Otoniya J. Okot Bitek maps the stories of Uganda's abducted children in new novel

WARNING: This story contains details of abuse.

In the novel We, the Kindling, Otoniya J. Okot Bitek weaves together stories of women who were abducted as children by a rebel militia in northern Uganda. 

Through the writing, each powerful voice tells a haunting story of loss, survival, friendship and what it means to hold on to hope, no matter how small.

Drawing from real-life accounts, Bitek used fiction to reckon with missing details and massage the horrific truth.

"I respect stories so much that I wanted to be able to tell this story without further harming whoever is going to read it," she said on Bookends with Mattea Roach.

Bitek, a poet and scholar born in Kenya to Ugandan parents, currently lives in Kingston, Ont. Her work includes poetry collections 100 Days, A is for Acholi, which won the 2023 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, and Song & Dread. She was also longlisted for the 2018 CBC Poetry Prize. 

The 2025 CBC Poetry Prize is open April 1-June 1. You can submit an original, unpublished poem or collection of poems. The winner will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, a two-week writing residency at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and have their work published on CBC Books.

Bitek joined Roach to talk about being Acholi in Canada, using facts to inform her fiction and exploring the cartography of Uganda through stories. 

Mattea Roach: In your poetry collection A is for Acholi, you consider what it means to be an Acholi woman living in Canada. You write that Acholi is an expansive way of being in the world. What does that expansive way of being in the world look like for you?

Otoniya J. Okot Bitek: The daughter of the diaspora is what I would call myself. To claim an Acholi identity doesn't mean I live in Acholi, it means I live elsewhere. To claim an Acholi identity also doesn't mean I speak the language fluently or that I have all the cultural practices. It means that I have and I carry a memory, a sense of being, a way of being in the world. That is from northern Uganda, from the Acholi people, which is where my parents were, both born and grew up in. 

In We, the Kindling you weave together these stories of several Ugandan women who were abducted as children by a militia called the Lord's Resistance Army. Can you talk a bit about the history that you're exploring in this novel?

The Lord's Resistance Army was formed in 1987. Before that, the government of Uganda was overthrown by the National Resistance Movement, which was led by Yoweri Museveni, who is still president, in early 1985. And immediately there was a lot of resistance by people in the North and there were groups that relented and there were groups that gave up.

Among the groups that relented was one led by a woman called Alice Lakwena. And she led the Holy Spirit movement, but she was defeated. Out of that, many people who were in the Holy Spirit movement went on to form the Lord's Resistance Army, which was led by Joseph Kony in 1987. 

The government of Uganda was in this insane situation where they were fighting an army made of citizens and kids in their own country.- Otoniya J. Okot Bitek

But different from the other groups, which relied on people joining them intentionally, the Lord's Resistance Army relied on kidnapping kids, other people too, other grown people too, but mostly kids, and forcing them to join the army and fight. It went on for more than a couple of decades. So the government of Uganda was in this insane situation where they were fighting an army made of citizens and kids in their own country. 

In the case of We, the Kindling, you drew on real survivor accounts to craft these stories that we encounter in the novel. Can you talk a bit about how you put this together and the responsibility that you maybe feel to some of these survivors whose stories appear here?

I was working as an academic doing a PhD teaching and studying how the importance of agency and and histories of violence in different spaces, trauma histories, the Holocaust and the generations that came after that, and what it means to be silent, what it means to have agency, what it means to be able to tell your own stories.

Initially, I was working with professor Erin Baines from [the University of British Columbia]. She had all these transcripts of women who were told their stories and she asked me, what can we do with that? I initially started a project of a creative nonfiction story because I was interested in just having the exact story out there to be told. And then I realized that with creative nonfiction and other kinds of writing that rely on facts that can be proven that would mean that I could not write a lot of things, and also that would mean that I'd have to think about my own position right in telling it.

What sorts of things do you think you wouldn't have been able to include had you written We, the Kindling as more of a creative nonfiction piece?

For example, I write about rape — and the rapes happened. Rapes happened to a lot of people. But an accusation of rape usually means you have to have a victim, a date, a time, and those kinds of things. Those are not things I can prove. In fiction, I can do that.

Also, these women who were girls at the time, they traversed so many different landscapes. Where on the map would I put those places? And so I'd have to leave that out. In fiction, I could do that.

How are we meant to read this map of northern Uganda and South Sudan that you set up in this novel?

I wanted to hark back to an unmapped territory, but I also wanted to think about the land as a storyteller. What you know about a place is how well you can read being there.

I also wanted to think about haunting. I wanted to think about ghosts. I wanted to think about all other kinds of presences that we don't usually think about when we think about a map. So I wanted you to have the sense of having other presences with you on this territory that is not familiar. And I also really want to get away from the idea that we have to read stories that are relatable, right? Stories where we can see ourselves in. So many of us have been brought up in literatures in which we could not see ourselves.

What you know about a place is how well you can read being there.- Otoniya J. Okot Bitek

But also, the experience of being abducted and taken to a foreign land is an experience of disorientation. So I do want the reader to feel disoriented and not to have a sure sense of where they are, but to pay attention to what's around them.

If you were to create your own map of Uganda, the one that's in your memory and imagination, and that you've kind of continued to map out through your fiction writing, what would it look like? 

First of all, I would not, I'm not really interested in colonial borders, but I would say that I'm much more interested in my identity as an Acholi person. I'm interested in how people work together and live together and so that actually people are scattered across the world. There's a healthy community of Acholi people here in Toronto. So we don't need to be contained in a border that's defined, especially one that's defined by other people. But I would map it through stories. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. It was produced by Katy Swailes.

If you're in immediate danger or fear for your safety or that of others around you, please call 911. For support in your area, you can look for crisis lines and local services via the Ending Violence Association of Canada database. ​​