Bakandamiya XVI
by Saddiq Dzukogi
In a dream’s rose garden, the air fanning with incense, there is a lavish throne piqued by curiosity. Another Wise Man is dancing. Asking all to be silent, the ground roars with the sound of prayers. It is the death of strangers. A reoccurrence, crafted by the hands of answered prayers. He said inside a mirror is the unfamiliar stare of one’s self. And outside, the refrain of a familiar song, made carnal by the divine hands of God, and whatever lurks in its lush laceration, summoning the specter of this world, all made possible by that simple technique of genius.
I am speaking in the voice
of hyenas and, between the stillness of the wild
and its noisiness,
I am quite ardent at their howls,
gathering shameful desires and waxing them
into my body.
I have a body allied to wind—
you need just speak
and I will hear you, even if you stand
in the red robes of fire that linger below a cliff
at the edge of the world. In my heart
I have saved up more names for birds than lovers.
And my day song enters the song of night
and sleeps.
I have maintained allegiance to hibernating,
where death has undone so many,
and selects its victims by feeding them
grapes.
This poem is an excerpt from Bakandamiya: An Elegy, my book-length poem forthcoming in December from the University of Nebraska Press. The work explores the fallible, collective memory of Northern Nigeria, contending with the erosion of its indigenous culture due to exposure to both Islam and the West. The poem, in its entirety, argues that discussions of colonialism often overlook religion as a significant disruptive force upon native spirituality and cultural practices. This became, first, evident to me when considering the practice of naming: In Nigeria, particularly in the North, newborns are frequently given Arabic names, sometimes difficult to pronounce even for locals. This shift represents a subtle yet profound dislocation. Stepping away from one's indigenous identity initiates a drift into a void, leading to a loss of self-recognition, alienation from one's people, and ultimately, the forgetting of the land and stories cultivated through generations of lived experience.
I am interested in all forms of observation, orphic, cultural, and oral. The argument always seems to be that because cultures like mine preserved their traditions in folklore, they are lesser in a way. I read, somewhere, of my people that they did not have myths, which is a tacit form of dehumanization. The implication is that a people who have no mythology have no stories and, hence, must not have lived. Because to live is to create experiences, and to have experiences is to be human.
In this excerpt I worked with what I call an extended poetic epigraph to transform the poem itself from a potentially fragmented piece to one where the epigraph provides an essential spiritual context that I hope elevates the poem into a powerful exploration that flirts with the fundamental alienation of the self, the seductive proximity of death, and the enigmatic nature of existence. There is also the subtle echo of T.S. Eliot.
When I was considering writing the poem I contemplated my poetic influences, which range from Eliot, Derek Walcott, Khalil Gibran, and the Quran to the praise singers from Northern Nigeria, Mamman Shata and Barmani Choge—and many others who serve as instructional guides for my own voice that meditates this telling of history through the perspective of an animist shape-shifting spirit of the Bori religion. These influences serve as conduit to engage in a meditative contemplation of the nature of death, in the machination of the divine.
Saddiq Dzukogi is a Nigerian poet based in the United States, where he is an assistant professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is the author of Your Crib, My Qibla, selected by Carolyn Forché as the winner of the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry. His new book is the epic poem, Bakandamiya: An Elegy (University of Nebraska Press, 2025). Dzukogi’s writing has been supported by the Nebraska Arts Council, Mississippi Arts Commission, and PEN America. His poems have appeared in POETRY, Ploughshares, The Georgia Review, Guernica, The Kenyon Review, and Narrative Magazine. He is a fellow of the Obsidian Foundation, as well as Cave Canem.