after agreeing that so much has gone wrong,the cyborg & i bend our bodies in sujood.yesterday, we prayed against becoming victimsto the violence of geography. we wokelonging to heal without yieldingto the darkness of exit wounds. i wish i knewwhat my heart is most scared of. maybe it isthe men who walk through the eye of the sunwith rifles tucked under their arms.who i can’t promise i know by their names.only that in islam, i am taught to accept themas my brother. i am listening to the cyborgcomplain about the country’s economy.i drag my left pinkie through tiny pyramids of duston a table. a woman on tv is saying she losther children during a retaliatory attack by unknowngunmen. everything the reporters are telling the cyborg,i’ve snitched about to Allah before, in a prayer.the cyborg thinks there are too many holesin my mouth. asks why the media is never exact aboutbody counts. why there are empty villages surroundedby bloodish-red water. where the girls are taken to afterabduction. do they return whole when they’re released.how many families i’ve lost to the crisis. how deep hasthe trauma clawed into my body. if i think the silicon platein his chest can repel bullets, in case they start shooting.if i would like to go somewhere i can sleep & not bewoken by the sounds of rounds, rushing out of firearms.in response, i ask if he can just shut the fuck up.
The BBC Explains the Country’s Challenges to the Cyborg in Sixty Seconds
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“The BBC Explains the Country’s Challenges to the Cyborg in 60 Seconds” is reproduced from Leaked Footages by Abu Bakr Sadiq by permission of the University of Nebraska Press.
Copyright 2024 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska.
Abu Bakr Sadiq is the author of Leaked Footages (University of Nebraska Press, 2024), which won the 2023 Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets. He is the winner of the 2022 IGNYTE award for Best Speculative Poetry, The Paulann Petersen Award for Poetry 2024, Margaret Gibson Poet Laureate Poetry Award 2023, and a finalist for the Evaristo Prize for African Poetry, 2023. His work is nominated for the SFPA Rhysling Award, Pushcart Prize, Best New Poets, and is published in Boston Review, Poetry Ireland Review, The Fiddlehead, MIZNA, and elsewhere.
The poems in Leaked Footages carry urgent subjects, ranging from death to disappearance to grief to memory. Not only do the poems fulfill the tradition of witnessing often manifested in contemporary poets such as Garous Abdolmalekian and Ilya Kaminsky, but they extend that tradition by the medium through which they witness: the technical and the technological. Here, the camera, the closed-circuit TV, cinematographic techniques, and the cyborg are trusted for truth telling. Reality is represented in footage seen through the eyes of multifaceted speakers.
“In Abu Bakr Sadiq’s Leaked Footages we encounter a speaker addressing us from a richly imagined future while haunted by the past. The result is an interrogation of the many ways the world can end, the many scales of that apocalypse. These poems haunt me and teach me. Here is a poet I will follow into every future.”
—Safia Elhillo, author of Girls That Never Die
“In Abu Bakr Sadiq’s Leaked Footages we enter into a world concerned with untangling the ontological realities of our present-day. Populated with cyborgs and a speaker navigating the violence of their world, there is a deep yearning and precision in the language of these poems aimed at comprehending how we have come to engage one another. The poems here ask what it means to be a person, a Nigerian, a Muslim, in the face of a world so deeply adjudicated by conflict and the myriad lenses of technology. Mediated by the nuances of received narratives, intersecting histories, and family lineages, this book is at once deeply rooted and otherworldly, an oscillation between a kind of distant witnessing, and a meticulously intimate living. Each poem in this collection feels like an arrival!”
—Matthew Shenoda, author of The Way of the Earth: Poems
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