Ahead of the grand finale of the 2026 edition of the Nigeria Prize for Literature, seasoned writer Ogaga Ifowodo speaks on his mission and art in ‘Why Does God Need a Gun’, his collection shortlisted for the award, alongside James Eze’s ‘Unbind me Now’ and Tares Oburumu’s Flora’s Love Colony’, AKEEM LASISI writes.
After two attempts at winning the coveted Nigeria Prize for Literature, thoroughbred writer and activist Ogaga Ifowodo is back in the limelight game. And he is close to earning the big prize founded and funded by NLNG, with $100,000 as prize money.
Ifowodo’s entry, titled Why Does God Need a Gun?, is principally a poser for religious extremists who have been polluting the polity, with some having gone to terrorist extents. His persona is Leah Sharibu, one of the schoolgirls kidnapped from the Government Girls Science and Technical College, Dapchi, Yobe State, in 2018. He holds no word, no imagery back in challenging the criminal actors, emphatically asking why they must make themselves God’s vicious gunmen.
But with Ifowodo’s preoccupation with this very important issue, how did he manage not to sacrifice artistry? What has so far saved him from the eagles’ eyes of the NPL judges, who are always keen on craftsmanship? These were some of the questions he answered when he, alongside other finalists, spoke in Lagos last Wednesday during an encounter with the media. His response was unequivocal. For him, craft is always supreme:
“Craft is the first thing,” he said. “As a poet, as a writer, the message is secondary. If you ask me, the message is secondary. Because there’s nothing that we’re going to write about today—wars, intolerance, love, grief, whatever it is—that has not been there from the beginning of existence. So, it is the how; that’s where the art comes in, even if you are working with wood as a sculptor. So, art is first and foremost. The medium disciplines the message.
“In all my works—this is my sixth collection—the message is secondary. It is the art, the medium through which you deliver the message, that comes first. If the art fails, the message fails.”
The impulse for Why Does God Need a Gun?, Ifowodo stressed, was what had become very familiar in terms of the scourge of religious terrorism—the scourge of believers thinking that those who don’t believe like them have no right to existence.
He noted, “So, the question is: why would God Almighty—the Omnipotent, Omniscient, Omnipresent—why would He make things made out of clay think they need to protect Him? That is a preoccupation in the collection. Thinking about all the recent activities, especially in the post-Al-Qaeda 9/11 events that are terrorising the world. So, that’s where the question comes from.”
Below are excerpts from Ifowodo’s responses to other issues raised during the interview.
Leah Sharibu Actually, it is a question posed by the poet’s persona, Leah Sharibu, whom I’ve turned into a composite figure for all the victims, not even only the girls. You remember the Federal Government College, Buni Yadi, I think in Yobe State, where about 59 students were killed. They were not even taken into captivity. They were killed while the school was burnt down. I attended a Federal Government College, so I feel a particular feeling of pain, you know, in imagining that.
So, Leah Sharibu becomes a composite figure for all the victims of the scourge of religious terrorism that we are witnessing. And the whole idea of the terrorists’ action is to erase the other, is to deny agency to the other, is to turn, in particular, the girl child and women into non-beings. They actually boasted about making her a slave for the rest of her life.
Initially, they gave Sharibu the option of renouncing her faith. We have not heard a single word from her ever since she was captured. Nobody has seen her. But for those girls who were released, some of them gave the testimony that she refused to renounce her faith.
This reminded me so much of Nelson Mandela, who, as you know, was offered conditional release several times, and each time turned it down until there was complete liberation for the whole of South Africa, for Southern Africa. And that was also celebrated. I recall Soyinka’s collection of poems, Mandela’s Earth, you know, celebrating that. “No,” he said.
Of course, Mandela was a full-grown man, already world-known. But here is a little girl, a little girl in school, a teenager, who still had the courage and the astonishing bravery to reject freedom in defence of her belief.
At a point, I said that this person whom they intend to turn into a slave must be given a voice; must be made to speak; must be made to speak in a book. They forbid the book. Her testimony, her personhood, her womanhood. By now she’s a woman, but she must be celebrated by way of commemorating her in poetry.
So, the first part of the collection, a series of I think about 26 poems, titled From the Forest of a Million Demons, Leah Sharibu Lives, is a celebration of that. A reflection on everything from vulnerability to God, etc. It’s about: God, are you even still there at all? Why do you allow human beings to take your name in vain?
Salman Rushdie Then to the second part, where it goes beyond Nigeria, to Gaza, to the Middle East, to the fatwa pronounced on Salman Rushdie, you know, in another instance of religious intolerance and fundamentalism, of fanaticism, and which was reenacted recently. This was when, many years after the original fatwa by Ayatollah Khomeini, now in New York, another fanatic, a young fanatic, who probably has not even read anything written by Salman Rushdie, sought to blind him by plucking out his two eyes. Got one eye.
Challenges faced when producing the book I’ll say it’s the writer’s challenge in that sense between the image and the representation of it, the idea and the adequate representation of it to find the words, to find the image, to find the metaphor that carries it, embodies it to your satisfaction.
I am very demanding on myself because I think a writer has to be their best critic. I’m very unsparing, you know, and unsentimental about my own work.
So, the moment when you find that phrase, that image that can give life, open the door to the aspiration or the idea or the thoughts that move you to poetry, that’s the biggest challenge. The rest, the existential issues of whether you can have your amala this afternoon and whether you can have a bottle of beer, those are not quite as important as this one. It’s a writerly challenge of how I can give expression worthy—worthy of the impulse or the idea that has moved me to poetry.
