In the interview, Adedayo Agarau goes in conversation with Abu Bakr Sadiq, author of the Leaked Footages and winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets.
Some of the things that I often consider as a writer are the concept of fate and how it is related to our interpolated physical world. In the forward, Kwame Dawes writes, “At some point, there has to be a reckoning with how our lives are inundated with the clipped images of terrible violence and suffering from all around the world that arrive through the ubiquitous persistence of social media.” I often wonder how the small pockets of violence (all added together make a chaotic world, of course) affect our tiny lives. In Tishani Doshi’s A God at the Door, she writes, “You know things are dire when temples get down on their stony knees to pray…” and that brings me to my question about how Leaked Footage interpolates the world. How did the conception of the book and the delivery of the book arrive together, for you, for us, in this world where we can neither postpone the ubiquity of grief nor the heaviness of the news?
Leaked Footages was born out of an attempt to document the realities, experiences, and histories of the people I grew up around, our shared experiences as human beings navigating life in various circumstances, to offer readers and the world an inside view of the lives of people who have and continue to experience the consequences of political, economic, and societal upheavals, with a focus on amplifying stories and narratives that may not necessarily be represented in global media. The concept was to create a movie-like experience with a poetry collection, to linearize the fragmented narratives of these people whose victimization fuels the speakers in the poems. I set out to contextualize these narratives in a manner I hoped would highlight how much they equally deserved inclusion in global discussions about similar issues.
Blending traditional, contemporary, and innovative forms and techniques, I hoped to create a cohesive body of work that showcased the rich and complex nature of the subject matters being addressed by the speakers. The actual writing of the collection happened at a rather quickened pace. This, I suppose, was because the themes I was engaging with were not alien to me. So, when I started writing the poems, everything just kept pouring out. It was like a flood of poems, an exorcism of some sort. Only in this case was I the exorcist, the possessed creature being exorcised, and the person recording details of the exorcism, all at the same time.
Before I began writing the earliest poems that would later become Leaked Footages, I had been plagued by incessant violence-ridden news. There was always someone with whom I had a sort of kinship in the middle of that news, and they always came as casualties. While away in school, in between the chain of new developments, I was fed by people from home. There was always the news of someone who had either gone missing or been taken for ransom by bandits. At a point, it felt like the people back home no longer experienced natural deaths anymore. With these comfortably skittering in my mind, I wondered how grave the suffering must be in their hearts and how they were navigating it. Most of the collection was my attempt at contending with these events and even larger ones that were akin to them, from all around the world. Since poetry was a medium with which I made sense of my experiences, the journey of writing Leaked Footages began.
In “Wormhole,” you write: “time dissolves & we are a billion light-years deep into the future.” This evokes ideas of time dilation in physics and seems to connect personal memory with cosmic scale. How do you see the relationship between personal history and larger historical or even universal narratives in your work? Even further, how do you expect the reader to harbor the concept of time in Leaked Footages?
I’ve always felt there was a sense of identicality in our experiences as humans. That our individualism sometimes functioned as mirror images to the same people who we think our experiences are different from. The idea of Sympatheia, in stoicism, confirmed this for me. When I think about the intersection between personal and collective or universal human history, it is with sympatheia in mind. There is a great degree of likeness between most of our current realities today and what we have passed through in the past. The idea of sympatheia, when looked at through the eyes of history, could make us see time as a cyclical phenomenon. This gives time a fluid characteristic, and this fluidity is one of the things I set out to explore in my usage of it in the collection.
The portrayal of time in Leaked Footages was partly informed by my interests as a person who is drawn to scientific principles related to time-space relationships and often imagines time as a malleable creature. According to Einstein’s theory of relativity, the rate at which time passes decreases with the increase of the person’s speed and direction of movement. This means that if a person could move at the speed of light, they’d be able to experience the stillness of time. This posits time as a possible means of escape from the current realities that abound in the time we exist in, albeit temporarily. While the idea of moving at the speed of light remains a theoretical concept for humans, in writing poems like “Wormhole”, I’m offered an opportunity to explore possible outcomes of freezing time, to hold time at a standstill, with the liberty to take anything into whatever timeline I want.
In writing the collection, I was invested in exploring the porosity of timelines. By traversing through life, we are navigating these porous paths, discovering new parts of ourselves, and leaving behind those that no longer serve us. I imagined time as a being of its own, with its own features— desires, frustrations, loss, etcetera. I set out to interrogate the mannerism with which time grows, beckoning us to grow with it. I wanted to explore its overlapping nature and how that shapes the similitude we see in our lives as human beings. Through that exploration came the realization that the events unfolding in our lives today become markers of time. The markers offer us an opportunity for revisitation, and when that revisitation is conducted using poetry, it results in what often feels like a simulation. We remember time by the things that happened in specific periods. As a Nigerian, I will always remember October 10, 2020 the shooting of protesters at Lekki Toll Gate during the #EndSARS protests. I remember the 2010s as the years in which insurgent and violent activities of Boko Haram wrung out peace from northern Nigeria.
One of the things I hoped to achieve with time in this collection and my poetry in general is to explore the possibilities of poetry serving as a bridge between the past, present, and future. While acknowledging our current realities, I tried to imagine what the future could be with the hope of better understanding the life we’ve been given.
The recurring figure of the “cyborg” appears throughout the collection, as in “Uncensored Footage of the Cyborg in an idps Camp.” This seems to blend concepts of posthumanism with very human experiences of displacement. Do you, as a poet, believe in the ascension of robots and their predicted intelligence (if they can hold as much emotion or compassion as the physical body)? What drew you to use this cyborg figure, and how do you see it relating to themes of identity and belonging in your poetry?
The Cyborg’s presence in the collection is mostly metaphorical, a symbol of human identity. He represents something both within and outside of myself: an eyewitness and a vehicle for exploring themes of alienation, violence, and the numbing repetition of trauma highlighted in the collection. It was also, by extension, a vessel to explore my own otherness. As someone who fancies technological tools, the cyborg was the closest human-like figure that I felt could efficiently home my explorative imaginations and curiosities. Using the Cyborg gave me an opportunity to see the life I knew through the perspective of someone other than myself or the people I knew.
Across the various poems in which the cyborg appears, it symbolizes a diverse range of people. Sometimes, a close relation and other times, just a stranger trying to make sense of the environment it found itself in. My use of the Cyborg as a witness to violence and displacement represents a contemporary take on Nigeria’s historical narratives, illustrating the continued struggle with colonial legacies, religious tensions, and political instability.
Realistically, while I do not believe in the ascension of robots or the idea of them replacing human beings, at the pace technology is advancing, it is hard for anyone to not acknowledge things that hint at the possibilities of that happening. More than ever, there’s a need for us to collectively understand and redefine what it means to be human. Perhaps, with that, there might be no need to bestow the power of holding human-like emotions upon robots after all.
In “displacement theory,” you mention “dar es salaam” and “Yaounde,” bringing a pan-African perspective into a futuristic Africa. How do you see your work in relation to Nigerian and broader African literary traditions? How do you place and displace cyborgs and humans in the same space? I am stunned by the possible idea of cohabitation, but what is futurism in a politically impoverished Africa? Does that even exist?
My poetry, I think, is deeply connected to Nigerian and African literary traditions even as it pushes these traditions in new, innovative directions. Elements in African literature like oral storytelling, postcolonial identity, and the fusion of traditional and modern poetic forms can be seen in my poetry. When I write, I do my best to see these elements are incorporated into my work.
The orature tradition, where storytelling is a communal and often performative experience, is one of the West African traditions I often draw from. I grew up in a family where these traditions were very much alive and rooted in our culture. I hoped to use the poems in Leaked Footages to reflect this in the same way they reflect Nigerian folktales, in which the themes of family, faith, and survival in turbulent times are prominent. African mythology has always been fascinating to me, and I wanted to use the recurring figure of the cyborg to partly function as a mythical figure who observes and reflects societal struggles, much like characters in oral epics in ancient African literature. With this, I hoped to bridge traditional and futuristic elements, modernizing oral storytelling motifs while grounding them in present-day realities.
Obviously, most of the poems speak to my Nigerian and Islamic background, where there’s a blending of traditions and languages often including references to my Islamic faith and customs. This blending reflects the multiculturalism of Nigeria, a country with vast ethnic and religious diversity.
Most of the poems address the impact of colonialism, war, and displacement, much like the works of Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and Christopher Okigbo, who highlighted the consequences of colonialism and Western influence in their writing. However, I think my work speaks to a new generation’s experience—one navigating not only postcolonial legacies but also the age of social media, digital surveillance, and global migration. My inclusion of technology, represented by figures like the “cyborg,” introduces a postmodern layer to the African literary tradition, exploring how technology affects identity and memory for displaced people.
Spirituality, faith, and existential questions are some common themes in African poetry, as in the works of Okigbo or Niyi Osundare. My poetry mirrors this introspectiveness in African poetry, yet I place it within the turmoil of contemporary Nigerian life, weaving Islamic references into my poems to contemplate faith amidst suffering. This approach allows me to question divine silence and the role of faith in understanding trauma, a theme that resonates within African literary traditions and, in my case, is expressed with a modern urgency.
With style, I think my poems reflect an evolution within African poetry, drawing inspiration from contemporary poets like Safia Elhillo, Saddiq Dzukogi, Warsan Shire, Inua Ellams, and Romeo Oriogun, who explore diaspora, trauma, and identity in experimental forms. The fragmented structure of my poems, blending of languages, and shifts between personal and political realms align me with this new wave of African poets who push boundaries while remaining rooted in their heritage.
The placement of the Cyborg is partly for it to serve as a vehicle for the exploration of subject matters in the poems. In the midst of humans, whether in an IDP camp in Borno, the frontline of a protest in Lagos, or inside a refugee camp in Yaounde, the goal is to see that it does the work of helping me explore the possibilities of what could be; what the experience could be like should Africa attain a level of technological advancement that facilitates this.
Prayer is heavy in this book, Sadiq. Is that the poet praying, hoping throughout the poem, against the idea of violence, or a safer world, or it is the fearful human who happens to exist in the same geography where many are kidnapped, maimed, families are displaced, students are burned in classrooms and their bunk beds? In poems like “After a Conversation about Janazah with Bhabi in a Dream,” “”After Bhabi Dreams of a City Filled with Light,” “Maqtoob” and many others carry this [almost hopeless iconography] of prayer on varying frequencies, so I wonder, why prayer?
“o i should consider the end, where every will shall pass. consider empty playgrounds, aching for the feet of children. consider what should be a blessing: i have lost so much but not a memory of everything i’ve lost.” —Maqtoob
Yes, it’s both the person and poet praying. I grew up in a family where I learned early that there was a prayer for everything, every situation you find yourself in. For that reason, I find myself trying to always return to God through prayer, even in my writing. I use prayer as a means to confront, process, and express the complex emotions tied to trauma, displacement, and identity. For me, the frequent appearance of prayer throughout the collection serves as a layered, multifaceted motif that reflects both my personal and our collective experiences.
In the midst of conflict and displacement, prayer becomes a source of comfort and a form of refuge. The poems in my collection are filled with invocations that seek protection or guidance, offering the speakers—and perhaps myself—a sense of solace in a world where violence and suffering are omnipresent. By turning to prayer, I create a space for spiritual solace amid the chaos described in the poems.
Prayer serves as a connection to my cultural and Islamic heritage, grounding the poetry in my Nigerian and Muslim identities. My references to specific prayers and religious practices, such as dua (supplications), janazah (funeral prayer), and salaat (prayer), underscore my attachment to faith and community. These invocations reflect the strength found in spiritual practices that connect individuals to their roots, family, and shared history.
With Leaked Footages, I didn’t want prayer to be merely passive; I wanted it to also be a form of resistance. For people facing oppression, poverty, or loss, holding onto faith can be an act of defiance. By invoking God amid scenes of hardship, my speakers assert their dignity, humanity, and resilience. The act of prayer becomes a refusal to succumb to despair, and instead, it embodies the strength to endure and to remember those lost.
And yes, prayer because Allah says in the Qur’an “And seek help through patience and prayer, and indeed, it is difficult except for the humbly submissive [to Allah].” Prayer because “Man is not weary of supplication for good [things], but if evil touches him, he is hopeless and despairing.” Prayer because I was born into a Muslim family where there was a supplication for everything and that became a shutter eye through which I navigated the world. Prayer because faith keeps me grounded and sane. Prayer because every dua is a conversation with Allah. Prayer because it is where I can speak with the assurance of being heard. Prayer because it opens doors in places where my eyes see an empty field. Prayer because it is all I can offer those who’ve taken the path to the hereafter. Prayer because it is where my heart, like the heart of any man, finds peace. Prayer is important because how do I make sense of life without it?
Ultimately, my use of prayer in Leaked Footages reflects a complex, multi-dimensional relationship with faith. It serves as a space for lamentation, resistance, and affirmation, capturing both personal struggles and collective resilience in the face of adversity. Through prayer, I hoped to invite readers into a deeply spiritual yet questioning dialogue with the divine, turning each invocation into a poetic encounter with my world’s sacred and painful truths.
Your poem “After Bhabi Dreams of a City Filled with Light” intersperses religious imagery with the realities of conflict: “in the city, prayers are being offered to stifle / the obliteration of peace from the heart of our / new country as it crawls, blind-eyed, toward an oasis.” This recalls the work of Ilya Kaminsky in “Deaf Republic,” where prayer and resistance are discreetly fastened. How do you see the role of spiritual or religious imagery in your poetry to address political realities
I think it comes from my Islamic upbringing. I was raised in a community where a larger part of the inhabitants were Muslims. So, my realities, experiences, and how I express myself will always have an Islamic influence. These influences serve as a bedrock for the imagery in my poetry, which is why it is hard to separate it from Islamic references or imagery.
Being a Muslim, I use spiritual and religious imagery as a lens through which to address and critique political realities. By interweaving religious symbolism with themes of violence, displacement, and loss, I attempt to create an intricate, emotionally charged narrative that highlights the human costs of political turmoil and systemic injustice. The spiritual imagery allows me to intersperse personal faith and collective experience with larger social issues.
I use religious imagery to question hollow displays of faith in political contexts, such as the way religious rhetoric can be co-opted by political regimes to justify or mask violence, as is seen in “my god swears / by the fig…” where a “bearded man with rifle in hand” asks the speaker what his prophet (Muhammad, sallallahu alayhi wasallam) says a Muslim is to another Muslim. Through references to prayer and other Islamic practices juxtaposed with war-torn landscapes, I reveal the contradictions in a world where sacred values are often sacrificed to political agendas.
Religious imagery in these poems, I think, elevates the experiences of the speakers, casting political oppression and violence in stark moral terms. By using Islamic practices such as dua (supplications) and references to divine silence, I’m attempting to frame political realities as not just human tragedies but moral crises. This framework allows me to critique war, displacement, and systemic violence as affronts to the sacred, making these issues resonate on a deeply moral level.
In some of the poems, I use the concept of divine silence or distant witnessing as a way to confront unanswered prayers and unresolved suffering. This, I think, highlights the stark disconnect between the suffering of ordinary people and the indifference of political systems that perpetuate violence. The presence of an often-silent divine figure forces readers to confront the feeling of abandonment that many experience amid political crises, positioning the divine as both a witness and an unwilling participant. My use of religious symbolism turns each poem into a meditation on the sacredness of human life and the tragedy of its violation, giving political critique a dimension that is both reverent and honest.
Reading “Crane Shot” reminded me of Elhillo’s earlier works in which she is both panoramic and mindful of the space on the page where her characters, the reader and the camera invade. I wonder what you think of space and how it functions throughout this book. “Flight theory” is also spatial, as if cramming so many words [insert people] into the page, or into the memory of the reader. What is it with space and leaked footage [which I agree also postulates the idea of a camera recording documenting] which seems to find its obsession in this book?
In this collection, I wanted to approach the portrayal of space in an intricate and multifaceted manner, shaping not only the physical settings of the poems but also the psychological and emotional landscapes of the speakers. With that in mind, I explored spaces in ways that amplify themes of displacement, trauma, and memory while also creating a fragmented, almost cinematic narrative that reflects the disrupted lives of my speakers.
Some of the scientific theories that I found deeply interesting were about space-time relationships. Writing Leaked Footages, I wanted some parts of it to explore this space-time relationship in relation to how humans coexist. While I had no trouble thematically interrogating the time aspect of that relationship, I only felt comfortable exploring the space half of the relationship through structural experimentation. Often, I imagined words as individuals, the space between them as a symbol for how much space there was between us as humans; how much space we were occupying and holding for each other, and what effect this had on our existence over time.
The whitespaces in poems are an attempt to pictorially represent the speakers who are haunted by memory, where the past continues to seep into the present. I made references to abandoned homes, lost cities, and symbolic locations like Borno, Maiduguri, and Lagos, which carry the weight of personal and collective trauma to augment the effect I hoped to create with whitespaces. These spaces act as sites where memory and loss intersect, creating a lingering presence that shapes my speakers’ identities.
On one level, most of the poems are set in transient or unstable spaces, such as refugee camps, war-torn cities, and border zones. These spaces reflect the precarious existence of the speakers, caught between worlds and identities. In poems like “Uncensored Footage of the Cyborg in an IDP Camp,” the physical displacement is mirrored by a sense of psychological fragmentation. To portray this, I use these liminal spaces to underscore the constant state of flux and instability that comes with displacement, where a sense of home and belonging is eroded.
In many of the poems, physical space is paralleled by negative space in the form and structure of the poems. I use white space, line breaks, and enjambment to create pauses and silences that mimic the gaps in memory or the emotional void left by loss and trauma. This negative space allows the reader to feel the emptiness and isolation that accompany displacement. Silence becomes as important as words, turning white spaces into active components of meaning, where what is unspoken or absent becomes a form of presence. This, I hoped, will offer readers a multidimensional view of how spaces shape, and are shaped by, those who inhabit them; how space serves as both a passive observer and an active participant, bearing witness to stories of loss, survival, and resistance. Through these spatial techniques, I hoped to reconstruct a world that is as fragmented and layered as the experiences of the speakers.
On a more surface level, what did it take to write Leaked Footage? How did you arrive at such a title that is ingeniously inquisitive?
The drafting process began with a writing challenge with my friend, Martins Deep. At that time, I had a rough outline of the collection and only needed to write the poems. I had written a poem, “Uncensored Footage of the Cyborg Leading a Protest in Lagos”, some months prior to that, and I knew I wanted it to be part of the collection, so I just built the manuscript around it. The poem served as a reference point, and I developed a thread for the manuscript. As it would appear, the Cyborg happened to be at the center of it all. It was around this phase that I decided on some of the ideas and themes I wanted to explore using the Cyborg.
After the writing challenge, I had an ample number of poems about the cyborg, and in most of those poems, “Uncensored Footage” was a recurring phrase in their titles. For me, titling is an integral component of my writing process. The title serves as a door for me to reach for the soul of a poem. They function as a gateway for my mind to assess the mind of a poem. For a very short period of time, I had titled the manuscript “Uncensored Footages”, but upon reflection, it didn’t sit right with me. I felt the manuscript had a moral responsibility that I wasn’t honoring. I felt I was breaching the privacy of the people whom these poems were about. People I knew intimately. I felt like I didn’t have the permission of these people to put their lives in my poems. Out of respect for their privacy, I decided to change it or ask for their permission. Seeking permission was practically impossible because that would mean having to ask for permission from graveyards, ashes, empty houses, people who were displaced from their homes forever, people whose names no one knows because their deaths were announced in figures, etcetera. Since I couldn’t ask for permission and the poems demanded to go out in the world, I decided I was going to leak them, and there was the title.
What was the process like? I mean the writing, compiling, arranging and deciding that the collection was ready to go.
I was in Zaria when I started working on the manuscript. After the writing challenge, where the poems that shaped the collection’s trajectory were written, I had to move to Minna a few months later. In Minna, I wrote extensively, maybe because I was finally at home with my family. I don’t know. I think it was tricky because, in Minna, I didn’t have as much time to write as I did in Zaria. My weekdays were occupied with work outside of writing. The most I could do was jot down flashes of ideas, concepts or lines as they came to me in between my engagements. When weekends came, I would draft poems to the ideas I had noted down during the week.
After a few months of writing and arriving at what seemed like a complete first draft, I stepped away from the manuscript. While I was away, I sent the poems in the manuscript to Mayowa Oyewale and Martins Deep in batches to get feedback. I had initially planned to stay away from the collection for a longer period, but the call for Sillerman came, and I wanted to test-run the manuscript. I was aware that I hadn’t revised the collection to my satisfaction and this bothered me. My concerns grew even larger when my brother was hospitalized, and I had to completely push the manuscript away. It was a difficult time for my family. I was convinced that it was more likely that I wouldn’t be able to enter for the prize, but about a month before the deadline, my brother was discharged, and soon after that, I was able to do some light revisions on the manuscript. I didn’t have much trouble with ordering because I had tried to build a narrative arc with the titles at an earlier stage of putting the manuscript together. The ordering, I think, panned out well because it didn’t change at all by the time the manuscript was cleared for publication, except for the couple of poems I had to drop.
However, I never got to feel like the manuscript was ready to go out. I wanted to spend more time with it but my friends would not have any of it. They reminded me that it was never going to be completely ready and that I can always continue with my revision even after submitting, especially because I had convinced myself it wouldn’t go far in the selection process given its current state.
What was your experience like working with Kwame Dawes, who I assume edited the collection (and the series)?
I’ve admired the incredible work he has done with the previous winning collections of the Sillerman First Book prize, New Generation African Poets Chapbook Set, and what he does for African poetry and poets, all of which have been some of the reasons why I have always wanted to work with him. Besides being a dream come true, working with him was also an eye-opening experience. He was very meticulous in the way he handled the manuscript. I found myself learning anew about the poems I had written. He deeply understood the things I was attempting to do with various techniques in the collection and was very generous in pointing me in directions that took the manuscript to where it was asking to be taken; where I felt satisfied and confident about letting the manuscript go out into the world. The whole experience of working with him is something I’d love to do over and over again.