Interview by Uche Umezurike
Saddiq Dzukogi’s upcoming collection of poetry, Your Crib, My Qibla (to be released by University of Nebraska Press on March 1, 2021), proceeds the death of his daughter, Baha, who died on December 12, 2017––twenty-one days after her first birthday. Dzukogi explains, “She had suffered from malaria and typhoid according to the doctor, but ultimately died because of shortness of blood and the doctors didn’t realize it; they weren’t paying attention.
“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.”
Uche Umezurike: Your Crib, My Qibla is beautiful poetry but suffused with such pain—a parent’s pain—it leaves the reader deeply pensive. To read your collection is to visit, as you put it, “where pain lives.”
In “Scarf,” the speaker writes, “He wishes grief were a cloth he could take off.” Why is poetry the most appropriate means for you to contemplate grief?
Saddiq Dzukogi: 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.
There is the tendency to venture into dark places when loss befalls us. Poetry allowed me to be in that dark room and still find my way out of it.
UU: The poems in “Your Crib” express intense grief, unlike the poems in “My Qibla” that appear to deal with the acceptance of grief and the comfort of kinship. What did you hope to achieve by conceptualizing the book in that form?
SD: 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.
UU: In the section “Your Crib,” the speaker reflects on the father-daughter relationship in the third-person perspective, but in “My Qibla,” the speaker employs the first-person voice. I am interested to hear why you structured the book that way.
SD: 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.
UU: Why was it important for you to represent poems such as “Ummi,” “She Begins to Speak,” and “December” in the narrative voice of your late daughter?
SD: 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.
UU: Though Your Crib, My Qibla is very personal, you manage to indict the poor health system in “The Breadth of a Butterfly” and “December.” Having lost my father to the systemic failure of healthcare in Nigeria in 2006, I can relate to the speaker in the former poem: “Hours before the doctor/came, nurses with their swollen eyes / […] But their job is to fail at doing their jobs.” What might poetry do for social action?
SD: Oh, this is a story I never want to dwell on. It was a messy situation.
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.
To return to your question about what poetry might do for social action is first to be as sincere to the realities as possible, especially in a society caught up in denial and disillusionment. Poetry doesn’t only offer us a voice to articulate our struggles, it often serves as a motivation towards social action.
UU: The imagery of the butterfly is strong in your poetry. What significance does the butterfly hold for you? Could you also say a few words about this striking imagery: “The palm is a ritual site of holding”?
SD: 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.
UU: It is convenient to read Your Crib, My Qibla as a meditation on the “rack of grief,” but I am inclined to reading it as a haunting lyric to “the weight of love”—a father’s love for his daughter. Can you speak briefly about how poetry has helped you to reimagine masculinity?
SD: That is one way to read it. I think poetry has allowed me more access to my most innermost self; consequently, I move through the world with considerable awareness of the self. We live in a world that expects men to be unemotional and strong. We operate within a skewed idea of what being strong is. For example, on her birthday, while I was teaching English to first-year English students, Google Picture prompted me with her picture as a reminder, I couldn’t hold back tears and ran out to the toilet. When I told a friend, he responded, you must be strong, you are a man. But I don’t believe emotions make men weak; being real and vulnerable is strength.
Saddiq Dzukogi is a PhD student in the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA. His chapbook Inside the Flower Room was selected by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani for the APBF New Generation African Poets Chapbook Series. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Kenyon Review, Oxford Review of Books, Poetry Society of America, Prairie Schooner, and Gulf Coast. In 2017, Dzukogi was a finalist for the Brunel International African Poetry Prize. He is the author of Your Crib, My Qibla (University of Nebraska Press, 2021).
Uche Peter Umezurike is a PhD Candidate and Vanier Scholar in the English and Film Studies department of the University of Alberta, Canada. An alumnus of the International Writing Program (USA), his critical writing has appeared or forthcoming in Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, African Literature Today, Postcolonial Text, Journal of African Cultural Studies, Cultural Studies, Journal of African Literature Association, and Tydskrif vir Letterkunde. His research focuses on postcolonial and Black diaspora literatures, gender and sexuality studies, cultural and critical studies. Umezurike is a co-editor of Wreaths for Wayfarers, an anthology of poems.