Barrelhouse Reviews: Your Crib, My Quibla, by Saddiq Dzukogi

Review by Rainie Oet

University of Nebraska Press / March 2021 / 108 pages

These are poems born out of grief and the celebration of our beloved daughter Baha, who we lost twenty-one days after her first birthday. In writing these poems I feel like I am holding her in my hands. She is alive as grief, alive as memory, alive as song.

Saddiq Dzukogi’s Your Crib, My Qibla is a brave, intimate, obsessive, and painful elegy for his daughter Baha. Many elegies allow grief to ferment, trading the threat of grief for pearls of wisdom. Dzukogi’s book offers no ready pearls of wisdom—that is not its point. Dzukogi’s book shows us, as brutally and honestly as it can, what grief looks like as it is being experienced.

Dzukogi often invokes the metaphor of a bridge to describe his ongoing journey in the wide landscape of grief: “he walks through a bridge / beyond himself / … with the countless realms of sadness / between him and the light she keeps inside his heart” (“Burial Sheet”). He also writes poignantly about his wife’s pain and desire to make a bridge to Baha, in “Internment”:

She cups each [breast] in her hands
as she delicately squeezes the warm milk
through puffed-up nipples into a polythene bag,
paces into the yard, roots her knees to the earth,
hands muddied as she digs the spot 

where she entombs the milk there
in the place you used to play with your brother.
She leans back, looks into an open sky
like one who has found a way
of sending the milk across to you. 

Even as grief bridges, it separates Dzukogi from himself. The speaker often refers to himself in third person, only as “he” or “your father” or “her father.” His grief “trap[s]” him “in a loop he can bear no more” (“Strain”), a loop in which “He envies his grief, / dreams to go into himself and lie / down close to his child” (“The Gown”). The pain is always there, sometimes seeming more real than anything else. It “will reopen and bleed / and clot and bleed and clot / until he can only pretend healing / or smile in a way that it is not in the heart / the next time he walks into the masjid” (“Cave”). 

The force of the speaker’s grief seems to bend reality around him: “The pigeons no longer come to his windowpane, / just bats and dead butterflies” (“A Nimble Darkness”). And yet, a survivor of loss cannot bend the laws of time or death, however forceful their obsession. Dzukogi acknowledges, with excruciating clarity, the overpowering need to remember everything about the lost one, writing: “When your mother found strands of your hair / hung up in the teeth of your comb, / your father squirreled them into a wineglass” (“Wineglass”), and “He can’t explain just how sacred an act / sniffing your clothes has become” (“Scarf”). These scents are going to fade. In this, Dzukogi elucidates another painful edge of grief: the fact that memory itself is temporary, always undergoing change. A memory and a “ghost is a wine. / He drinks this last memory” (“The Fruit Tree”). Memories too will change, if not fade. 

Dzukogi is continually “rehearsing what to say” in case Baha appears to him in a dream, which she never does (“Ba Shi, Ba Shi”)—this detail has haunted me since I finished the book. Baha does, however, appear in futures imagined by some of these poems, potential lives in which she never died. These unreal futures, appearing intermittently throughout the book, include the speaker imagining, for instance, Baha living through his dying: 

Today Baha is not dead—Her tears reveal deep love
for him 
[…] 
as he imbibes the water
she spit Quran verses into.
[…]
Today Baha is not dead, 

she is the shield that repeals a surfeit of darkness 
from owning his body, an eel out of mud-water.

However, Dzukogi does not need to dip into imagined futures in order to invoke the love and tenderness his daughter embodied while alive: “On the day of her only birthday, she dips / a finger in the cake before she slips / it into his mouth. On her face are the words: / I will care for you” (“Flower’s Tenderness”). 

The transcendent second section of the book, “My Qibla,” functions as a conversation in the voices of Baha, her father, her mother, and her older brother. Inside Baha’s voice in “She Begins to Speak,” Dzukogi allows: “The place of my rebirth // attracts joy like petals attract insects. / Everything in my life is a flower, // I live inside the smell like a moth / twirling toward the farthest bulb.” Without stopping, he traces this beautiful golden thread further around this poem’s labyrinth—“Don’t despair, it reflects on me. / I am anchored to your feelings. // Inside your body, it spikes when you despair”—and then:

absolve yourself 

of the guilt, it is the only way for me 
to live. I hear you crave my voice 

in your dreams, the thing is, I do not 
know how I sound and I’m scared 

of speaking in a way that you won’t know 
it’s me. But know that your voice is in 

my body, you echo in my bones, 
quite loudly, the one dead feels alive.

After the unrelenting pressure of grief throughout the book, this passage renders unspeakable beauty. But Dzukogi doesn’t end his book there—this is just the beginning of the second half. Thus, he impels himself, even within his grief, to live. “I know what you feel, that sadness / keeps me physical in your body, // but you have to let go, it’s a monster / bullying me here—I have my mother’s hand, // go on and hold her.”

The poems after this point feel especially sacred. Qibla is the direction toward which Muslims pray, fixed upon the Kaaba at Mecca. A subject of large importance in the “My Qibla” section is Dzukogi’s relationship with God, which often seems as immediate and inaccessible as his relationship with his departed daughter. Returning to the image of a bridge in “Measuring the Length of Grief by the Length of a River,” Dzukogi acknowledges the possibility, as his wife tells him, that “[Baha’s] body shortens / the distance between God and me—a bridge // sprawled from my doorstep into paradise. Perhaps it’s true.” And in “Ummi,” a poem written in Baha’s voice to her mother: “You wonder if God hears your voice, / Ummi, I hear you.”

In “Unexpressed Grief,” Dzukogi’s mother tells him “we must grieve / according to the Quran: This means in peace, / without tears or words. … In the Quran there is a solution to every mystery, / but not for an unexpressed grief.” And yet, Dzukogi attempts in these poems to express the inexpressible. To give voice to Baha. In doing so, he gives voice to his whole self, which includes Baha and everyone he loves. The entire section is a holy conversation within this one poet’s self. It charts a movement through grief, from fragmentation to connection. 

Amidst all this renewal Dzukogi still suffers: “How do I consent to joy? … All I want is to crawl // away… My tongue inside / a keyhole cannot unlock the door” (“Waterlog”). But still he encourages himself, in “December,” through Baha’s voice: “Maybe the art you create is not a mistake.”

Rainie Oet is a nonbinary writer and the author of three books of poetry, most recently Glorious Veils of Diane (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2021). They received an MFA in Poetry from Syracuse University, where they were awarded the Shirley Jackson Prize in Fiction. Find them online at rainieoet.com.