By Nehru Odeh
There is something intriguing about Ogaga Ifowodo’s latest poetic offering, Why Does God Need A Gun? Not just because of the insistent and ever-disturbing question it asks. Not just because it is about Leah Sharibu, the subject matter of the collection and one of the 110 schoolgirls abducted from Government Girls Science and Technical College in Dapchi, Yobe State, on February 19, 2018 who remains in captivity because she refused to renounce her faith and convert to Islam.
But because of its simple complexity and complex simplicity, the remarkable way it transforms national tragedy into an intimate imaginative experience- something we can feel, relive, and in which we can situate ourselves. And also the way it turns Leah’s story into a discourse. Indeed, the collection is consequently not simply about what happened to Leah; it is about what happens to a society that keeps experiencing Leahs.
The sheer compelling nature of the discourses it inspires, the aesthetic quality of the poems, the strict discipline and lyricism of its lines, the beauty and brilliance of its language, and the strong use of metaphors, indeed make the collection not only a collector’s item but also a jewel sparkling like a China in the sun.
Leah is a metaphor for subjection, for captivity, for silence, for abduction, for rape and for erasure. And we keep experiencing Leahs. We keep experiencing what it means to be Leah. We keep reenacting what it means to live through abduction, through fear, through uncertainty, unsure of what tomorrow may bring. Leah has become a metaphor that refused to be obliterated from our consciousness.
And that is why the ill-fated fate that befell her because she chose to acquire Western education and refused to renounce her faith, even when she had the opportunity to do so and enjoy the sweet-smelling savour of freedom, keeps tugging not just at the conscience of every Nigerian but at that of the whole nation.
Published by Masobe Books in 2026, the book has been shortlisted for the 2026 Nigeria Prize for Literature, alongside Tares Oburunmu’s “Floral’s Colony” and James Ngwu Eze’s “Unbind Me Now.” Still, its deepest achievement and what sets it apart lie in its refusal to allow Leah’s story to remain an isolated incident, relegated to history or normalized. Her captivity becomes a point of entry into the collective memory of a traumatized nation: what happens to the citizens of a nation in eternal distress and the pains they experience daily.
Beyond Leah Sharibu, Why Does God Need a Gun? can be read as a poetic anatomy of Nigeria’s national trauma. Ifowodo takes the story of one abducted girl and places it within the larger psychic landscape of a country that has spent years witnessing the disappearance, killing, displacement, and silencing of its citizens. As I have aforewritten, the collection is not just about Leah, who is at present in captivity and about to be forgotten, but about all of us.
We are in an age of forgetting. This is particularly significant because trauma is often accompanied by forgetting. In Nigeria, the shock of one atrocity is frequently displaced by the next: one kidnapping follows another, one massacre is overtaken by another emergency, and yesterday’s victims disappear beneath today’s headlines. The poet resists this national amnesia by returning repeatedly to the experience of captivity and by reconstructing the world from which Leah was violently removed.
Perhaps this is where one of the greatest strengths of Ifowodo’s Why Does God Need A Gun? lies. Its ability to raise Leah from the ‘dead’, so to speak, to bring her from the dustbin of history, to bring her alive and give her the voice that her abductors had silenced. “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake,” so says Stephen, in James Joyce’s Ulysses. By bringing Leah’s story vividly to life and giving her a voice, Ifowodo in this singular act of imagination, confronts us with reality and wakes us from the nightmare of history. The subject matter of his poetry collection – a young lady in subjectivity – makes the reader confront reality head-on, however dark and gloomy it may be.
Ifowodo himself makes his intention clear in the introductory Note On The Poem. “In choosing to make the inexpressibly sad but infinitely inspiring case of Leah Sharibu the heart of my poetic ruminations on the unspeakably tragic epoch of religious history,” he says, “my intention is not to regulate the countless other tragedies and their victims. Rather, it is to focus on a particular episode, beaming light intensely on an image in the hope of illuminating the entire sordid canvas of atrocities around it.
“Indeed, I have chosen to make Leah speak, even though we have not heard a single word from her ever since that accursed night of her abduction, precisely because silence, invisibility and total erasure is what her abductors desire above all. Far from her subjection, she will be a subject, dead or alive.”
The description of the collection as one that “listens for voices nearly erased” is especially revealing in this regard. It identifies the poetic project as an act of recovery: the poet goes in search of voices that violence, time and public forgetfulness have almost succeeded in erasing.
By giving Leah a voice and making her come alive via the pages of a book, which the captors abhor, that is indeed an act of triumph. Leah is no more a mere statistic lost in the rubble but a human being who feels pain and experiences things. And Ifowodo has made the reader enter into Leah’s world and know what she is experiencing in captivity, her dreams, her fears, her hopes, and doubts by the sheer power of imagination,
This is where the collection connects particularly well with the ideas of Gayatri Spivak in her famous essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” The subaltern is not simply someone who is oppressed; the deeper problem is the political and representational structures that determine who can be heard and how. Ifowodo’s poem enters precisely this difficult territory. Leah’s captors seek to control not only her body but also her identity and voice. Their demand that she renounce her faith is an attempt to rewrite who she is. The poem answers that attempted erasure by allowing her interior life to occupy the centre of the work.
The collection begins with Leah’s self-assertion: her audacity to dream on her first night in captivity. “It was no night for dreaming/But I dreamt/My first night as captive/ of their girl-hating God./ I dreamt of my mother/fleeing half naked from her bed … “ Her mother appears in a dream, racing towards her, but the movement towards home and safety is interrupted by the image of the gun. The gun that stops Leah from reaching her mother in the dream is therefore also the gun that separates Nigerians from safety, home and certainty. The gun therefore becomes a recurring motif in the collection, an instrument of national memory and a symbol of Nigeria’s accumulated trauma.
From those first lines, page by page, the poet takes the reader into Leah’s world, her interior life, her fears, hopes and dreams, both literal and figuratively. And the reader is able to immerse himself in that world through the power of the poet’s imagination, vividness and imagery that is peculiar to the forest in which she is being held captive, and how she feels at a particular time.
By that imaginative power and Leah’s interiority, the reader is able to experience what it means to be in captivity in that forest. Not only does the forest come alive in the collection but also her feelings as well as nature such as river, sand dune, prehistoric trees, crying baby girls and monstrous roots. The forest speaks to us through Leah. This is why it can be read as a metaphor for Nigeria’s collective memory. It is crowded with ghosts — the missing, the abducted, the murdered, the displaced and the forgotten.
The “million demons” are therefore not simply the armed men in the forest. They are also the demons of historical repetition, religious extremism, political failure and public forgetfulness. Ifowodo’s poetic intervention is to bring some of those ghosts back into the national conversation.
This is where Ifowodo’s imagination becomes ethically important. He is not merely decorating a tragic story with beautiful images. He uses imagination to make absence visible with strong unforgettable metaphors such as ‘On the way to the stream that gurgles water” and “Snatched from sleep at school and secluded/in a forest, air filling my nose with soldier ants/that file from the wild buses of holy men’s /beards like broken antills,/ I dwell night and day in my dreams”, “Then there was a a clatter and the clouds/heavy all day, poured down their waters,/the sky flashed its knives, lightening so bright/ I could count the grains of dust on my feet./ In the midday dazzle of a night/ that could not stop weeping…”
There are other lines, too numerous to mention, that beep with metaphors such as “I’ve transferred all of my fears to him/’to flourish in the weeds of his tangled beard./ I’ve yielded all the loathing in my heart/to the scalding rock in his chest.” “Angel of hope and the ticking clock, can you see me?/The school from which I was kidnapped has locked its gates,” “God’s saviours shut down schools, they fear the words in books/ And here in the forest, we are their pledged wages.” “but how would I abide these men/if the changing forests of our prison/retain the demons night after night.”
“The sun sits worn and wearied above us/tired of wasting its warmth on stonehearts/nestled in its reddening bed/the clouds gone with their fuzzy dreams/to distant places happier than this forest.” I could go on and on, not measuring time this time but dancing with metaphors that dot the book, page after page, lines after lines, spiraling and taking the reader to luminous heights, a condition only great poetry can induce.
In another poem titled, “I Had Never Ventured into the Forest”, Leah says “I had never ventured into the forest/beyond the reach of a human voice/now I was a being of the wild/For bedroom classroom blackboard books/ raw-thatched huts, bowed branches of old trees/empty packs of cigarette, the glowing /ends of wraps sucked eyes glazed, half-closed …”
The great strength of the collection is no doubt its vividness, the poet’s ability to make imagery palpable, words memorable, lines sing and yet disciplined despite the freedom and liberty that poetry engenders. Ifowodo does not leave Leah in the abstract space of “captivity.” He gives captivity a geography, a weather, a soundscape, a texture and a psychological atmosphere.
In sequential poem after poem, such as “They Can’t Steal Away with All of Us”, “At First I counted the Night’s”, “I Feared Their Hearts More than Snake or Satan”, I’ve Transferred All of My Fears to Him”, ”Who is Listening to the Cries of Little Girls,” to mention just a few, Ifowodo is at its lyrical best. Take, for instance, the dance of lyricism, alliterations and oxymoron in “Who is Listening to the Cries of Little Girls?”
Who is listening to the cries of girls/
Snatched from school and hidden/
In a forest haunted by holy hate?
Who is listening for the fading echo
of their hearts heaving with stifled songs
in breasts still forming, weighing the world’s
burdens under forced conversion gowns…
A very salient feature of the collection is the strength of the imagery. The poems live because they are populated by images: a mother running through a dream, a river whose fish become crocodiles, trees with the appearance of monstrous creatures, lightning flashing like knives, a gun waiting to spit hatred at the moon, armed men praying beneath an angry sky, a girl hidden behind the mesh of a forced burqa, a date palm becoming an imagined alternative to human captivity. These images do not merely illustrate ideas. They generate ideas.
And this brings us to illuminating affinity between Ifowodo’s poetic imagination and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Atwood’s great achievement in that novel is to make an oppressive political and religious system frighteningly concrete. Gilead is not simply described as a dystopia; it is rendered through clothing, architecture, rituals, streets, rooms, gardens, ceremonies, surveillance and everyday routines. Critics have noted Atwood’s reliance on imagery, symbolism, and precise visual detail to make Offred’s world imaginable.
Ifowodo employs a similar strategy, although in a radically different genre and historical setting. Where Atwood gives us Gilead, Ifowodo gives us the forest. Where Offred’s red clothing becomes a visible sign of the system’s control over women’s bodies, Ifowodo’s forced clothing and burqa become signs of Leah’s attempted erasure. Where Atwood turns ordinary domestic objects into instruments of oppression, Ifowodo turns trees, rivers, clouds, guns, clothing and prayer into elements of a landscape of captivity. Both writers understand that oppression becomes more powerful in literature when the reader can see it.
Atwood’s imagery often forces the reader to look at familiar things differently. A garden can become a symbol of suppressed life; a mirror can become an unsettling image of confinement; a religious ritual can become an instrument of sexual and political domination.
Ifowodo does something comparable. Rain is not merely rain. Lightning is a blade. Prayer is not necessarily communion with God; in the hands of violent men, it can become theatre. The forest is not merely vegetation; it becomes prison, school, battlefield, graveyard and possible tomb.
The similarity extends to narrative movement. Although Why Does God Need a Gun is poetry rather than a novel, its long Leah sequence possesses a remarkable narrative momentum. One poem leads into another as if the reader were being taken deeper into the forest. Memory interrupts the present; dreams collide with reality; fear anticipates the future. This gives the poems a quality that is unusual in contemporary political poetry: they tell a story without ceasing to be poems.
Another striking similarity between Ifowodo’s “Why Does God Need a Gun” and Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” is the ability of both writers to enter into the minds of the protagonists, Leah and Offred, and vouchsafe the reader glimpses into their inner world, their fears, anxieties, reflections, hopes, dreams etc. In Ifowodo’s work, the reader is made to experience the psychological consequences of separation from home: the fear of night, the uncertainty of rescue, the threat of forced conversion, the possibility of sexual violence, the loss of ordinary childhood and the gradual distortion of hope. The result is an important act of memorialisation. Leah ceases to be merely the subject of a past news cycle. She becomes a continuing presence, like Offred in The. Handmaid’s Tale.
In “At First, I Counted the Nights,” time itself becomes an instrument of torture. Leah initially counts the nights, only to abandon the counting after the thirtieth twilight. Daylight briefly offers the possibility of escape; sunset brings news that destroys hope. Even nature seems militarised: lightning becomes knives, the sky appears to slash the clouds, and the shadow of a gun threatens the moon. The effect is cinematic. One sees the forest. One hears the rain. One feels the darkness. One senses the terror of a child trying to calculate how long captivity might last.
“Why Does God Need a Gun” is more than a collection about Leah. It is a meditation on the terrible distance between faith and fanaticism, power and innocence, silence and speech. Like Atwood’s Gilead, Ifowodo’s forest is an imagined world that becomes frightening precisely because it is rooted in things that actually happened.
That is the triumph of the book: it converts a forgotten girl into a living voice, a forest into a world, and a political tragedy into an enduring work of poetic imagination.
Dear Vows
