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...