A Ugandan Poet Remembers the Rwanda Genocide on Facebook in Canada: The Transnational Aesthetics of Juliane Okot Bitek’s 100 Days (2016)

Abstract

In 2014, Juliane Okot Bitek decided to commemorate twenty years of the Rwanda Genocide by writing a poem a day for 100 days on her Facebook page. This sequence of poems was later published in 2016 by the Alberta University Press as 100 Days which won the 2017 Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry and was nominated for three other prizes – the 2017 Pat Lowther Award, the 2017 Dorothy Livesay Award for Poetry, and the 2016 Foreword INDIES Award for Poetry. This paper explores four issues: the significance of Facebook and other social media as the space where the poems were first published; the major issues that Bitek raises in this collection; the manner in which she raises them; and finally, but not the least, the transnational aspects of the collection.