Your Crib, My Qibla

by Saddiq Dzukogi

Overview

Your Crib, My Qibla interrogates loss, the death of a child, and a father's pursuit of language able to articulate grief. In these poems, the language of memory functions as a space of mourning, connecting the dead with the world of the living. Culminating in an imagined dialogue between the father and his deceased daughter in the intricate space of the family, Your Crib, My Qibla explores grief, the fleeting nature of healing, and the constant obsession of memory as a language to reach the dead.

Saddiq Dzukogi holds a degree in mass communication from Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria (Nigeria), and is pursuing a PhD in English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. A 2017 finalist of the Brunel International African Poetry Prize, he is the author of Inside the Flower Room, selected by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani for the New Generation African Poets Chapbook series. Dzukogi's poems have appeared in the Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Gulf Coast, World Literature Today, New Orleans Review, Oxford Poetry,African American Review, Best American Experimental Writing, and elsewhere.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781496225771
Publisher:	Nebraska
Publication date:	03/01/2021
Series:	African Poetry Book
Pages:	108
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Saddiq Dzukogi holds a degree in mass communication from Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria (Nigeria), and is pursuing a PhD in English at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. A 2017 finalist of the Brunel International African Poetry Prize, he is the author of Inside the Flower Room, selected by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani for the New Generation African Poets Chapbook series. Dzukogi’s poems have appeared in the Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Gulf Coast, World Literature Today, New Orleans Review, Oxford Poetry, African American Review, Best American Experimental Writing, and elsewhere.
 
 

Read an Excerpt

Wineglass

When your mother found strands of your hair
hung up in the teeth of your comb
your father squirreled them into a wineglass
It bites him hard that your life happened

like an hourglass with only a handful of sand—
this split to the seam of his body, a split
of darkness that won’t kill him but squeezes
adrenaline into his veins, so he lives

through the pain of your absence. He’s not all right
to speak. His voice rims with bereavement,
and he wants to sing by your grave, child,
now that birds blow songs through

the window—counts sadness on the prayer beads
necklaced around his collar. If he had known the sky
would inhale you out of him so quickly,
he would have stayed with your toes forever

in his hands. Your face is still everywhere,
even in the places he is not looking.
He presses a deep kiss on your grave,
on your forehead.

Hands, cloudy from rubbing the grave,
as if on your tender skin.
The distance he feels is more
than the four hundred kilometers that often stands
between you. He will travel this far
to hold you against the moon.
They say you are like his reflection

pulled out of the mirror he stares into.
To pull you out he plunges his hand
inside himself and pulls.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments    

I. Your Crib
Wineglass    
Song to a Birdwoman    
Internment    
Burial Sheet    
So Much Memory    
Scarf    
The Fruit Tree    
A Nimble Darkness    
He Didn’t Get to Say Goodbye    
The House Held by Chaos    
Marshmallow    
Enigma    
Palms    
Shoes    
Measurable Weight    
The Gown    
This Web    
Shattered    
A Kind of Burden    
Learning about Constellations    
Elegy    
Quenching    
Back to Life    
Ba Shi, Ba Shi    
The Conceit of Shadows    
Strain    
Window    
Is Memory in Her Brother’s Body?     
Dates    
Ribbons    
Revival    
Cave    
Sufficient    
Chibi    
Shahada    
Seismic    
The Breadth of a Butterfly    
Flower’s Tenderness    
Memories by the Sea    
When He Says Your Name    
A Song in the Mouth of a Ghost    
Half-Light    
What Belongs to Him    
Aubade    

II. My Qibla—A Dialogue
She Begins to Speak    
Journey Home    
Still-Life    
Janazah    
Observations    
Measuring the Length of Grief by the Length of a River    
Ummi    
Unexpressed Grief    
My Son Asks if I Miss My Daughter    
At Your Grave I’m Reminded of the Day You Were Born    
Where Pain Lives    
December    
Inner Songs    
Waterlog    
One Year After    
Notes    

Editorial Reviews

"Dzukogi’s Your Crib, My Qibla will join a list of collections by some of the most notable new African voices in the continent and in the diaspora, whose books have been published by the University of Nebraska Press."—Ernest O. Ogunyemi, Open Country

Open Country - Ernest O. Ogunyemi

Saddiq Dzukogi’s Your Crib, My Qibla signals the arrival of a poet of assured craft, of courageous sentiment, and one who possesses a capacious facility with language and musicality. In this collection Dzukogi offers an elegy to innocence and to the false security of the living, and yet he demonstrates that the art of lamentation is as forceful an expression of hope as we have available to us. This is a remarkable introduction to a poet for our moment and time.”—Kwame Dawes author of Nebraska: Poems

Kwame Dawes

‘Where your headstone was, I put a mirror, / each time I come to visit / I see that you live in my face,’ writes Saddiq Dzukogi in this heartbreaking, powerful collection of poems. A love song, an elegy, a book-long sequence, Your Crib, My Qibla is a parent’s epistles to a deceased child, an exploration of pain that continues to sing through pain (‘your songs endure // inside his bones. / They will nourish the loneliness— / yours and his.’). The mourning here is endless and yet transformative (‘Today Baha is not dead; she is six years old, / forcing marshmallows into his mouth. / Says I’m grown enough to feed you, Abba, / with the future’). Impossible not to be moved by this voice of a father who sees a dead child’s face everywhere (‘He presses a deep kiss on your grave, / on your forehead’), by this need to pull the dead out of the ground. This is a stunning, memorable book.”—Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa

Ilya Kaminsky

In Saddiq Dzukogi’s Your Crib, My Qibla the loss of his daughter becomes the navigational pull to an interiority steeped in earthly grief and a desire for the unseen spaces of the afterlife. With incredible fidelity Dzukogi unravels a series of poems that wrestle with his loss and make meaning of our most unbearable moments. His is a song of embodied witness and recollection shaped by a voice skilled in the musicality of duality. These are poems that find their way to the reader’s depth and open a window to the otherworld.”—Matthew Shenoda, author of Tahrir Suite

Matthew Shenoda