The summer of 2022. Lying down on the finely moored grass of Mississippi State University campus, in the perfect symmetry of the Drill Field walkway, between the statue of a confederate Army Lieutenant and the flagpole where the American flag unfurls and stretches as the warm wind streams on. Such contradiction, sometimes, is what life confronts us with.
I often lay at the midpoint when the sun is cooling down. I watch the clear sky. I watch as people come and go. I sometimes pretend I was in a steamboat, undulating on the Mississippi river. And other times, I pretend I was home, in Minna, at the feet of Ba’aba, beloved grandmother, always pregnant with fables and wisdom. My mind is munificent— with an ability to make the bliss I want to experience. Such is the scale of my imagination.
An eye formed because of a painful longing for company—in my childhood hours as an only child, only for a brief seven-years moment. In that age of aloneness, I learned joy by playing with my toys, in the enterprise of conversations I made for my brave self and the toy-villains in battlefields conjured up at the center of our sitting room. This childlike approach to absence fills me up with a pleasure that, to this moment, feels beyond the taking of hands: a transcendence.
This transcendence nurtured through play, as a child, has helped me understand the history of Nigeria, and the many gaps that exist. I once wrote in a poem, that anything imagined thoroughly becomes alive. It is like continuously breathing life into an inanimate object until its animal awakes.
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There is a reluctance to confront difficult history in Nigeria. Writing Bakandamiya, I felt I had a responsibility to hold the land up and amplify not just its voices but also their many accents. Accents that have been ignored. For us, history is not an absence but a ghost seeking to attach itself to a body within Nigerian consciousness. It’s like chiseling prayers onto a stone that everyone is willing to carry but immediately becomes cursed by, because they are unwilling to hear its truth, or even acknowledge its voice.
You see, we run from history. Even more so, we run from truth. Often the world mistakes history for truth, but us, we constantly want to mistake it for falsehood, especially if in it there is an atom of our own complicity being reflected back to us, to our collective peril.
What I privilege is questioning the notion of things. Questioning myself, the world. Faith. Light, and even darkness. These are all places I am always eager to enter. The pursuit of understanding knows no bounds. And so, the poem Bakandamiya began as a seed to sow into the soil of my mind.
Kwame Dawes asked, when will an African poet give us an epic again. I said, I will do it. This was few months after my book Your Crib My Qibla had just come out. It was a frightful sport. But fast forward to a night of surgery, faced by my own feeble mortality and the absence of pain medicine: verses that existed for a year began to unfurl into completed sections. I was afraid of death but the process of composition carried a pleasure that I still do not understand. I was writing a book that centered the mythology of my people. Their wisdom. Their triumph.
I have lived under the sun whose light has been deployed to dull the vibrancy and color of their contributions to our collective story as human beings, by the simple fact of their existence. The music they created. Spices, indigenous religion—art. The lyrics of their lives for centuries.
My poem-length book leans on an existing poetry tradition of the Hausas. “Bakandamiya” roughly translates to “the praise singers master poem”, which is to say it is both heavily rooted in praise-singing tradition and autobiographical in nature. The poet here idolates themselves and their lyrical prowess. This tradition is baked in orature often accompanied by a troupe playing the talking drums.
In today’s world, you still find a privileging of literature that is written and of writing in general, a practice which I suspect aroused as a necessity of preservation but has now morphed into destructive perception that contributes to a Eurocentric view of literature. My perspective is that poetry exists regardless of what contains it. Whether spoken or written, a poem is a poem. And the safeguard that we construct to protect it from the erasure of time does not make a poem a poem. It just protects it from the waning of memory.
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Bakandamiya, the poem, also reintroduces the indigenous religion of northern Nigeria, where the book is set. Here, the religious practices that predate Islam have now been relegated to the fringes. Before Islam, the religious system in most of the core north was Bori practice, where animists worship spirits that they often call upon to possess the body of priests and priestesses. It is a lamentation of that loss of indigeneity—narrated by a shapeshifting spirit that takes us on a journey that subverts the myth of the protagonist Bayajidda, who is said to have arrived in northern Nigeria from Baghdad and is seen today as—somewhat—the father of the Hausa states. This makes for a fascinating history not least because of Bayajidda’s foreign origins and his name that literally means “one who does not hear the language.”
It is my belief that the story follows a pattern of the language of discovery that many indigenous people are subjected to. A river does not exist until someone else from perhaps a bigger or outside civilization has seen and drank it. And then, all of a sudden, it comes into the consciousness of everyone, including the indigenous people who have for thousands of years built their lives around it, fishing and offering libation to it. The thing that has existed begins a new life and everything before is erased. The songs, the history, everything. I wanted to push back on that notion, pushing back against the acquired religions that disrupted indigenous spirituality.
Writing my version of the Bakandamiya, then, was a form of salvation, an elegiac prayer for an unending past. It was writing against erasure and an attempt to recognize the aliveness of history. The past is still with us, even as we mourn its decay. The poems are the archeological evidence of our existence.
