By Damiete Braide
Assistant Professor of English, Mississippi State University, Saddiq Dzukogi, is an innovative and dynamic educator who is committed to public speaking and professional development.
Dzukogi is the author Your Qrib, My Qibla and his work was one of the three shortlisted poetry collections for last year’s edition of The Nigeria Prize for Literature.
The poet says his passion is to create a positive learning environment where students become life-long learners.
“Through the study of poetry and creative writing, I aim to help my students develop as writers so they will be capable of capturing the stories in our ever evolving society,” he says.
Chatting with him online, the award winning poet feels honoured that his book made it to the last three in the midst of his close friends. He explains: “I was not intimidated. The prize is intended to reward the best poetry books and not for the academic status of the poets.
“Of course, there are a lot of veterans in the running in the initial long list of eleven, but, ultimately, I was too excited to be intimidated. I am always content with whatever is mine and I focus only on that which at that point was on the long list.
“But I would like to use this opportunity to thank all the other poets. Some of them have been torch bearers for their own generation and are examples to me.”
Qrib, My Qibla, he hints, is a work about the child “we lost in 2017”, adding, “It is a book length sequence of poems that immortalizes the short life of my daughter. It is a rebellion against death, song for an imagined life, a celebration of what could have been. When my daughter died, I returned to poetry for solace. I returned to poetry to gain agency with language, to understand what seemed indecipherable, grief, life, and the fleeting nature of things, our own impermanence in a world we try to fashion into our own image.”
How did he feel winning the maiden edition of the ANA/Mazariyya Teen authorship prize for poetry in 2007?
“That was a lifetime ago,” he says. “I do not remember. But I know I bought a smartphone with the price money. That felt great.”
His work, Inside the Flower Room, in 2017, was on the final list of the Brunel International African Poetry Prize shortlist. What was his reaction?
“The Brunel was a prize for 10 poems. A few of the poems made up part of the chapbook that was selected to be a part of the APBF New Generation African Poets Chapbook series. But when I got the news, my reaction was utmost surprise and the feeling of gratefulness for being seen.”
He wrote his first ever poem in Hausa, so does he have plans of publishing a collection of poems in Hausa?
He responds: “My first poem was not written in Hausa. I think it took more than a decade of writing before I penned my first poem in Hausa. I nurse the ambition of writing in Hausa. Some of my present works adopt some Hausa expressions.
“But this is something I hope to accomplish, publishing not just my own collection but a translation of notable Hausa poets into English. I think there is a world of beauty to be explored in our indigenous languages.
“There is just so much literature there that we must begin to appreciate and celebrate. We must reveal for ourselves, and the world, what has been pushed into the backside of history.”