Miriam, Helen and Maggie are three friends who, years ago when they were school children, survived capture by the Lord's Resistance Army in northern Uganda. As the women go about their new lives in the city, shopping, caring for their children, planning and thinking about what the future might hold, we come to understand how deeply their past haunts the present. Miriam, Helen, and Maggie form the emotional core of Otoniya Juliane Okot Bitek’s debut novel, We, the Kindling.
It’s a book that author David Chariandy calls “an extraordinary accomplishment, a novel of voices liberating themselves from horror but equally from spectacle and instrumentalization, voices freed from conventional narration so that we may sense, in their spare beauty and insistent aliveness, that which might yet emerge from catastrophe.”
Otoniya Juliane Okot Bitek writes poetry and fiction. Her first collection, 100 Days, won the 2017 IndieFab Book of the Year Award for poetry and the 2017 Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry. Her second collection, A is for Acholi, won the 2023 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Her most recent collection of poetry, Song & Dread, is published by Talonbooks. Otoniya was born in Kenya to Ugandan parents and has lived in Canada for more than three decades. Her short story “Going Home” received a special mention in the 2004 Commonwealth Short Fiction Prize. We, the Kindling is her first novel.
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We, The Kindling explores the brutal abduction of young girls taken by the Lord’s Resistance Army in northern Uganda in the 1990s. In the novel, we meet Miriam, Helen, and Maggie, three survivors now in their early adulthood. Why did you want to tell their stories?
Miriam, Helen, and Maggie are three characters created from the stories of several women who survived abduction by the Lord’s Resistance Army, returned to Uganda and are navigating their lives since. The war between the government of Uganda and the LRA lasted over two decades in northern Uganda and beyond to neighbouring countries, and stories from this time have been told in multiple ways by many people. I have always been interested in war stories and I wanted to imagine a war story told from the perspectives of the women who lived it. This seemed to be the best way to do it.
A note accompanying the novel explains that it took over a decade for you to complete the book. Can you talk about the process of writing and how you navigated the material?
Initially I wrote a work of creative nonfiction but I was frustrated by the demands of nonfiction and its reliance on the provable and yet nonfiction was not enough to be able to write truthfully. After many rewrites and revisions, the book moved towards fiction, and I was able to rely on several storytelling techniques to get at a more truthful way to share these stories.
I wanted to be able to write hard stories without locking the reading in gore and trauma, so I used lists, prose poetry, narrative, poetry, any, and all kinds of ways to tell these stories.
Through the recollections of Miriam, Helen, Maggie, and others, we are privy to a world of brutality and fear, but their narratives are filled also with moments of beauty, connection, and love. How did these characters arrive for you, and why was it so important to balance the trauma of what they’d experienced with so many moments of connection and hope?
Since these stories are based on many transcripts and interviews as well as a familiarity with voices from Acholi, it feels as if they were already there. It is important to write people’s lives as fully as we can. It wasn’t so much about infusing hope and connection to balance out trauma but more about telling the truth about people’s lives that include all kinds of moments—not all our lives are terrible all the time and it wouldn’t be fair to write anyone’s life like that.
I also wanted to write people who come from families and communities that are culturally informed, where people love and care for and look out for each other. Too often, the focus on the victim status of someone feels like a heralding for a saviour who can only come from outside and this is not one of those kinds of stories. This isn’t to say that life was not hard but that there were and are coping mechanisms that the women relied on that was already part of their upbringing.
You’ve included a number of folk tales into the novel. Can you tell us more about the origins of these stories? How did you decide what tales to include?
I come from a rich storytelling tradition, and it was important for me to lean on these stories to tell this one. For me, We, the Kindling is a book about storytelling, and we all know the power of storytelling in determining who/what matters. First, these stories helped me to map out the novel as a Ugandan story, not just about a war that was largely fought in northern Uganda. So I used stories from Buganda, for example, as well as Lango, Acholi and other traditions. Doing this also underscores that it was not just Acholi people who were kidnapped by the LRA. There is a song and game that I reference in the book for which I don’t know the language. For me, that represents the other traditions that I couldn’t have known to write about.
Second, I wanted to illustrate how folk-tales are not just simple stories of simple people—folk tales—but are muscular and elastic and in this case, they were instrumental in holding some of the most painful experiences.
Third, folk tales are unforgettable because they are told and re-told, and they allow for magic and mystery which is often necessary to tell a hard story as I did, for example, by reframing the story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin.
In addition to fiction, you’re also an award-winning poet. What were the challenges and rewards of moving from poetry into prose for this particular project?
I was already working on and revising these stories before I got any of my poetry published as books. So linearly, I was writing prose, or trying to, before I ventured seriously into publishing my poetry. I think it’s probably a bad idea to lock myself into a singular identity and imagine that it would make it harder, or weirder to write fiction. I don’t think that’s the question, though. I think that poetry and fiction do different things—also depending on what kind of fiction and poetry one writes…
Many people will not realise that one of the early representations of the LRA, both the organization and its victims were already in popular culture. I was stunned to see a dark skinned, red-eyed, dread-locked, machete-wielding man in James Bond’s Casino Royale speaking in Acholi. That movie came out in 2006 and if you never ever knew anything else about Acholi people, you would have heard the language spoken by this character in an iconic movie series. If you go to the wikipedia page for Acholi people, you will still find a photo of someone taken in the 19th century as representing Acholi.
The main theme of my writing is memory and how we resist or accept what is socially remembered, or forgotten.
What that tells me is that we’re not imagined as real, or people with agency or the ability to tell our own stories. If poetry, as Dionne Brand says, interrogates the reader, while the reader interrogates the fiction, I wanted this work to do both: to invite the reader into a space where they can experience a storytelling tradition that they’re probably not familiar with and I want them to ask themselves why they never knew or imagined that these women’s stories are war stories, too. I think I could only have done this project in this way, not as a book of poetry.
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