Hauwa Shaffii Nuhu is a poet and essayist from Nigeria, whose work has appeared on Popula, Ake Review, Lolwe, The Republic, Litro, After the Pause Journal, Bitter Oleander, 20.35 Africa, Memento, Jalada Africa, and elsewhere. She is a 2018 fellow of Ebedi Writers Residency. Hauwa has a law degree from Bayero University, Kano, and is currently getting her BL from the Nigerian Law School. A two-time shortlistee of the Nigerian Students Poetry Prize, she has been a guest and panellist at literary festivals and panels such as the Ake Festival, the Kaduna Book and Arts Festival, and most recently the Qurao Festival of Words. Passionate about northern and women representation and amplification, in 2018 she was an associate producer of season 4 of the popular Hausa TV show “Haske Matan Arewa”; a program that aired on Arewa24 on Wednesdays, interviewing and showcasing exceptional northern Nigerian women and their work to the world. She’s currently working on her first chapbook of poetry, due for release in 2021. She writes and lives in Minna.
Precious Okpechi: Hello Hauwa, can you tell us how you first got started as a poet?
Hauwa Shaffii Nuhu: It falls along with this scene: A man is asking me whether I write poetry and I am shaking my head no. And my friend and brother, a poet I have always admired and respected, Saddiq Dzukogi, turns to me and asks “Why are you lying?” I stare at him, confused, then stammer, “But I don’t write poetry.” He laughs and asks, “Those lines you’ve been posting on Facebook — what are they?”
It was then that my journey as a poet really consciously began.
Precious: Interesting. I am familiar with your works, but the truth is I can’t say which I love best: your prose or poetry. I think of your very tender essays in Selves Anthology and on Lolwe, and I scream (in my head). Tell me, which do you lean towards more, poetry or prose?
Hauwa: I think I am just generally in love with language, like all writers. Sometimes language leads me to poetry, sometimes to prose. These days, I have been writing more prose. But it is in writing poetry that my soul truly comes alive.
Precious: In a not too recent tweet of yours, you talked about your forthcoming chapbook with APBF in 2021 and how vulnerable the poems are. I wonder, how were you able to finally reconcile with letting the poems out into the world? And the title, like a gift unto ourselves, what is the bigger role it plays in defining the collection?
Hauwa: It was a tough process, ngl. I would read the poems over and over and come to the conclusion that they were too private, too revealing. But then I sat myself down and had this conversation with myself. I am only alive, and functioning this eloquently, because of all the writers and poets who were brave enough to share their experiences, their lives. I feel like I have a duty to be that writer to another person. So much of our private darknesses have been made habitable and liveable because of the realization that we are not alone nor the first to go through it; because of those brave writers who braved it and shared. I have always been a big believer in sharing. This did the trick for me.
The title comes from a line in one of the poems in the chapbook. The original line reads “…like a gift unto yourself.” But thinking about the body of work as an offering to myself and the people who feel in the same intense, painful manner that I do, I decided it was going to be the title.
Precious: Your poem “fatimatu” published in 20.35 Africa’s Anthology Vol. II has these lines that stayed with me: “my name is new and used – / butchered at the edges, keeping the fate / of its real owner away.” The duality in those lines – a novel and used name – says much about the range of your imagination. I am curious as to what those lines really mean as well as your general influences as a creative?
Hauwa: Thank you. Some people reinvent themselves when they move into new cities and “start life afresh.” I have always been intrigued by that idea – of starting life afresh. How do you do that when memories exist so permanently? When we are products of a mashup of past experiences and lives? Do we simply practice the art of forgetting until we truly forget? I imagine the character named fatimatu starting her life afresh and renaming herself tima, which is only a shortened/butchered/trimmed version of the original name. And how this, too, can be a metaphor for her new life.
My general influences are Safia Elhillo, Alycia Pirmohammed, Kaveh Akbar, Fatimah Asghar and so many more.
Precious: What is the most urgent at the core of your writing? How does it come alive in the featured poems here?
Hauwa: I have always been interested in the personal. I am also interested in the communal, but usually through a narrowed, personalized focus. I find that when writing about communal losses or tragedies, I am most likely to reimagine the life of a person affected by that tragedy, and then focus on that single life. As opposed to dealing with large people. It’s what I tried to do in the poems featured here. In “fallen,” I reimagine the final moments of the brave Hauwa Leman, whose murder alongside other young women shook Nigeria.
In “a body in love is a body in water,” I reimagine the final moments of the old couple in Titanic who cling to one another and choose to go that way.
I am only alive, and functioning this eloquently, because of all the writers and poets who were brave enough to share their experiences, their lives. I feel like I have a duty to be that writer for another person.
– Hauwa Shaffii Nuhu
fallen
(for hauwa leman, an aide worker captured and later executed by boko haram in Nigeria)
when the man’s knee pushes from behind,
hauwa staggers like a grieving heart to her knees
there is a piece of cloth hooded over her like a prayer
her hands are tied into a clasp
the other girls told her last night that if she dies,
she at least dies a martyr
she twirled the word in her chest. martyr.
decided her lover’s name sounded better
still, when the bullet pokes her,
her tongue is wound round the shahadah
that night, the other girls
shiver through dawn
the nation grieves on the internet
her mother breaks like dry clay on tv
her lover: he replays in his head, the frantic voice-note
she left him the day the men attacked
he knows he will not forget it
he knows he will not forget it
a body in love is a body in water
for the sea of wailing clusters spilling out the ship
like failure,
it’s the end of the world
others try first, then fail
at the language of survival.
they speak it to lifejackets and boats
some are rusty;
others, fluent
the whole motion of labouring to stay alive,
in that adamant way
that is peculiar to bodies,
sings the rhythm of futility.
there is death in the air
but no one
perceives it more than the old couple
lying in a deck,
trying out, with their bodies, the actual texture
of those words they said to one another
all those years ago before the priest
even as the ship slides underwater
because
glassy, helpless, drowning and beautiful;
a body in love is a body in water