<\/p>\n
(Scholar-Poet, Amatoritsero Ede, in conversation with Otoniya J. Okot Bitek, Poet and Novelist) <\/em><\/p>\n Amatoritsero Ede:<\/strong> Otoniya, it is a pleasure to have this long-delayed conversation with you. You are a poet first \u2013 I hope I am not being too presumptuous here. In what ways did your praxis as a poet stylistically influence the writing of \u201cWe the Kindling?\u201d<\/p>\n Otoniya J. Okot Bitek<\/strong>: Thank you for having me. Yes, I am a poet first, but I also write in different genres. I have published work as essays, short fiction, and academic essays and creative non-fiction. So, there\u2019s a way that my poetic practice might be apparent in my other work and sometimes it\u2019s obvious. But in We, the Kindling,<\/em> I think that my poetic sensibility probably shows in the controlled use of the white space and the lack of stamina (if I can say it that way) for long pages of prose. As a poet, I\u2019m always thinking about the extent to which the reader is a co-creator of the poem and so I don\u2019t feel the need to say everything. In that regard, yes, my practice as poet deeply influenced the writing of this work.<\/p>\n A.E.:<\/strong> Can you elaborate a little more about the influence of the African oral tradition on this new work? I note influences of the folktale, for example.<\/p>\n O.J.O.:<\/strong> We both come from the African oral tradition from which we came to understand the world as one that was inhabited by characters, human and nonhuman, in stories that orientated us to the world and taught us how to be in that world. In the use of folk tales in this work, I wanted to use African folktales as a citational practice\u2014the stories we were told as children warned us and taught us how to manage and strategize when conditions made themselves apparent. The story of the hare that was giving the ogre a haircut clarified the unending war in northern Uganda and its exacting toll on the community and it also functions as a shortcut, the way folktales do, so I did not have to do the work of spelling out the costs of the war. The folktale did that in the metaphor of the haircut. I also wanted to use folktales to map out the story of the war as a Ugandan story. I used folktales from different parts of the country so that readers (whether they know this, or not) will come to understand that many of our tradition stories contained the kernels and the skill for explicating a complex contemporary situation.<\/p>\n A.E.:<\/strong> Your dad, Okot p\u2019Bitek, is \u2013 in the present tense \u2013 a renowned foundational modern African poet in the English language. I remember the classics, Song of Lawino<\/em> and Song of Ocol<\/em>. It is poetry rooted in African story-telling motifs and validating traditional worldviews. Would you say you are influenced by his style or literary convictions either in your poetry and especially in this new work?<\/p>\n O.J.O.: Thank you for having my dad in the present tense. He feels like that to me even though I miss his physical presence immensely all these decades since he passed away in 1982. Dad was just starting to go bald and sometimes I wonder and wish to have had him a bald, old man. I think he would have been a grand old man. It\u2019s hard to make the claim that one is not influenced by the powerful concept of the Songs which as you say, were rooted in African storytelling and worldview. Dad wrote at a time (and this is still true) when folks believed that the western tradition was the more important than our indigenous African ones, and that we were better off adapting the western way of life. It was always clear to him that that was not the case, and he wrote powerful voices in his songs. The protagonists from his epic poems, Lawino, Ocol, and the un-named Malaya and the prisoner (from Song of Lawino<\/em>, Song of Ocol<\/em>, Song of Malaya<\/em>, \u201cSong of Prisoner\u201d) are as unforgettable as their articulations, so much so that Ocol and Lawino became metaphors in everyday speech for people who behave like these characters did. So how can it be possible that I would not be influenced by my father\u2019s work when it was in the air and everywhere as I grew up and even now in adulthood? What writer does not want to write like that? For me, the most impactful influence of my dad\u2019s writing is in the conceptualisation of the song, wer<\/em>, as a poetic space for gathering, reflection, and articulation which I developed in my PhD work, but as a creative writer, I haven\u2019t adopted my father\u2019s song format of the epic poem in free verse. My writing follows wer<\/em> as a concept, not stylistically. As an aside though, my first published work was a poem titled \u201cSong of the Road to Jinja\u201d which was published in a Kenyan newspaper when I was a girl. In that poem, I wrote a poem in response to the political upheaval in Uganda after Idi Amin was overthrown in 1979. To be clear, my father titled that poem and he says so in the accompanying short article to the poem.<\/p>\n A.E.:<\/strong> The theme of war spreads all over \u201cWe the Kindling.\u201d But it is done in such indirect, measured and non-intrusive manner. Why did you adopt this narratological strategy.<\/p>\n O.J.O.: <\/strong>I would like to think that We, the Kindling<\/em> is a book about storytelling and as such, the stories that are told in that book tell us about what it was like to live through and survive a war like that one. It is not a plot-bound novel, because I don\u2019t know how to follow a plot, but I do know how to get lost in a story, and I wanted to write a novel that I could get lost in. I wanted to invite the reader into an African storytelling tradition and have the war as the backdrop from which the stories are told. I\u2019ll leave the stories about that war to those who have and continue to write that.<\/p>\n A.E.:<\/strong> We the kindling<\/em> is described as a \u201cnovel\u201d by the publisher. I read it as a collection of interconnected short stories. Is there a significance for the description, \u2018novel\u201d? <\/p>\n O.J.O.: <\/strong>It depends on how you define a novel. You could begin with the Italian root of the word \u201cnovella\u201d, as a new way to tell a story. Or you could rely on the idea of a long story that is sustained by a plot. Or, as in my attempt, I wanted to engage with many voices from the same era, and I don\u2019t think I\u2019m doing this differently, or in a new way, to have several voices tell a story– other contemporary novelists do it, too. When I think about interconnected short stories, I think about each story as containing a whole world and I think about Edwidge Danticat\u2019s very powerful The Dew Breaker<\/em> which left me breathless. Danticat is a master short story writer; each story, itself a complete world, reads like an explosion but feeds on the idea of the dew breakers, as the torturers in Haiti were known. In We, the Kindling<\/em>, even though there are several tellers to the story, I hope they\u2019re read as a braided project which makes it a novel, rather than a collection of short stories, but I won\u2019t arm wrestle you about that.<\/p>\n A.E.: <\/strong>The geographical setting of the stories in We the Kindling<\/em> are mostly located in Uganda. I know that some gate-keeper commentators\/critics might want to question whether this is true \u201cCanadian\u201d literature. It was heavily implied of Austin Clarke\u2019s The Polished Hoe<\/em>, for example. What is your position on such biases?<\/p>\n O.J.O.:<\/strong> This question about a \u201cbias\u201d feels like a patriotism test, so here we go; watch me fail. If you truly believe that true \u201cCanadian\u201d literature can only comprise work that is set in Canada, then the landscape of CanLit will be very limited. I think this debate has already been had but in terms of my own positioning, I can\u2019t worry whether this book is read as CanLit, or African lit, or Ugandan lit–categories are not my thing. I\u2019m more interested in readers who want to engage with a story no matter where it\u2019s set because the role of literature is to expand our minds, not restrict our imagination to a national border. If a Canadian writer can only write work set in Canada, what happens when a writer focuses on fantasy about spaces that are not located on earth? Do they get thrown out or delegitimized, or do they become less Canadian, or perhaps will they not be writing true Canadian literature? Or must we return to (as happened for much of Canadian literary history) to when Canadian writing was one that wrote a European sensibility and culture onto this landscape? Must we limit the role of literature to nation\/empire building as a project that infuses and limits the landscape with a Canadian \u201cus\u201d, however this \u201cus\u201d is defined? Just today, I saw a post by @openbookontario on social media that stated: [t]he importance of children seeing themselves, their culture and their country reflected in the books they read at school cannot be understated. It\u2019s time we have books published in Ontario in our classrooms\u201d. I get the importance of young readers becoming orientated to the world through reading, but I also see the conflation between publishing books in Ontario and those books being ones that children in Ontario can recognize themselves in. Sometimes I hear the expression \u201crelatable\u201d, in reference to films, or books, or stories being shared between people. But honestly, if we\u2019re only after stories that we can relate to or see ourselves reflected in, we will miss out on so much more that the imagination has to offer. Limiting writers to work set by national borders can and will harm all of us by controlling the possibilities of our imagination. Should we deny the gift of brilliance from contemporary writers like Michael Ondaatje, Emma Donoghue, Nalo Hopkinson, Anakana Scholfield, Jack Wang, Madeleine Thien, Dionne Brand, and so many more who have written novels that are set elsewhere, as not truly Canadian?<\/p>\n A.E.: <\/strong>This work is richly layered and is not only about war. What are some of the themes embedded in the narratives?<\/p>\n O.J.O.: I\u2019m not sure that I\u2019m the best person to answer this question because it feels like one of those exam questions from literature class. I\u2019ll leave this one for the readers.<\/p>\n A.E.: <\/strong>In the story, \u201cHow to Cock a Gun\u201d this title becomes symbolic and an inuendo when one considers that the commander sexually harasses Josephine and Lucia and assaults the latter. How realistic is this to the real-life operations by the Rebel Group, Uganda\u2019s \u2018Lord\u2019s Resistance Army\u2019. In other words, is this just poetic licence or documented fact; fiction or faction?<\/p>\n O.J.O: <\/strong>This is a good example of where fiction presents a space from which an experience can be shared. It might not be obvious to the reader, but I was not abducted by the Lord\u2019s Resistance Army, and I did not spend any time with that guerilla group. I don\u2019t believe that \u201cdocumented fact\u201d can be the only truth of what happened, but I did rely on my own experience and relayed stories of sexual assault and rape to write \u201cHow to Cock a Gun\u201d and I think that\u2019s what makes it feel true: it is true to the experience of survivors. A question that guided me as I wrote the book was: how might a war story sound like from the perspective of women? How could a book set in war time, told in the voices of women exclude rape? When I initially began this project, I wrote creative nonfiction (published in MTLS<\/a> and African Writing Online <\/a>but over time, I realized that I could not write about stories of rape, for example, unless I had documented fact and that that claim would be impossible for me without proximity. And so, fiction and wer<\/em> became the only spaces I could rely on to write this book truthfully. If a reader wants to find out more about the Lord\u2019s Resistance Army, I would suggest that there are loads of books out there, including memoirs by survivors, and writing by journalists, and books by academics for reference. Even though it is founded on stories that were shared by survivors, this is a book of fiction.<\/p>\n A.E.: <\/strong>The writing of this novel was a project of several years. How does it feel in hindsight, clich\u00e9 as it might sound, to have this behind you. But I would like you to frame it in context of this work\u2019s loud critical and public reception \u2013 i.e. Giller longlist and more\u2026<\/p>\n O.J.O.: <\/strong>It\u2019s a bit strange to think that this book could be behind me. I suppose the question is really about having the novel (you refer to it as a novel, ha!) in the hands of a wider reading public. I can\u2019t tinker with it anymore. I can\u2019t decide to put it away and return to it again\u2026I have to let it go. That said, I\u2019m now working for the book. I do interviews like this one, attend festivals, media\u2026all the things that are expected of a writer after publication. I am happy to see the critical acclaim and the nod from major publication prizes in Canada. Along with being long-listed for the 2025 Giller Prize, We, the Kindling<\/em> was a finalist for the 2025 Atwood-Gibson Writers Trust Fiction Prize. It was named among the Globe and Mail 100 Best of Fiction 2025 as well as the CBC Best Canadian Fiction of 2025. We, the Kindling<\/em> is also being translated into several languages, so I think it\u2019s done well for itself and I\u2019m rather proud of it. I hope it can be read among the books that seek to trace the importance of women\u2019s narrative voices in war stories. Even though it took a long time to write, I\u2019m grateful that I\u2019m not working on it anymore and that clears my brain to think about other things.<\/p>\n A.E.:<\/strong> All of us at MTLS will like to thank you for taking the time out of your busy schedule for this chat.<\/p>\n O.J.O: <\/strong>You\u2019re welcome. Thank you for having me.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A Sweet Sigh (Scholar-Poet, Amatoritsero Ede, in conversation with Otoniya J. 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