We, the Kindling: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

Okot Bitek, Otoniya J.

Literary

Alchemy by Knopf Canada

Review\n"Part poem, part prayer, part mourning song; part warrior chant, part love song for a people, part revelation and so much more than the sum of its parts, A Is for Acholi risks all, as poetry must, to bring us to a place of reckoning with loss of homeland and its enormous implications. Loss that is here. And there. And everywhere. Okot Bitek offers us a brilliant work of testamentary poetics, which visually embeds and simultaneously explodes the silencing and erasure of colonialism, even as it simultaneously exploits an array of linguistic devices and practices to limn continuity of story and memory, telling tales as long as the night and short as time. By all means necessary, A Is for Acholi creates a space that is rampant, generative and necessary – it speaks to and for us all." -- M. NourbeSe Philip, author of Zong! and She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks\nA Is for Acholi is an Alphabet for diaspora and an Antidote for the colonized mind. 
Transcending cultural, geographical and temporal space, poet-scholar Otoniya J. Okot Bitek exploits the footnote, from reference to afterthought, in all its machinations, with Ancestor attitude and Academic-precision. Rupturing everything in her path Okot Bitek moves across this collection without looking both ways, without saying sorry. 
A is for Artist. Each page is a canvas, each word a world, each poem a galaxy. -- Chantal Gibson, author of How She Read and with/holding\nA is for Acholi’s strategic erasures, alphabetic sequences that race ahead and double back, and flattened textual hierarchies, like those between the primary text and the footnote, turn the page into a vast field. The poems pattern and traverse this space. Convention and hierarchy are subject to reversal, to play, and the relationship between poem and reader becomes fluid. 
Acholi expands the conversation about form, race, diaspora and language that crackles among poets in Canada. That conversation, much like the writing in this volume, hurdles borders. 
Acholi’s cycles of return and repetition carry memory, yet they always turn toward our moment, and speak to the future. -- Kaie Kellough, author of Dominoes at the Crossroads and Magnetic Equator\nA is for Acholi is a sweeping collection exploring diaspora, the marginalization of the Acholi people, the dusty streets of Nairobi and the cold grey of Vancouver. Playfully upending English and scholarly notation Otoniya J. Okot Bitek rearranges the alphabet, hides poems in footnotes and slips stories into superscripts. The poet opens ways of rethinking history as she rewrites both the 1862 contact of the Acholi people with the British and the racist texts of Joseph Conrad, while also searching for a way to live on lands that are fraught with the legacies of colonization, similar to her ancestral homeland. With writing that is lyric, layered and deeply felt, the poems in A is for Acholi unfold maps of history, culture and identity, tracing a route to a present where the poet dreams of writing a world without empire.

A Is for Acholi

Poetry

Buckrider Books

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