A Cascade of Voices

An unnamed narrator confronts us in the opening lines of We, the Kindling. “You want a map of the places we’ve been,” they insist. “You want to know where we went and where we did what we did, don’t you?” But first we have to “learn to read the text of the landscape,” because “unburied human bones have nothing to say if you cannot see the colours in the air.”

We begin to see “hues of orange, lilac and indigo, mirroring old cries” with the help of six women — Helen, Miriam, Maggie, Susannah, Josephine, and Lucia — whose perspectives, while fictional, are rooted in truth. Starting in the late 1980s, the Lord’s Resistance Army, a militant religious extremist group led by Joseph Kony, terrorized Uganda for decades, while abducting tens of thousands of children and displacing millions of people. Otoniya J. Okot Bitek has drawn on survivor accounts — both oral and written — to form the many voices of her novel.

In flashbacks, the women recall the circumstances of their abductions in the late 1990s and their brutal transformation from students into child soldiers. Helen, taken from a Catholic boarding school at sixteen, acknowledges the inescapable change forced upon them. “We were abductors of fellow children; we were torturers of failed escapees,” she thinks. “It was heavy, this revelation of what we were, making us question deep inside ourselves whether it wasn’t worthwhile to try to escape after all, even knowing better than anyone that failure meant death.”

One chapter alludes to Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, which depicts American servicemen in Vietnam, by drawing connections and underscoring differences between these two experiences of war. The LRA travels from northern Uganda into Sudan, through barren deserts, lush rainforests, and twisty mountain passes — all on foot. The captive women carry everything: food and water, AK‑47s, babies, guilt, “burdens, questions, no answers.” Existing as both hunters and prey, they are forced to attack civilian populations and flee the indiscriminate bullets of government helicopters.

The horrors they endure on the run are relentless, but once they re-enter society years later, they are stigmatized for having been “rebels.” Okot Bitek attends to this difficult aftermath with sensitivity, demonstrating how the LRA survivors must navigate a changed world in bodies altered by violence and privation. “It’s as if we fell asleep for ten years in the belly of an ogre and woke up in a world that kept going,” Miriam says, mourning the time they lost. Their inability to reassimilate blurs with their surreal, traumatic memories: “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.”

When Miriam attempts to get a passport, she’s stymied by an officer who questions her motives. If something happens to her, she’s told, it could reflect badly on the Ugandan government; it’d be better, he says, to stay where the authorities can “make sure that you’re okay.” Subject to state surveillance and limited in her freedom, Miriam thinks and speaks bitterly of the “big people” of the LRA, many of whom have been allowed to resume their high-ranking posts in society. Unlike them, she and other victims have been used and thrown away. As Maggie says, “We were the kindling used to start the fire.”

While each woman’s account is powerful, the stories tend to overlap and blend together. In another novel, this might be considered a weakness, but here it reads as a purposeful choice. Yet never do the women feel like a monolith. They register as unique people who, in undergoing similar trials under the LRA and long afterwards, come to represent a wider group of survivors. In this respect, We, the Kindling recalls polyphonic works like Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl, which assembles the disparate viewpoints of people affected by the 1986 nuclear disaster into one collective if kaleidoscopic whole.

Indeed, some of the chapters of We, the Kindling aren’t narrated by a specific woman at all but use the first-person plural. “Waiting,” for instance, repeats the phrase “We waited” to capture a range of experiences and desires. “Murmuration” presents a cascade of voices, listed one after the other, that state names, birth years, places of origin, and brief, painful testimonies from wartime. Here many singular identities cohere into a veritable sea of pain and longing.

Other chapters recount tales from Acholi and Lango folklore, which serve first as warnings and later as metaphors. Told to the girls in childhood, they take on new meaning as the women process their abductions. These fables, passed from one generation to another, also affirm the importance of storytelling, which, Okot Bitek writes in her acknowledgements, “is foundational for memory keeping, history, lessons, entertainment, and all education.”

From the novel’s composition, in which a variety of voices and narrative approaches culminate in a richly layered reading experience, to the simple but considered syntax, We, the Kindling succeeds in painting a vivid map, one where the landscape is indelibly marked by those who lived and died upon it.