Saddiq Dzukogi

Saddiq Dzukogi (born in Minna) is a Nigerian poet and assistant professor at University of Nebraska-Lincoln and has previously taught at Mississippi State University's Department of English. He is the author of Your Crib, My Qibla, a highly-acclaimed poetry collection which has earned him the 2022 Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry, and the 2021 Julie Suk Award as a co-winner. The collection was also shortlisted for the $100,000 Nigeria Prize for Literature. Quotes “The poems here are written not just in celebration of her life but as a ritual that will keep her eternally bound to the consciousness of the physical world. I wrote these poems in response to the urge to stay in touch, to rage, to celebrate that which I can no longer hold.” Thank you so much for your generous words about the collection. I find it immensely difficult to talk about the book, but I guess I am at that stage where it becomes necessary since the book’s release date is around the corner. Poetry has always been a tool for me to make sense of my body and the various emotions that it experiences and endures. I fall back to poetry each time there is something about the world or the self I do not understand. Not that it always arms me with understanding, but at least it starts the journey. When I started writing the poems, it was a way to get rage out of my veins. I wrote because crying wasn’t enough, my body wanted to bleed, I wanted to see my blood and the words on pages were the closest to replicating that. I remember I was told I shouldn’t cry then. Binyavanga Wainaina, the late Kenyan writer, was the first to call, and I lamented that the folks at my workplace are pleading for me to be strong. He said, where is the quiet place you can go to? I replied, the toilet. He said go, go there and cry. The whole thing was written in the first seven months after her death. It’s been three years and perhaps more than two years since I wrote the last poem. I can’t say anything about the structuring of the book, because it just followed the sequence of the days and the memories as they came, and as I tried to survive the toil of grief. I didn’t follow any deliberate conceptualization in the form that you speak of; I just wanted to talk and cry and talk to my daughter. The poems were the only way I could have that conversation. That part was the last edit of the book and one that I have come to like. When I was done working on the book with Kwame Dawes, he said to me the individual poems are strong but also weighs on the reader, because the lyrical “I” draws the reader close to the grief of the writer. This is after all still a work of art, even though I didn’t mean for it to be. He said to flip it to the third person and see what it reads like. It was the hardest exercise that I had to do, because at first, I saw it as me relinquishing my agency over my grief and wedging a barrier of distance between myself and my emotion. But in the end, it was a fruitful exercise because it turned the book into a dialogue and the initial voice sounded sometimes like the poet’s subconscious voice, pitched against the conscious one and that of the departed child. Other than this, the move ensured that the poems exist with a level of distance between me and the work. When she died, my mom was the first to say she saw her in a dream. Then my wife, her mother. Then my grandmother. I never did, until several months after when she appeared to me in a dream within a dream. I haven’t still seen her in a direct dream. Those poems marked that period and forced me to imagine what she might want to say to me, to us. She died because she was out of blood and the medical personnel didn’t realize it because they didn’t care for her. When my wife called to tell me that our daughter was sick, she said they had been to the hospital and offered medication. I returned from Kaduna that weekend and we slept on the same bed, three of us that Friday. I was awake most of the night, as I heard her wheezing. The next morning, we took her to one of the government hospitals in Minna, it was on a Saturday, and apparently doctors do not come to work on Saturdays. I talked one of the nurses into giving me the doctor’s phone number, which she obliged reluctantly. I called and pleaded for him to come to the hospital to check the condition of my beloved daughter. At first, he refused, but later agreed to come. He asked that we take her to the lab, in my arms I cradled her back and forth between the lab and the hospital’s nurses’ station. It took the doctor several hours to come. Anyway, we were given a room and we were to spend the night there. The drip was badly inserted on her forehead. I remember going to the nurses to explain to them, and they yelled at me that I was disturbing them, that it was 1 A.M. and this is the only time for them to sleep. These were nurses on night shifts, who were there to take care of the sick and did not have the barest sympathy for a one-year old child. My wife thought they would reason better with her, since she was a woman, but she only got even more rudeness from them. Maybe one day I will be in a better emotional state to tell this story fully, but I will sum it up by saying in a society where things work, those medical staff would lose their jobs at the very least. The butterfly. I love to think it symbolizes my daughter. It also reminds me of the time she, Baha, trapped one on the floor by making her palms into an improvised cell of sorts. She loved to trap insects that way before letting them free while chuckling. My wife showed me her palms when Baha died and said, what can I hold in these hands now that my daughter is gone? That line was speaking to that moment.