A01=Saddiq Dzukogi
academia
African myth
African Poetry
African Poetry Book
African spirituality
Africana studies
Author_Saddiq Dzukogi
Bakandamiya
Bayajidda
Black studies
Category=DC
Category=DCC
Category=DCF
contemporary African epic
diasporic poetics
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_poetry
ethnic studies
griot tradition
Hausa culture
Mamman Shata
Nigeria
Nigerian civil war
Nigerian history
Nigerian poetry
poetry
postcolonial African history
the African epic
Product details
- ISBN 9781496244277
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 01 Dec 2025
- Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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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.
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 is a Nigerian poet and assistant professor of English at Mississippi State University. He is the author of Your Crib, My Qibla (Nebraska, 2021), winner of the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry and the Julie Suk Award and shortlisted for the Nigeria Prize for Literature. His poems have appeared in the Poetry Magazine, Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Narrative Magazine, Ploughshares, Guernica Magazine, Poetry London, Best American Experimental Writing Anthology, and Cincinnati Review. He has received fellowships from the Nebraska Arts Council, Mississippi Arts Commission, and Cave Canem.
