“Dear Dad” is how Otoniya Juliane Okot Bitek opens a sequence of letter-vignettes to her late father, the revered northern Ugandan poet Okot p’Bitek, who wrote in Acholi and English. The intimate piece, entitled “The Meaning of a Song,” was included in River in an Ocean: Essays on Translation, an anthology of decolonial and feminist politics published by Tkaronto-based trace press. In it, Okot Bitek meditates on her Africanness as someone born to Ugandan exiles in Kenya after the Uganda-Tanzania War of 1978-79: “What is it to claim an African identity? What is it to be African or not? How is it that we’re not reading both Ocol and Lawino as African and imagining that there are far more representations of what it means to be African?” Such poignant examination is also to be found in her award-winning poetry collection 100 Days (University of Alberta Press, 2016), in which she muses on the terrains of history, wanting to know “what is it to come from a land / that swallows its own people”.
In this interview, I conversed with Okot Bitek on the expanse of Ugandan poetry of exile from Acholiland, African literature as world literature in itself (even and most specially) without translation, and the politico-literary legacy of her father, Okot p’Bitek.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): I want to start this conversation by quoting from your essay “The Meaning of a Song”, anthologized in River in an Ocean: Essays on Translation (2023):
We were people until we were Acholi, also Acoli, and then we were defined by foreign terminology by the Arabs and written in an even more foreign alphabet by the European colonialists and missionaries.
How is naming vital and significant in the collective sense, specially among the colonised?
Otoniya Juliane Okot Bitek (OJOB): To begin, I align the how of this question with the intention of the colonizers in their practices—particularly with how we’ve then adopted these names, and rejected or forgotten our own. My own orientation is that of an Acholi person born to exiled Acholi people who were already adults by independence in 1962, but they still received a Western education through missionary educators. So the context is a potent mix of religion, the cultural imposition of colonialism, and the beginning of undoing a continual colonial imperialism. By the time I was in high school, most of my classmates had Christian names, along with our own African names and sometimes a surname, which was usually the father’s name.
These days, it’s more commonplace to find young people using their African names first. My Acholi name is Otoniya—I’m named after my paternal grandmother’s sister. In Acholi, as in many places, folks are named after events, people, time of the year, etc. I’m not an anthropologist so I dare not position myself as one who knows entirely, but I will say that when it comes to naming, the teaching and impact of elder scholars like Ngugi wa Thiong’o remind us that hanging on to our African names is an important way of reclaiming our legacies and traditions.
AMMD: Over thirty years after your family came to Canada, you spoke among a panel of Black and Indigenous writers at Simon Fraser University, where you were introduced as someone who “has no experience being a natural born citizen of any country, whatever that means”. How do you feel about this label and how has the act of writing from exile and in the diaspora served you as a writer?
OJOB: Sometimes I think about how exile is a fluid and constant experience for certain people and an intellectual exercise for others. My father was exiled and could not return to Uganda, his country of birth, until well after Idi Amin was overthrown—although it was not Idi Amin who initially exiled him. It was Milton Obote, the president that Amin overthrew. Having been born to exiled parents and then living most of my life in the African diaspora, I can only speak to what I know, which is that I used to consider myself disadvantaged by not being Ugandan born, or having not lived in Uganda for any significant amount of time. I never had the experience of being ejected from a homeland, and I had to learn that we were not of the land where I was born.
But now I can see that there’s also a gift in the ability to look from a distance—whether geographical or cultural—at the spaces I live in. I’m not often imagined as being of Canada, which is fine. I don’t need to be imagined as being “of Canada”, but I don’t want to take away from the people who value being an imaginary part of this or that nation. I suppose there’s a tinge of bitterness there; perhaps it’s the perennial feeling of feeling foreign. I know how to be foreign and I don’t know what it is to not be foreign.
The diasporic view is a little further than a bird’s eye view, and I can see patterns and make connections that I might not have made if I lived somewhere that felt truly like home. I also know that my situation isn’t unique; it’s part of a long tradition of settling and resettling under all kinds of conditions—including the Acholi people, who are said to have migrated to the present day homeland about five hundred years ago.
I want to acknowledge that movement and migration is highly politicized and that individuals migrate, emigrate, are exiled, made refugees, and/or are expatriate. Conditions of economy or politics are just as powerful as forces of war, famine, or disease, and as Somali-British poet Warsan Shire writes: “no one leaves home, unless home is the mouth of a shark”. As much as this displacement and distance from where I might call home has affected my perspective, I truly appreciate that those who live in Uganda have an expert eye on the daily minutiae, which I will never have. I think that adds to the diversity of voices that might speak on the Acholi or the Ugandan experience and imagination, whether at home or elsewhere.
AMMD: 100 Days, one of your award-winning books, was written twenty years after the Rwandan genocide, and dedicated to one of its survivors, the Rwandan Francophone memoirist Yolande Mukagasana. In your essay “War and the Written Word”, anthologized in Writers, Writing on Conflicts and Wars in Africa, you contend that writing about war is “a life affirming act”. How does this closeness with conflict, which some scholars have named “poetic redress”, relate to your work?
OJOB: Yolande Mukagasana, a Rwandan writer and survivor, began writing poetry after the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, after she had lost all her close relatives and friends. This is what she told us when we met at a poetry festival in Colombia.
I have been thinking about the work of poetry, which is different from that of prose and other creative writing, and how poetry might offer a space to imagine a different world, to challenge power, insist on life, rail against oppressive forces, create possibilities for a time beyond the impossible present… and on and on. Of course, poetry has also been conjured to impose knowledge on the oppressed, the colonized, the other. I think about some of the childhood verses we learned at school (now cleaned up for today’s children), and how we were taught to see ourselves as either rescued by colonial forces or religious dogma. Think of Rudyard Kipling’s White Man’s Burden and what it must sound like coming from the mouth of small children, as it did from ours—“half devil and half child”. In the practice of poetry as I engage in it, I think about the page as a space for agency and a possible future, no matter what the news might claim. I also think about the voices that the media would never have time or space for.
AMMD: You endorse appropriating narrative techniques in writing about certain themes and topicalities. In The International Journal of Transitional Justice, for instance, you proposed a narrative poem that “disassembles and dislocates the logical and regularized ways in which we have tried to forge a path towards a future after war”. And that begs the question—are there more appropriate ways to write about war and genocide?
OJOB: I know that others have and continue to write about war and genocide in ways that cement the experiences of death and impossible futures—I don’t need to add to that. Narrative techniques are important for writing against the logics of war and genocide, which rely on numbers and what Katherine McKittrick defines as “the mathematical and numerical certainties that compile, affirm, and honor bits of black death”. Such techniques provide space for voice, agency, life—possibilities that numbers don’t.
A “more appropriate” way to write about war and genocide begins with the hope that we can work towards life without war and genocide. I also hope that we, who think about these things, can consider diverse voices in reporting, recalling, and reconfiguring who we are after events of war and mass violence, and to use whatever life affirming techniques at our disposal to do that work. I’m thinking about musicians and visual artists who employ affective methods to connect people, to encourage reflection on the work of witness and our responsibility to resist the forces that insist on war and death.
AMMD: In your father’s body of work—notably his essay collection Artist, the Ruler (1986), as well as the poetry volumes Song of Lawino (1966) and Song of Ocol (1970)—he was a staunch critic of Western writings that misconstrue African philosophies and traditions. He also championed Acholi oral performance and literature as instrumental in remaking and unmaking the postcolonial social order. Decades after his death, how far has the journey come in turning away from colonial centers, and in advocating for Ugandan poetry and Acholi language?
OJOB: That’s a tough question for me, as I haven’t lived in Uganda since 1988 or so. I can say, however, that the writing of Okot p’Bitek has been consistently studied—especially his Songs—beyond the Ugandan borders, and currently there is a resurgence of interest in translating his work, especially Song of Lawino, into Ugandan languages. Song of Lawino has long existed in several European languages as well as Swahili, but it’s great that it’ll be available in more African languages. More recently, a British academic re-published my father’s dissertation and a couple of his essay collections under one title. A couple of songs that my father composed continue to be heard and re-recorded.
With regard to writing in Uganda, there is a lively poetry tradition that is producing brilliant work. I’m thinking about Serubiri Moses’ The Moon is Reading us a Book, Ber Anena’s A Nation in Labour, Peter Kagayi’s The Headline that Morning, and I know that there are far more titles.
Our dad was a staunch critic of Western writings, as you say, but he was also in the company of other thinkers like Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Micere Mugo, Ama Ata Aidoo, Ngugi wa Thiong’o (and others), who we have also come to appreciate as thinkers and guides in looking towards the heft of our African traditions and navigating our contemporary lives.
AMMD: A museum caretaker in eastern Tanzania, upon learning that you are Okot p’Bitek’s daughter, asked you, “Do any of your brothers write?” In River in an Ocean, you posed a rhetorical question asking, “What is it to be the daughter of a poet that is looking to connect with a literary heritage and a genetic ancestor in Lawino? How will I know when Lawino speaks through my pen?” In your previous interviews, this seemed like the perpetual elephant in the room: how is it being the daughter of Okot p’Bitek—as a poet, a scholar, and more importantly, as a woman now in the diaspora?
OJOB: It’s important that I begin by acknowledging that I’m not my father’s only daughter and I’m also not the only daughter of Okot Bitek that writes poetry, so I speak from a singular perspective that doesn’t necessarily reflect the experience of my siblings. The perpetual elephant in the room, the shadow of my father’s reach, and often the metaphor of stepping into my father’s shoes—it has often felt like I could not possibly have anything to add or to contribute beyond my father’s extensive and brilliant oeuvre. But even though I am one of my father’s daughters, I also have my own voice and I claim it, as much as I claim the privilege of being his daughter and the only family member who writes and teaches as a main occupation—similar to him in his later life. Often, someone might be star-struck by my last name, but I no longer feel subsumed or offended when a stranger offers their admiration for his work. It’s always awesome to come across former students and people who read his work, who still engage with his ideas. It’s very cool. But I also know to do my own work—it is not an extension of his, but can be read as connected through a literary lineage. I suppose I am both my father’s literary and literal daughter, and that’s okay.
AMMD: You wrote the afterword to Peter Midgley’s poetry collection Let Us Not Think Of Them As Barbarians, where you spoke of Swahili poetry as
. . . already world lit because it already encompasses many worlds. It doesn’t need to be read in English to be world lit. [The Kenyan scholar Simon Gikandi] also spoke of untranslatability as one of the ways that African literature insists on itself. It doesn’t need to be translated to make sense. . . . There is still a world and being that exists, even with everything that was lost, and it still does not depend on the colonial center.
You then maintained in the same book that the “attempt to translate” is a formation of weakness, as “it reduces the tension of not knowing and frees the reader who should understand that the ability to read should not grant access to the whole story”.
OJOB: In the afterword, I was commenting on Peter’s generosity in offering readers in English access to what might be untranslatable. It’s hard enough to unpack poetry in English, and I wanted to appreciate the layers and layers of work that goes through making that poetry visible and, in the process, perhaps recentering the brilliance of the work in English. It’s not a real critique because of the care that Peter takes and also because he does not translate everything—it was a small point.
But to the larger idea of world literatures that do not rely on a European ethos, Swahili and other African languages have long histories of sharing art and culture without revolving around English. Scholar Simon Gikandi describes the commensurability of the pumpkin, a central theme of Song of Lawino, in different translations of African languages, and the evident tension of translating the thematic role of the pumpkin in European languages like French, English, Spanish and German.
Even though so-called “world literatures” are read and studied in departments of literature as othered and minor literatures, this is a political decision rather than a factual decision, because so much of the literatures of much of the world have histories of being in conversation. Please also see Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s thinking in Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing, especially his argument for de-centering world knowledges and a more lateral relation of literatures and oratures through translation.
AMMD: Métis poet Jónína Kirton’s page as bone—ink as blood and Ghanaian novelist Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing are books which you declare “tell the same stories” but are set apart into disparate canons—Indigenous literatures and African literatures respectively. Would you say that these categorisations have been a symptom of diversity and inclusivity labels like “intersectionality”, a term which you have problematised?
OJOB: I was thinking about the problem of siloing and categorizations as opposed to the inter- and multi-disciplinary spaces in academia where we can read and think about ideas from diverse writers, artists, thinkers, and have them in conversation. Obviously Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing and Jónína Kirton’s page as bone—ink as blood don’t tell the same stories—they are distinctly different works of art, located in different geographical and social ethos—but they’re both powerfully decolonizing texts. Kirton’s work, alongside Gyaasi’s work, offers an incredible space for a conversation beyond the boundaries of classifications, disciplines, and categories, which academia might keep apart. But in having these conversations, it’s important that we don’t erase identities.
My problem isn’t with the word intersectionality because the term does important work in illustrating how multiple oppressions can come together in a person’s identity. My problem is in how it can be used to mask power and privilege by those who have co-opted it in a completely different way from its origins.
AMMD: In their memoir Rebent Sinner, transgender artist and filmmaker Ivan Coyote evokes a defining moment which was catalysed by your poetry:
Last night I heard a poet say that love is not a blanket but a cloud. Her name is Juliane Okot Bitek, and I heard her say that last night, and I am fifty years old, and it did not bring me comfort, but it did flick a string inside of me. Like an echo, like a broken heart still pumping blood into my fingertips, like an E minor chord sung in the underground parking lot of a condominium they built where I used to gather and tell stories to other twenty-three-year-olds wearing third-hand boots way too big for them.
Can you respond to this reference to your poetry in particular and your view as a poet-scholar on audience and readership in general?
OJOB: I remember the night that Ivan Coyote read a longer excerpt from their book, including this section, at the Vancouver Writers Festival a few years ago. I had already read it, but I never expected to be in the audience, listening to a reference to my own work. To be honest, it was weird and good at the same time. The lines are from the poem “For you without skin”, in which I was thinking about women who had survived being abducted by the Lord’s Resistance Army. The poem was published as part of the afterword for Colleen Wagner’s “The Living”, a play about survivors of the Rwandan genocide. This is a poem that morphs into different spaces, but what I enjoyed about listening to Ivan was that the passage exemplified exactly what I hope for when folks read my work: how can they make it their own? How can it be in conversation? It was a very cool moment.
Otoniya Juliane Okot Bitek is the author of 100 Days (University of Alberta Press, 2016) winner of the IndieFab Book of the Year for poetry and Glenna Lushei Prize for African Poetry, and nominated for the BC Book Prize, the Pat Lowther Award, the Alberta Book Awards, and the Canadian Authors Award for poetry. Her other books include Song & Dread (Talonbooks, 2023); A is for Acholi (Buckrider Books, 2022), winner of the Dorothy Livesay Prize for Poetry; gauntlet (Nomados Literary Press, 2019), longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize; and Sublime: Lost Words (The Elephants, 2018). She holds BFA in Creative Writing, MA in English, and PhD from the University of British Columbia. An Ellen and Warren Tallman writer-in-residence and SFU Jack and Doris Shadbolt fellow, she is an assistant professor of gender, Black Studies, and English at Queen’s University. She has contributed to, among others, New Daughters of Africa (Amistad, 2019), The Great Black North: Contemporary African Canadian Poetry (Frontenac House, 2013), African Sexualities: A Reader (Pambazuka Press, 2011), Revolving City: 51 Poems and the Stories Behind Them (Anvil Press, 2015), as well as in Zócalo Poets, A Review of International English Literature, The Capilano Review, and The International Journal of Transitional Justice.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (they/them), Asymptote’s editor-at-large for the Philippines, is the author of In the Name of the Body: Lyric Essays (Canada: Wrong Publishing, 2023) and Towards a Theory on City Boys: Prose Poems (UK: Newcomer Press, 2021). Their latest poetry, essays, and translation have appeared in World Literature Today, BBC Radio 4, Oxford Anthology of Translation, Sant Jordi USA Festival of Books, and the University of Alabama Press anthology Infinite Constellations. Their lyric essay has been nominated to the Pushcart Prize and their prose poem was selected for The Best Asian Poetry. Formerly with Creative Nonfiction magazine, they have been widely published, from South Africa to the Netherlands, from Australia to Canada. Find more at https://linktr.ee/samdapanas.
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