Bakandamiya
An Elegy
-
- £14.99
-
- £14.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the 2026 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Poetry Award
Covering more than five hundred years of cultural transformation, Bakandamiya: An Elegy is a book-length epic poem set in northern Nigeria. The poem moves from passages of mythic power to elegant lyricism with remarkable skill, subverting the legend of Bayajidda, a prince from Baghdad whose arrival reshaped the outlook of the Hausas, a Native ethnic group in West Africa. Told in part from a Bori spirit’s point of view and in part through personal lyrics, part prayer and part praise song, Bakandamiya decries the loss of culture and spirituality due to colonization from both the West and the East. Even as it subverts myths and popular beliefs and addresses some of the events that led to the Nigerian civil war, it tackles the lingering question of nationhood.
In this work of lyric and poetic ambition, Saddiq Dzukogi blends the personal with the mythical, expanding the griot tradition of Bakandamiya, a poetic form from northern Nigeria popularized by Mamman Shata. Here the form travels from orature to contemporary poetics for the first time, taking its place at the vanguard of contemporary poetry.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The masterful second collection from Dzukogi (Your Crib, My Qibla) draws on the mythic and poetic traditions of northern Nigeria for a lyrical reimagining of the legend of Bayajidda, a prince whose exile from Baghdad leads to his founding of the Hausa States in what is today Nigeria's predominantly Islamic north. In Dzukogi's version, a local spirit "born of death,/ forged by the power of grief" possesses the foreign prince to bring back fertility to the desert: "You are son of conquerors,/ but I have conquered your body/ for this simple purpose." This reframing of a foundational myth of Hausa tradition sets the stage for later poems that reflect on the Nigerian Civil War and legacies of nationhood: "Signs abound—a gory war is coming./ The spirits have fled the light of the new religion,/ and the badges of the old transpire like seismic murmurs/ in the fringes." In the more personal and confessional final section, the speaker feels their connection to the past as a mournful impossibility: "I must tell the secrets/ burning in my gullet/ to my ancestors with eyes clogged with the tongue/ of silence." Dzukogi makes potent and capacious use of myth to distill past and present.
