The ‘thrown-away children’
We, the Kindling
by Otoniya Okot Bitek
Toronto: Alchemy by Knopf Canada, 2026
$22.00 / 9781039009301
Reviewed by Brett Josef Grubisic
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We, the Kindling is paradoxical: skillfully-wrought, exquisite, poignant, tender, and affecting art about awful, ugly, senseless, incessant, and shockingly common brutality.
For me, who has never so much as thrown a punch or had one thrown at me, the novel’s broad canvas of Uganda during the LRA (Lord’s Resistance Army) insurgency in Uganda (1986 – ) defies comprehension. Literally: Otoniya Okot Bitek’s debut novel leads the reader through horror after horror—day by day, month by month—and each new scene stuns as completely as the ones that precede it. And all the while reason, the brain’s normally indispensable order-making mechanism, cannot process the enormity, the severity, the senselessness. It’s dumbstruck. Similar to the sublime or the absurd, only really, really terrible, the novel’s Ugandan hellscape effortlessly rebuffs every effort to fathom it.
An example. A Bible verse is introduced about mid-way through Bitek’s often harrowing tale. A LRA commander, his army of youths barely into their teens behind him, halts a man on a bicycle. Commander Lagum questions the civilian man’s loyalty and accuses him of being a traitor, as the man has evidently disregarded a law that forbids the riding of bicycles.
Never doubting that God is on his side, the devout commandant paraphrases a key passage in the Book of Matthew: “Jesus says: If your hand or foot causes you to sin, chop it off and throw it away. You are better off to go crippled or lame than to have two hands or feet and be thrown into the fire that never goes out. If your eye causes you to sin, poke it out and get rid of it. You would be better off to go into life with only one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into the fires of hell.”
At gunpoint, the lawbreaker is instructed to sit and positioned so that his leg rests across the frame of the forbidden bike. Commander Lagum’s assistant swings an axe down and “hack[s] at the man’s leg between the shin and ankle” until the foot is severed.
Task accomplished, the militia moves on, the man in agony at the roadside. “We left him lying there”: for narrator Maggie, who recalls the episode, the day was not categorically different than any other. To the reader, a shocked witness, the act is reprehensible, the scene unspeakable. With considerable understatement, Maggie remarks, “This was not a place for understanding.”
A long time (albeit former) Vancouver resident with a pair of graduate degrees from UBC, Kenyan-born Bitek (Song & Dread) wrote the novel over the course of fifteen years and based its arresting portraiture on the extensive testimony of Ugandan survivors. And built a remarkable, singular war novel with that testimony.
We, the Kindling begins with characteristic elegance, a saving grace and relief that distraught readers will find invaluable. A narrator address her audience, which includes every reader of the book: “You want a map of places we’ve been. You want to know where we went and where we did what we did, don’t you? Here’s a map you will not find on any atlas.”
Across five sections—“Today in Gulu,” “Monkey Salt,” “Fetching Water,” “Waiting,” “Considerations”—Bitek maps experiences over decades. Across those sections, Helen, Josephine, Lucia, Maggie, Miriam, and Susannah, the principal narrators, relate adult struggles and revisit a past they wish they could forget.
Miriam, for instance, mentions “while we were away”—that, for the briefest of moments, suggests a getaway, perhaps a vacation. In the next paragraph, however, she fleshes out “away”: “Me, I was taken when I was in primary school and I lost everything I was learning.” Later, her friend Helen, who “was taken away when she was a schoolgirl,” cries out about her exhaustion, her fatigue, and the bleakness of her mind. Earlier, Miriam expresses the women’s adult predicament in a different way: “We woke up to find that we’d grown; we’d had children and husbands; our parents had grown old, and some had died; our homes had been abandoned, become overgrown. Our agemates had grown up, graduated from school, were hired into jobs—and were now making decisions that affected our lives. We woke up from one nightmare into another. But at least now we have regular worries, regular problems” (such as, for Miriam, learning to read and write).
When she adds, “but at least now, even if I am a grown woman, I can learn these things,” the core resilience she exhibits is breathtaking.
Bitek weaves the stories rhythmically. Though they relate unique (and uniquely horrific) episodes, the women’s voices frequently evoke a chorus: notes from individual voices that join together for a lamenting, and occasionally hopeful, aria.
At other points the chorus speaks as though in a chant. A chapter titled “The Things We Carried” begins with, “We walked. We walked everywhere,” and then goes on to list the oil, babies, basins, and AK-47s the abductees physically carried, as well as, “We carried what luck remained because those who ran out of it lost their lives.” Similarly choric, “Murmuration” makes the heart swell. Over five pages, a litany of pain: “I was taken…. I was abducted…. I was abducted… I was a student at Awach Central when I was abducted….” A list of another kind is spoken by Lucia in “How to Cock a Gun,” and touches on the ins and outs of AK-47 maintenance and use. It concludes with a lesson that hints at the eventual sexual crimes visited upon the teenage girls: “Our roles as girls, we were told, was to take care of the homes. We were going to be the mothers of the next generation of Acholi people, unspoiled by the corruption and the sins of present-day Uganda. We needed to understand our responsibility and privilege.”
Yet elsewhere (at just over 200 pages, the novel is also a marvel of economy), Bitek turns to cautionary folk tales and fables—an ogre that snatches up girls and eats them, a guinea worm, a catfish, a hare—spoken to children by mothers and grandmothers. When Miriam comments, “Because you never know who’s an ogre and who isn’t,” we sense the general wisdom and broad application of the animal tales.
“From today, you need to put it into your minds that you are no longer students. You are soldiers.” In northern Uganda, Helen recalls, “we were initiated as soldiers.” Girls abducted from a Catholic school were beaten with plant canes. “We were stunned with pain,” she recalls. “This caning was meant to be a different kind of learning. It felt like our old life was being beaten out of us. As if this moment was a beginning but also the end of what we had known to be real before.” Soon after, one girl finds “freedom in death,” as she’s beaten to death by a sorority of abductees who lack the luxury of choice. Her crime? An escape attempt.
At an indoctrination camp with “many lessons to offer,” a narrator simply states, “[t]here was life, but … no happiness.” In Bitek’s exceptional hands, war-ravaged Uganda roars to vivid, horrific “life.” Shockingly unpleasant, it’s there for our apprehensive consideration, right on the page.
[Editor’s note: the hardcover edition of We, the Kindling was published in February 2025. The paperback will be released on February 24, 2026]
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Brett Josef Grubisic assigns, edits, and posts fiction, poetry, and children’s lit reviews for BCR; occasionally, he contributes reviews as well. [He’s written about recent books by Martin Butler, Hannah Beach and Maggie Hutchings, Zsuzsi Gartner (ed.), Jennifer Cooper, Caroline Adderson, Sunny Dhillon, Wanda John-Kehewin, Ryan O’Dowd, Michael V. Smith, David Bouchard, Alice Turski, Louise Sidley, K.J. Denny (ed.), Sonali Zohra, Carrie Anne Vanderhoop, Kristen Pendreigh, Sam Wiebe, Maureen Young, Daniel Anctil, and Adam Welch for BCR.]
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The British Columbia Review
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Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.
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