Poet and writer Otoniya J. Okot Bitek joins Bhakti Shringarpure to speak about her novel We, The Kindling. A beautifully assembled symphony of women’s voices breathes life into the cruel, two-decades history of the war waged by the Lord’s Resistance Army in northern Uganda. Okot Bitek says that in a way she has always been working on this novel even if her first poetry collection might have been about genocide in neighboring Rwanda, and that it took her almost 15 years to be able to take stock of the difficult material emerging from this period. The question of form was crucial since Okot Bitek did not want to generate a portrait of battered and victimized women nor offer pornographic accounts of violence. Okot Bitek also discusses the dilemmas around bearing witness, doing justice to memory and the imperative to always move against forgetting and erasure.

Otoniya J. Okot Bitek writes poetry and fiction. Her first collection, 100 Days, won the 2017 IndieFab Book of the Year Award for poetry and the 2017 Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry. Her second collection, A is for Acholi, won the 2023 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Her most recent collection of poetry, Song & Dread, is published by Talonbooks. Otoniya was born in Kenya to Ugandan parents and has lived in Canada for more than three decades. Her short story “Going Home” received a special mention in the 2004 Commonwealth Short Fiction Prize. We, the Kindling is her first novel.

Bhakti Shringarpure is the creative director of Radical Books Collective.

www.radicalbookscollective.com

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Writer Hamza Koudri joins host Bhakti Shringarpure from Algiers to talk about his debut novel Sand Roses. A historical novel about the semi-nomadic Ouled Nail group in Algeria, it focuses on the women who are trained as dancers—but are also forced into sex work by the community at an early age. The novel follows twin sisters, dancers Salima and Fahima, who eke out a living in the town of Bousaada at the height of French colonialism, and inadvertently find themselves at the center of the violence of the French army. Koudri belongs to a small but growing community of Algerian writers who have begun to embrace English language and culture. Even then, the concerns of his novel remain firmly Algerian as it is situated in a distinctly anti-colonial historical moment against the French while also excavating the forgotten history of the Ouled Nail community.

In this conversation, Koudri speaks about the thriving Algerian literary scene and how a random podcast led him down a research rabbit hole about the Ouled Nail community. He discussed the limits and delimits of the representing violence, especially against women. Lastly, he talked about the actual desert curiosity that the novel is named after: a sand rose.

This interview was originally published at The Polis Project. You can read and watch it here: https://www.thepolisproject.com/read/interview-hamza-koudri-sand-roses/

Hamza Koudri is an Algerian writer whose debut novel Sand Roses was shortlisted for the Island Prize in 2022. He holds an MA in English Literature and Civilization and has been working in education and international development since 2008. He is based in Algeiers and currently serves as the Country Director with the British Council in Algeria.

Bhakti Shringarpure is writer and editor who co-founded Warscapes magazine and is now creative director of the Radical Books Collective. She is the author of Cold War Assemblages: Decolonization to Digital and recently co-edited Insurgent Feminisms: Writing War.

Ainehi Edoro (Brittle Paper) and Bhakti Shringarpure (Radical Books Collective) discuss about the controversial New York Times' "100 Best Books of the Century list." A grandiose list claiming to represent the world and a diversity of voices, it happens to have 66 books by American and primarily white writers and only two African books, four Asian books and only 13 translated works. Ainehi and Bhakti explore what this means for the representation of the last 25 years of publishing in English. Originally streamed on Instagram Live

They ask:

Why are lists so captivating yet controversial?

How do lists shape our understanding of literary excellence?

Why do only two African books make the list, and what does this say about cultural bias?

How are culture and politics deeply entwined?

What harm does such cultural erasure produce?

What does it mean to leave out the entire Arab and Middle Eastern world of literature?

How can we highlight more diverse voices in literature?

Ainehi Edoro is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she teaches and researches on African literature, political theory, and literature in social media. Edoro is the founder and Editor of Brittle Paper (https://brittlepaper.com/), a leading online platform dedicated to African writing and literary culture.

Bhakti Shringarpure is a writer, editor and the creative director of Radical Books Collective.