Otoniya J. Okot Bitek: Against Forgetting
Poet and writer Otoniya J. Okot Bitek joins Bhakti Shringarpure to speak about her novel We, The Kindling. A beautifully assembled symphony of women’s voices breathes life into the cruel, two-decades history of the war waged by the Lord’s Resistance Army in northern Uganda. Okot Bitek says that in a way she has always been working on this novel even if her first poetry collection might have been about genocide in neighboring Rwanda, and that it took her almost 15 years to be able to take stock of the difficult material emerging from this period. The question of form was crucial since Okot Bitek did not want to generate a portrait of battered and victimized women nor offer pornographic accounts of violence. Okot Bitek also discusses the dilemmas around bearing witness, doing justice to memory and the imperative to always move against forgetting and erasure.
Otoniya J. 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.
Bhakti Shringarpure is the creative director of Radical Books Collective.
