In the spring of 2022, Knopf Canada announced the launch of Alchemy, an ambitious new publishing program headed by acclaimed writer Dionne Brand. Today, Alchemy publishes a handful of carefully chosen titles each year, focusing on the kinds of works that fulfill its founding mandate to “remake what is literary.” For Brand and her team, this means the publication of original, formally inventive works that de-center colonial models and unambiguously address the most pressing matters of our times, from climate catastrophe to social and political reckonings.
In February, Alchemy added its first original work of fiction to its oeuvre, We, the Kindling, a startling debut novel from poet and professor Otoniya J. Okot Bitek. The formally ambitious work negotiates multiple timelines and geographies, kneading them into a smooth and cohesive five-part, 200-some-page novel. Okot Bitek’s writing is unapologetic as she reckons with the legacy of the Lord’s Resistance Army: a militant group that abducted tens of thousands of children to serve in its ranks between the late 1990s and early 2000s. Embodying the viewpoints of several young women and girls captured in 1990s Northern Uganda, We, the Kindling bears witness to the vastness of their singular and collective stories.
A startling debut novel … Embodying the viewpoints of several young women and girls captured in 1990s Northern Uganda, We, the Kindling bears witness to the vastness of their singular and collective stories.
From its first line, the novel hails the reader to pay close attention, addressing the “you” who will read this book as an other; an English-speaking subject unlikely to be familiar with the realities of the survivors who populate it. “You want a map of the places we’ve been,” the narrator declares, naming the common (or perhaps, colonial) demand for stories to be neatly matrixed and mapped for the reader’s ease. The narrator’s refusal of this mode of reading is instructive. To read this book, it declares, is to accept that the multitudes it contains will not be neatly located on any “map” found “on any atlas.”
Miriam, Maggie, and Helen, three LRA survivors who have returned to their village of Gulu, are the novel’s first named narrators. Miriam speaks to the obstacles of reconstituting their lives, to the shame and the judgment they are made to carry, but also to the spaces of understanding they encounter in their communities. Helen, once a student at the well-regarded St-Mary’s College, describes the histories and politics underpinning the LRA, opening up the context to readers unfamiliar with it. Maggie crucially expands Helen’s knowledge, addressing how the thoughts and prayers announced on the local radio circulated only for the relatively wealthy girls of St-Mary’s, not for the thousands of children captured from “everyday families” without such clear connections to the Church. Even as it weaves a collective telling of their stories, the text refuses to flatten the intersections of their lives, reminding readers that hierarchies persist, even, or perhaps especially, in crisis.
Lucy, Susannah, and a few unnamed voices continue this collective story work in subsequent chapters, plunging into increasingly immersive scenes of life “in the bush”. In these middle chapters especially, accounts of enduring friendship and kinship are laid out alongside the horror and brutality the women and girls are subjected to, establishing the complexity of their lives in the LRA. As they tell their stories, the women sketch out the everyday objects that organized their days: the gumboots lined by children’s beds, ready to grab in the middle of the night, the AK-47s that became “mother and father,” the jerry cans of water from which the smallest drop could not be lost without agonizing humiliation. The objects they describe become deeply integrated into their stories, offering characters, as much as readers, something to hold on to as they grapple with scenes that demand candor and discernment.
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.
In its final chapters, the novel returns to Gulu, lending a critical eye to the politics of returning and the paradox of surviving. There is the aunt who blames her returned niece for the deaths of all those who didn’t survive, the father who rages at the request for school fees for children born of LRA leaders. There is incomprehension that links even family members to the “you,” the unknowing other, addressed in the book’s first line. Yet there is also the old schoolmate who offers a job, the passport office clerk who loosens regulations, and, on the novel’s final pages, the unnamed woman who shouts at the joy of finding her sister turned up at her door. In Okot Bitek’s telling, the importance of community and the failures it incurs need not be separated. They may be critically examined on the very same page. 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. 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.
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.
Publisher: Knopf Canada (February 4, 2025)
Hardcover 8″ x 5″ | 224 pages
ISBN: 9781039009288
Catherine Marcotte holds a Master of Arts in English Literature and Language from Queen’s University. She is a contributor at the Miramichi Reader where she writes about Canadian literature and publishing. Her essays, translations, and editorial work have been published in local and academic venues.
- Catherine Marcottehttps://miramichireader.ca/author/catherinereadsbooks/
- Catherine Marcottehttps://miramichireader.ca/author/catherinereadsbooks/
- Catherine Marcottehttps://miramichireader.ca/author/catherinereadsbooks/
- Catherine Marcottehttps://miramichireader.ca/author/catherinereadsbooks/
- Catherine Marcottehttps://miramichireader.ca/author/catherinereadsbooks/
- Catherine Marcottehttps://miramichireader.ca/author/catherinereadsbooks/
