In Hill-Top Secondary School, I remember being on a mound and saying we are burningdown our house, rehearsing a play about Bayajidda instead of Zik,or Shata, or even Hajiya Lolo. A mythical figure should speak our language, a friend said.Culture is the casualty. This is the name we remember. We are bleeding ourselves dead,I always wanted to say to my Hausa Teacher. No matter how slow the hours stall,in my body, I will catch up with the future. But my fear is that I will arrive with lessstories. Less history. I want to return to the earth, the gods, that have left us,the rivers that have left us. I want to hasten back to the pastnot to prolong my own mortality, but the land’s. There is a history of hymns.And when my grandmother sings them, we are a people whose myth didn’t begin fromthe arrival of a horseman. She is from Sumaila, not a great distance from Dalla Hill.
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Reproduced from Bakandamiya: An Elegy by Saddiq Dzukogi.
By permission of the University of Nebraska Press.
Copyright 2025 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska.
Saddiq Dzukogi’s most recent book is Bakandamiya: An Elegy (University of Nebraska Press, 2025), winner of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Poetry. His previous collection, Your Crib, My Qibla (University of Nebraska Press, 2021), won the 2021 Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry. He is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His poems have previously appeared in Poetry Magazine, Poetry London, Cincinnati Review, Georgia Review, Guernica and Kenyon Review. Dzukogi is a Cave Canem fellow and has received other fellowships and support from Pen America, Mississippi Arts Commission and Nebraska Arts Council.
Lincoln, Nebraska
University of Nebraska
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.
“Saddiq Dzukogi’s first book was one of my favorite debuts in quite some time, so I was wondering what might come next. Bakandamiya does not disappoint—this work is incredible in how it blends epic breath and lyric impulse, a timeless meditation . . . that knows ‘night is the truce between the battles of spirits.’ A conversation with sources as various as the Qur’an and Dante, Eliot and Gibran, here is a choral gathering of the tribes that’s unafraid to reach for the truth. . . . This is a voice worth listening to.”
—Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic
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