Complex Metaphors and Naming features poet and Mississippi State University professor Saddiq Dzukogi in conversation with poet and fabric designer Star Zahra, whose sophomore collection, Girls and the Silhouette of Form, won the 2025 Association of Nigerian Authors/KMVL Prize for Poetry. Dzukogi was also a finalist for the ANA Prize for Poetry in 2012, 2014, and 2016. The interview was recorded in March 2025.
Seen through the symbolic lens of alchemy, Babale’s self-fashioning as “Poet of Light” works out a transmutation of value: what history has rendered base or obscured—blackness, the self denied—is worked upon until it gleams with renewed worth. Like the alchemist who turns lead into gold, she converts silence into speech and stigma into power, not through softness but through a revelatory force that disturbs settled orders. Her illumination is thus a form of spiritual alchemy—witchcraft as transformation—where revelation does not merely disclose truth but remakes the terms by which beauty and being are known.
Girls and the Silhouette of Form deepens her exploration of womanhood, form, and memory. Beyond writing, she creates textile art that engages cultural preservation, sustainability, and the composite African experience.
Abubakar Ibrahim, popularly known by the moniker “Imam of Poets”, is a Nigerian poet and visual artist from New Bussa, a “sleepy” town in Niger State, North Central Nigeria. He holds a BSc in Biology from Usmanu Danfodiyo University, Sokoto.
Movement at the edge of your vision — maybe a man, maybe a shadow. You hold your breath. The darkness folds around you.
Four Poems from Girls and the Silhouette of Form | Star Zahra (Masobe Books)
Four Poems from Girls and the Silhouette of Form | Star Zahra (Masobe Books)