Abu Bakr Sadiq has established himself as a speculative poet who uses speculation as a didactic tool in examining the most inevitable human feeling that people of all classes experience—loss. As such, the reader is greeted with didacticism in the opening poem of his latest book, “Introducing Bhabi to the Cyborg”:

just so we’re clear, you're not allowed to ask
how these scars came to be.
i don’t usually respond to questions
concerning lineage [...] (p. 1)

In this way, Sadiq launches his collection with an introduction that quickly establishes the heft of grief that loss and apocalypse carry—and the cyborg as their witness, as his confidant. Sadiq is nonchalant, justifiably, about explaining his pain to the cyborg because he is “unlike you, i am not more machine than human. i exist in multiple halves. half water. half wind. half gunsmoke. half eulogy. half rage. half homeless. half patriotic. half burnt.”  These are by-products of the apocalypse that are incorporated into the parenthesis of his persona. The poem sets the tone of what to expect in the collection: Sadiq’s mood is that of the weary rebels who, due to the generational suffering their country has undergone, have given up on patriotism and hope. He writes:

i know of widowed women whose hands
have held ash from burnt bodies. it’s likely
we may never meet again. i am the type
to thirst for sleep in the middle of a world
tumbling towards its end. please,
remember me that way. (pp. 1-2)

He employs didacticism in his argument, then, but uses it with a scourging hyperbole to describe his resignation rather than dangerous hopefulness. Sadiq features decrepit celestial characters that embody his pain—cyborg, bots, titanium, Bhabi. In “Explaining Bot Fights to Bhabi,” he brings the title character into a digital apocalyptic world in which loss and want are the meat of existence, then gives him a crash course in how destructive human affrays can be. The fighting bots are examples:

anyway, the fight can only be over when
a bot is destroyed. this red button is your
trigger. with your thumb on it, your bot
fights like a wounded beast ’til the other
bot dies. ever imagined‚ if that’s the same
thing that happens when humans fight
each other? you have been asleep for six
months. open your mouth. i’m dying
to kiss your lips again. where is your tongue? (p. 7)

Abu remains the inventive poet he is, confronting the stinging effects of war and insecurity through piercing metaphors. Each poem stokes a trove of emotions. Whether addressing a formerly-corporal-now-sentient-being (“Wormhole”) or reflecting on loss (“Road Map”), Sadiq remains focused on inspecting the apocalypse, the deaths, and its toll on him. In “Wormhole,” Sadiq explores the time travel myth, compressing time inside his palm and dramatically pouring it back into the poem. Everything is happening all at once: his birth and his grandfather’s, the invention of the cell phone, him watching his father propose to his mother in the garden she later dies in, his mother flying a car to harvest water from clouds, him riding a fire-breathing unicorn to Janazah.

“Roadmap,” meanwhile, is a poem not only about loss but desire. This desire comes as result of such incessant loss that even the wrong city tempts him as long as it has peace. His current City, as the poet Warsan Shire puts it, is the mouth of a shark that has swallowed his mother. Consequently, reality is so steeped in grief that the speaker has taken to dreaming of a different life as a hobby. The poem is like a gmelina tree with several branches which sprout fruits every time it is read. After being understood as an entanglement of loss and desire, the poem cascades into revealing the origin of the speaker’s name, weight, his close affinity to water:

i got my name from my grandfather—alphabets, scrambled
to translate into “crocodile” in my mother tongue.
which explains my undying love for water & how it never
passes through anywhere unnoticed. [...] (p. 5)

Filtering this book to its essence, Leaked Footages opts for a glossy Sylvia-Plath spirit, affording Sadiq the rage to explore his innermost thoughts. The speculative landscape, embellished with the experimental nature of some of these poems, offers a balancing alternative to the systemized, stylistic, and thematic poems that comes out of contemporary Nigeria’s poetry mill.

The title of another poem, “Maqtoob” is an Arabic word for destiny or fate. In the Islamic context, which is the scaffolding of this poem, it means a written decree ordained by Allah about a person’s life—meaning the losses of ther poem are predestined. Sadiq starts by flashing agnosticism, “mumbling duas against his desires for what’s gone,” then explodes in the second line, adopting the voice of a spellbinder who relies on incantations to perform magic. “Maqtoob maqtoob,” he repeats each time after citing an instance of loss, as if summoning the spirit of skepticism and deploying it as mouthpiece for the voices in his head that question the phenomena of maqtoob—and entirely rejecting its idea as the justification for his losses. He puts off revelation with a paradox that poses as a rhetorical question and an existential declaration succinctly: “consider what should be a blessing: i have lost so much but not a memory of everything i’ve lost.”

In poems like “Uncensored Footages of the Cyborg in an IDPS Camp” and “Flight Theory,” Sadiq exploits the white spaces on the page by indenting words on the same line, giving the structure the look of a flush of falling leaves from a withering tree branch. This is a vintage poetic architecture that is as old as time, yet the uncensored poem is a pictorial image of the state of near-future internally displaced person camps captured in words. Sadiq’s arrangements feel like a chronology of events happening in a mishmash world of fantasy and Northern Nigeria. Accompanied by architectural beautification, for example, “Crane Shot” is a screenshot of a market square before and after an attack. A mother kisses her daughter’s forehead, a suicide bomber walks in.

Having learnt my way around the book, I kept returning to this poem and particularly this line: “who has lost what & who’s waiting for whose return, the women, i know / have given up hopes / of the return of / their men & now busy themselves / making up names of / inexistent countries to tell their children / when they ask / where their fathers / have gone”—it has become the mantra of mothers whose husbands have died in wars but do not know how explain that death to their young children who, ideally, should be protected from it. Like so much of Leaked Footages, “Crane Shot” feels universal, starting in Northern Nigeria and twirling outward to Palestine, to Sudan, Ukraine, Chile, and in the not distant past, Biafra, where victims are subjected to wars inspired by racial or tribal—albeit political animus.

Less sophisticated poems might be either starkly optimistic or pessimistic, but Sadiq swings like a pendulum between both. In “After Bhabi Dreams of a City Filled With Lights,” for example, he writes:

an āyah in the Qur’an says Allah has promised
gardens of bliss to all believers. tired, i light
a broken candlestick. its flame, a miniature sun,
spreads to douse the darkness in my room. (p. 13)

These lines tend to the optimistic part of the poem. It is not all doom, as the victims in the apocalypse are believers to whom Allah has promised gardens of bliss. As the poem flows downward, however, pessimism sets in, Sadiq’s voice becoming burnt. It ends in this manner:

close, i hold a mirror to my face, hoping i find memories
of our glorious days, glinting behind the filmy eyes
of history. on the news, a woman ends a report on
abducted girls returning home, drained as bones
emptied of marrows. on my bed, i curl beneath my blanket
anxious as a shadow waiting to be erased by light. (p. 14)

Across a painful and pensive fifty-one poems, Leaked Footages, has the sensory experience of a splaying photomontage, enculturating Sadiq’s Islamic faith, the musical pulse of his volatile will to live in the apocalypse, and refrains of optimism and hopefulness. His penmanship remains unquestioned. The book, much less the poet, is explosive and arresting. In the final scene of the book, “CAST (IN ORDER OF DISAPPEARANCE),” things meet their death. It is like the outro of an album or the last scene in an epic movie, the point at which things escalate and the screen goes dark, leaving viewers or listeners haunted by unanswered questions that might later influence their worldview in a search for answers. In reality, existential crises are perennial, without solutions. Sadiq closes the curtain in this manner:

cyborg— tired of tending to the wounds in my stories, flew back to space.	bhabi— tired, of carrying the lives of the many women in my life, left with my love leaking from her heart.
widowed women— ran through large banners of smoke after the escalation of violence in the town.	security officers— left their stations for the riverside to wash away every memory of bullet holes making home of bodies.
school teachers— stopped showing up when no one in the country could claim the burnt girl’s body.	townspeople— crouched in marshes waiting for the gunfire to return silence to their homes. (p. 73).