Zakiyyah Dzukogi: What is the process of writing a poem like for you? Is it a lot of hard work or easy?
Abdulrazaq Salihu: My process of writing poetry has changed over the years. First, I started writing poetry with so much passion and rush that I was writing about anything and everything. Every single day, I would wake up and write ten poems, and I would never feel drained. Then came the second phase, the conscious phase. I was still writing plenty of poems, but this time I was more conscious of the kinds of poems I wanted to write, which reduced the number. Then came the subconsciously conscious process phase, where I would house an idea for as long as two weeks, subconsciously merging it with necessary natural and artificial metaphors, and then on the day of the oozing, the poem would be born.
Generally, poetry has always been simple for me; I hardly write half poems; when I start writing, I must end it; I don’t believe in “some lines would not always come together at once” as much as I do not believe in writer’s block. Most if not all the poems I’ve written come complete, most times with titles missing, and I love my titles so much because I believe titles should always be as beautiful as the poem itself… Situations where I read a title and the poem fails to fulfil its purpose oftentimes disappoint me. Generally, my poems come to me easily; it’s like someone else is doing the hard work of creating them and pouring them over to me. The only hard part of my poetry is the intentionality I seek to pursue in metaphor, punctuation, rhythms, and, most importantly, in editing the entire poem. Editing is the only hard part of my poetry, compared to doing the writing itself, and I’m enjoying every bit of it—the writing, that is.
Zakiyyah Dzukogi: Please describe your sense of identity in this or any possible world in imagery or metaphor.
Abdulrazaq Salihu: Sometimes last year, I consciously decided to identify as a speculative poet. I enjoyed reading speculative poems, and all I wanted to do was write them. What I didn’t know about writing is that it chooses your identity for you, unless you decide to consciously alter the decision. I began reading speculative poems, began writing them, submitting them, publishing some of them, and continued chasing the dream of writing strictly speculative poems, but something happened in December 2022. I have always known I was too empathetic, but this time it was poetry forcing me to write empathetic poems. I was searching for joy and light, but all the poetry I was writing was devoid of them (or so I believed). I began writing poems about pity; I was feeling the power; the realisation came to me almost instantaneously that I had found my voice in poetry, so I jiggled between the conscious identity I chose for myself and the one poetry has given me, and today I can freely identify as an empathetic poet, much more than a speculative poet, unless in my speculative empathetic poems.
Zakiyyah Dzukogi: If any of your poems could literarily save a person’s life, which poem would it be and can you describe the person whose life you think it would have saved?
Abdulrazaq Salihu: Ouuuuuuu! This is a big one. I don’t think a poem, my poem, can save a person’s life, or I don’t think I understand the power of my poetry in society yet. One time someone told me my empathetic poems made them happy, that the metaphors were just doing magic, so I believe my poems would just lighten a person’s mood more than they would literally save a person’s life. I have written some therapeutic poems for myself, but I believe every poem, no matter the theme, must first satisfy or fulfil the author before it attempts to heal the general public. In my poem, I grieve for myself first, then heal, before I grieve for any other person.
If my poem would save anyone, it would definitely be someone as conscious as me; my kind of poetry is that which you must read consciously with emphasis on the punctuation; if my poem would ever do the magic, it would be on my kind first.
Zakiyyah Dzukogi: What does Africa mean to you, as potential or reality?
Abdulrazaq Salihu: Africa is home—home is a beautiful reality covered with the dirty regalia of wrong choices. I love Africa. I feel Africa is a lonely entity; we must be conscious as Africans to salve her wounds, and these days with the beautiful brimming of awesome writers, I’m 100% sure Africa would not die, Africa would flourish, and Africa would survive to watch her skin glow. Africa means as much to me as my troubled hometown. I do not see Africa as a large entity, but rather as a small body of silent people waiting for one of them to speak up. Today we’re speaking up; today we’re redefining the realities; we’re exploring our own potential; Africa would never die!
Zakiyyah Dzukogi: Could you share with us one poem you’ve been most impressed or fascinated by? Tell us why and share your favourite lines from it.
Abdulrazaq Salihu: I badly want to have “one” favourite poem, but I can’t, at least for now. But if I must choose one, then my favourite poem has to be this excerpt from Safia Elhillo’s January Children:
“…did our mothers invent loneliness or did it make them our mothers were we fathered by silence or just looking to explain away this quiet is it wasteful to pray for our brothers in a language they never learned whose daughters are we if we grow old before our mothers or for their sakes they called our grandfathers the January children lined up by the colonizer & assigned birth years by height there is no answer we come from men who do not know when they were born & women shown to them in photographs whose children left the country & tried for romance & had daughters full of all the wrong language”
This is an empathetic poem, beautiful use of language, beautiful use of language.
Abdulrazaq Salihu, TPC I, is a Nigerian poet and member of the hilltop creative arts foundation. He won the Splendours of dawn poetry contest, BPKW poetry contest, Poetry archive poetry contest, Masks literary magazine poetry award, Nigerian prize for teen authors(poetry), Hilltop creative writing award, and others. He has his works published/forthcoming in Bracken, Poetry Quarter(ly), Rogue, B*k, Jupiter review, black moon magazine, Angime, Grub Street mag and elsewhere. He tweets @Arazaqsalihu; instagram: Abdulrazaq._salihu. He’s the author of Constellations (poetry) and hiccups (Prose).
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