Towards Transcendence: An Interview with Abu Bakr Sadiq about Leaked Footages
Sneha Subramanian Kanta: I’m so glad we have the opportunity to converse at length, Abu. Congratulations on the publication of “Leaked Footages” from The University of Nebraska Press, a publisher I admire. In the foreword, Kwame Dawes writes of the book having a “powerful prophetic quality” and “whose tasks it is to bring a divine truth to bear on the reality of our daily lives…”. What was your process of putting this collection together?
Abu Bakr Sadiq: Thank you, Sneha. It is a pleasure to finally be in conversation with you. A huge part of the process of writing Leaked Footages was a form of a response mechanism to events I had witnessed, the memories of which felt ingrained in my sense of being. Each of the poems in the collection came from a place of necessity, I either had to write the poems or continue the intolerable work of living with unresolved concerns. On a surface level, I see them as products of realities which I had lived with for many years. For various reasons, I had felt, for a long time, that I was unequipped with the emotional capacity and tolerance to write poems around these subject matters, perhaps due to their proximity to what I knew to be my life. Beneath that awareness of emotional incapacity, one can see a larger underlying factor: fear. The fear of witnessing and embracing your own people in some of the most vulnerable states humans could possibly exist in. The fear of accepting these ongoing occurrences as what will be known as your history. The fear of confronting the page knowing well you have to bring to it nothing but the truth. The fear of writing about things you know have dwelled in you long enough to blur the meaning of time.
Being the first time I was putting together a collection of this length, I didn’t really have a rigid or planned structure to work with. A huge part of the process was simply me surrendering to my intuition, following my impulses, and tending to my sensibilities both as a poet and a human being. This gave the writing a fluidity I hadn’t conceived was possible. Writing Leaked Footages, for the most part, was my attempt to document these stacks of events shelved inside my memory; to record, on the page, past and ongoing realities that weren’t getting as much coverage in major media outlets as they ought to; to pull off the mask of obscurity from the faces of the devastating existence of people with whom I shared some sort of kinship. I completed the first draft of the collection over the course of a year, although some of the poems in the book were written a few years before I decided to put a collection together. After spending some time away from it, I revised for a few months before finally deciding to send it out to be considered for the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets when the call was made.
I’m deeply grateful to Kwame Dawes for the foreword and his apt elucidation of the poems. I never had the intention of writing a book or poems with a prophetic quality but for it to be perceived as such is absolutely humbling. It is a pity that the current state of many parts of the world⸺ Nigeria, Sudan, Congo, Syria, Mali, Botswana, Palestine, to mention a few, unfortunately leaves my book deserving of that description.
Sneha: I trace a juxtaposition of hope with the crushing state of this world weigh on your poem. In “Road Map”, the lines “i wish i could fill the bones of this city / with enough tenderness to break its chain of suffering.” are profound. How did you decide on the choice of un-capitalizing “i”? Please share the tradition of rhythmic momentum through lineation, the shape of which has been enamoring all throughout the book.
Abu: I like to think that the main reason behind my usage of the lowercase “i” in my writing is often impulsive. But then, while writing the poems in Leaked Footages, I was often overcome by an acute awareness about the ownership of the stories being documented. Obviously, most of these poems are not autobiographical. The speakers in the poems come from various backgrounds and lifetimes. The lowercase “i” felt more capable of containing this multiplicity of the speakers and selves. With “i”, I felt, in the poems, a universal sense of being. “I” in poems felt to me so sure of who it was; of whose body or being was tied to that particular speaker. But there was an absence of particularity in many of the poems that I felt indebted to honor. The encompassing nature of “i” then became a shroud, allowing the speaker in each of the poems to be just anyone.
I’ve always had great admiration for lineation. I get excited by the tiny possibilities of what new meanings could be created where a line breaks. Through this, for me, the whole act of writing poems becomes a process of making new worlds, new meanings, at every single point. I’m fascinated by the potential of poems to build entirely new and whole worlds through line breaks. Musicality, along with its many components, is one of the elements of writing, poetry in particular, that I hold dearly. This endearment forces me to listen for rhythm and shifts in sound whenever I write or read poetry. “The History of the Form”, an essay along with other essays in The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms was one of my earliest invitations to pay keen attention to both lineation, sound, and rhythm in poetry. I find myself leaning towards sound and rhythm on a line level and the harmony created by the individual sonic and rhythmic elements contributed by each line to make the poem. With this awareness, I read my drafts aloud when writing to catch the inevitable constant shifts happening through the length of a poem, making adjustments where it feels necessary.
Sneha: Your poems echo the tradition of transcendence. There is a divinity present within these lines, the fragments, even in its silences, an amalgamation of your Islamic background. Would you share how this tenderness in practice aligns with your work as a creator centering the multicultural Nigerian identity and African literary traditions?
Abu: Most of the components of the speakers in my poems, thinking of it now, are inspired by the life I strive to live as an imperfect Muslim. I find it nearly impossible to separate my life as a Muslim from my writing. It isn’t something I would love to do. I love when writing poems introduces me to speakers who are Muslims; speakers who practice Islam in flawed ways that remind me of myself; speakers who are constantly trying to return to the path of Allah; speakers who aren’t afraid to live in spite of the constant display of dissidence amongst tribal and religious groups in Nigeria and the world at large.
Our entire lives in this world is only a small part of the journey we call our existence. We all had existed in the world of souls before coming here, and someday, we will all die and move to a different world. This brings to mind that we are creatures whose existence is intricately woven into movement, through worlds and time. This world, the dunya, in the grand scheme of things, is merely a pit stop and it is important to try my best to engage with it as such both in my life and in my writing. Besides my religious background, I also come from a rich Gbagyi cultural background where there are a myriad of beliefs around the transcendentality of human life. According to one of such beliefs, the dead do not completely cease to exist amongst the living. They are believed to go on existing in the realm of the dead, which is somewhere just beyond our physical world but unseeable to those who are still alive. To believe in anything at all requires a great amount of tenderness and delicacy, especially in a growing faith-loathing world like ours today. With this knowledge, the tenderness is naturally fed to my approach to and practice of writing through which I attempt to explore some of these cultures and traditions that I have been exposed to.
Sneha: The image of the cyborg is a synecdoche, a larger reckoning through your book. In “Uncensored Footage of the Cyborg in an I D P S Camp”, there are gaps between sentences, an unequivocal tension. You expand this invention through “Crane Shot” where the lineation turns terse, a caesura. In what ways does engaging with language in a world rife with war lead to such pliable outcomes?
Abu: As someone who has witnessed, firsthand, what displacement has done by way of separating families who had lived together their entire lives, I wanted to dig into some of the ways in which whitespace could serve as a symbol for the layers of void created in such families and communities. Through this, every usage of the caesura becomes, for me, an attempt at exploring the parallels between whitespaces and the void carved into the lives and worlds of people who have been made victims of the horrendous actions of others, whose desire to destroy the lives of people outweighs their desire for a harmonious world.
I strongly believe that language has the capacity to convey our deepest emotions and realities, but how do we inform the world of an indescribable emptiness? How does language speak of and for those who no longer have the luxury to do so themselves? How do you explain what it means to arrive at a point in your life where your silence is in itself a statement? I was hoping to achieve, with the blank spaces, a sort of homage paid to the many lives that have been lost through ethnic cleansing, religious crisis, racial erasure, etcetera. Thinking about the spaces left behind by these people, most of whom meant the world to their families and loved ones, means thinking about what the living are expected to do with all that space. What do you even fill that kind of space with? Each caesura between words is a reminder of the many ways in which language fails us, sometimes, when we believe it is all that we have. Fully aware of the limitations of language, we have to come to terms with the fact that in certain situations, the best language can do is simply be language.
Sneha: One of the poems I return to in the book is “Dronecode”, especially the line “never fly above a country trying to learn the art of war.” The concluding lines “when asked if your drone can heal the world, / press your ear to a tree and wait for God to answer” are a bolt of thunder in a world which trains us to not be present.
Abu: This one of the earliest poems I wrote for the collection and at the time of putting the collection together, had a strong feeling it would not fit in. Written after Samyak Shertok’s “In a Time of Revolution”, the poem served as a guiding light for many poems, helping me track the trajectory of the collection. Thinking about the state of the world and where I was mentally when I wrote this poem, I see now that both the writing and form were acts of defiance. On one level, the poem is a subtle reminder to learn how to not say yes to everything this current world asks of us. To learn to resist. Writing the poem in itself was an act of resistance; a refusal to conform to the inhumane demands of the world I was waking to. I hoped to not only explore the many ways we could challenge our realities but to also change how we react to them— to be able to stand in the face of the world, acknowledge all its expectations of us and decide to do just that which makes our planet a better place to live in.
Sneha: In “Cyborg’s Diary”, you utilize redacted text through a blackout technique. In my work as an academician, I’m often telling students how they can be cognizant and aware of how much they want to share within a poem. How do you intersperse this balance of personal rhetoric and the politics of belonging?
Abu: This is one of those poems that made me stop and think about censorship, information privacy, and just how much I was willing (and perhaps even allowed) to share in a poem. What boundary was I overstepping in the name of documentation knowing well that the end result of this process was likely going to be presented for public consumption? Was this documentation being done with the acquiescence of the owners of its components?
This poem was on one level a reminder to myself that while I had full control about what I wanted to share about myself in writing, I had to consider the elements of the writing which I did not own. I also wanted to treat the poem as a gesture to media censorship (and how it threatens freedom of expression) especially when it involves details that challenge people in power. I was interested in the conflict between tending to the demands of a poem and a writer’s willingness (and unwillingness) to reveal what appears to be best left in the shadows. What rights the materials I was working with had over me, I had to honor and not go beyond limits. It necessitated the need for me to treat these materials with respect, at the very least. I guess the balance between personal rhetoric and the politics of belonging, for me, is achieved through some of the ways I interweave personal and collective realities, allowing my personal experiences to serve as a lens and a springboard for the exploration of broader social, cultural, and political themes. Cyborg’s Diary, like many poems in the collection, gets its anchorage from personal narratives and expands towards larger societal issues.
Sneha: Your attention to images is splendid. In “After Escaping Fire”, the lines “Do you remember anything more important than this? / hills of smoke branching out of houses. / warcrafts, sieving the chaffs of serenity / left in our bodies. a bullet, or more, looking for a home /” concentrates upon the dichotomy of things and being postcolonial. Has there been a methodology that you utilize while naming these cruelties and at the same time, remain poised at what language does to express it?
Abu: I love that you quoted this poem. It is the oldest poem in the collection. The first version of it was written about four years before Leaked Footages existed. Its inclusion in the collection always reminds me that virtually every poem I have ever written was part of and in preparation for the arrival of Leaked Footages.
No, there hasn’t been any particular methodology, at least, to the best of my knowledge. Sometimes, the language used to express these cruelties require no adornment, especially when one has witnessed enough to render the beauty of language almost useless. The cruelties are simply being written just the way they are. The work of language in weaving these experiences becomes organic. Natural. No extra paraphernalia or costume is necessary. There’s only so much that can be done with language. Oftentimes, I can’t help but feel like I am barely a recorder of these events. My tribe, the Gbagyi tribe, are a people who have been historically known to depend more on oral tradition of passing history and storytelling than on formal writing. I feel like with these poems I wanted to do the work of recording these events, else they might be forgotten forever, which will be a disservice to our generation and those to come later. In a sense, one could argue that I am also making attempts to challenge historical narratives. To engrave ancestral voices, along with all they stood for, on the page, while being fully aware of what could be lost through that endeavor either due to the failures of memory in accurately recollecting the events or mistranslation across languages.
Sneha: You are writing from Nigeria. Our contributors and readers are from around the globe. What advice would you give to poets who are in the beginning stages of their practice? Are there specific insights you’d like to share to those writing from the margins?
Abu: I know anyone reading this is likely tired of hearing this as a writing advice but it has to be said because it remains the most important advice for poets at any stage of their writing: READ. READ. READ.
Read widely with an open mind. I cannot think of so many practices that enriches me as a poet as much as reading does. A few years ago, someone shared a reading practice— creating personal anthologies, which greatly enhanced my understanding of and love for poetry. The contributors of these personal anthologies were poets whose works I had a great admiration for, inspired by, aspired to write like, or whose works spoke deeply to me. The congregation of their voices in a single file elevated my own voice in unimaginable ways. Also, it is important to be part of a community. Through the many communities I have found in writing, I feel held and seen in ways that the solitary nature of writing would never have suggested was possible.
Regardless of where you are writing from, it is important to believe that your voice significantly matters and contributes greatly to the literary landscape; that whatever you are writing about is equally important as any other thing being written about out there in the world. Being patient with one’s work as a writer is also very essential, just as is being kind to oneself and one’s work.
Sneha: Thank you for this illuminating conversation, Abu. I look forward to continuing speaking about your work through time.
Abu: I’m grateful for your generous readership of my work and these brilliant questions.
Abu Bakr Sadiq is the author of Leaked Footages (University of Nebraska Press, 2024) and winner of the 2023 Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poetry. His award-winning work appears in Boston Review, FIYAH, Uncanny Magazine, Poetry Ireland Review, and more.