone can use and I'd like and I and that's why I'm a storyteller that's why I'm a writer because I realized that it is my duty and it is my challenge to get these words that have been misused and create new meanings out of them. Re-imagine how we can be even in our tribal identities today how we were 20 years ago how we were a hundred years ago through storytelling. If we cannot imagine ourselves in as wide a way as possible we will only stick to the stereotypes. Stories will help us move into new ways of being new ways of behaving new ways of interacting with one another and I challenge all of us to claim this language make it fresh and explore all the different ways we can be explore the different identities we can make for ourselves through storytelling.