We, the Kindling

A spare, luminous novel centred around the unforgettable voices of schoolgirls in Uganda who survive capture by the Lord’s Resistance Army.

In northern Uganda in the 1990s, girls as young as eleven were abducted from schools and homes by the Lord’s Resistance Army and thrust into the ravages of war. Facing endless treks, gun battles, and unwanted underage marriages while forced to be pawns in political machinations they did not understand, many did not survive. Those who did make it through now bear the physical and psychological weight of these experiences--often within communities that wish only to forget or ignore them.

As We, the Kindling begins, we meet Miriam, Helen and Maggie, three survivors now in their late-twenties who are haunted by their teenage years spent in forced servitude to their captors. In graceful yet unflinching prose the novel weaves past with present, layering lively folk tales with taut realism to reveal the rhythm of the girls’ lives before the war, unspooling the circumstances of their abductions, and tracing their perilous journeys home again. Reminiscent of The Buddha in the Attic, this is an extraordinary, starkly beautiful novel, full of care and humanity, that insistently refuses to spectacularize brutality and tragedy.

OTONIYA JULIANE OKOT BITEK is an Acholi poet. Her most recent book, A is for Acholi (Wolsak and Wynn, 2022) was shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award and the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Her previous collection, 100 Days (University of Alberta Press, 2016), reflected on the meaning of memory two decades after the Rwanda genocide and was nominated for the BC Book Prize, the Pat Lowther Award, the Alberta Book Award and the Canadian Authors Award for Poetry. It won the IndieFab Book of the Year Award for Poetry and the Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry. Otoniya has been a Poetry Ambassador for the City of Vancouver, and in the fall of 2020 she was the Ellen and Warren Tallman Writer-in-Residence in the English Department at Simon Fraser University. She was also a Jack and Doris Shadbolt Fellow in the spring of 2021. She is currently an assistant professor of Black Creativity at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.