In We, the Kindling, her profound and stylistically innovative debut novel, Otoniya Okot Bitek explores survival, memory, and the ways in which trauma impacts both individuals and community through the dark lens of the war that tore apart northern Uganda. The novel opens in the present where we meet three friends, Miriam, Helen, and Maggie who were captured as school children by the Lord’s Resistance Army and pressed into service as maids, wives, and soldiers. In telling their stories, past and present, Okot Bitek weaves realism with folk tales, neither minimizing nor spectacularizing this tragedy and never turning away from the truth of what happened to these girls who became women.
We, the Kindling is the first release from the new Knopf Canada imprint, Alchemy, headed by the acclaimed writer Dionne Brand and charged with an ambitious founding mandate to “remake what is literary.”
Like Brand, Okot Bitek made her reputation as a poet before embarking on fiction. Not only is the language both graceful and taut, but the structure also seems poetic. The women’s stories criss-cross multiple timelines and geographies, yet somehow the slim novel feels cohesive, drawing together multiple viewpoints to tell a collective and, alas, universal story.
“The novel’s final lines—the yet unanswered question of “What happened to you? We thought you were dead.”— beckons both to the future and the past, leaving a space for the survivor’s story perpetually open, perpetually possible,” writes Catherine Marcotte in a review in The Miramichi Reader.
“We, the Kindling’s engagement with story — both its power and its consequence — is clear and compelling, ushering forward an invigorating new body of fiction from one of the country’s most exciting publishing programs.”
Join Okot Bitek in conversation with Merilyn Simonds on the writing, publishing, and significance of We, the Kindling.
Kingston Marriott
Limestone City Ballroom
Tickets $30
