Why Does God Need A Gun? Ogaga Ifowodo Confronts Religious Intolerance Through Poetry

A Collection Built Around a Difficult Question

OGAGA Ifowodo’s Why Does God Need a Gun? begins with a question that challenges one of the most troubling contradictions in religious violence: why would human beings claim to defend an all-powerful God through violence?

For Ifowodo, that question became the conceptual centre of a poetry collection examining religious intolerance, fundamentalism, freedom, faith and the consequences of beliefs imposed on others.

The collection has now entered the final stage of the 2026 Nigeria Prize for Literature, alongside James Ngwu Eze’s Unbind Me Now and Tares Oburumu’s Flora’s Love Colony. The three books emerged from an initial 223 submissions, with the 2026 edition of the prize dedicated to poetry.

Yet the book’s significance, in Ifowodo’s account, goes beyond the literary prize.

It is an attempt to examine what happens when belief ceases to be a private conviction and becomes a justification for denying another person the right to exist.

From Faith to Intolerance

At the heart of the collection is a philosophical concern with the relationship between belief and violence.

Ifowodo questions the impulse of religious extremists who take up arms in the name of God. His argument, as he explains it, is that an omnipotent deity should not require human beings to protect the divine through violence.

That paradox gives the title its force.

The question is deliberately provocative because it reverses the logic of religious extremism. Instead of asking whether violence can defend God, the poet asks why God would need human beings to defend Him with guns in the first place.

The collection consequently turns its attention from God to human beings.

It asks what people do in the name of belief and why disagreement over faith can become a justification for persecution.

Leah Sharibu & the Question of Agency

The first section, “From the Forest of a Million Demons”, places Leah Sharibu at the centre of the collection.

Sharibu was among the schoolgirls abducted from the Government Girls’ Science and Technical College in Dapchi, Yobe State, in 2018. Her reported refusal to renounce her Christian faith became a significant part of public discussions about religious identity, captivity and Boko Haram.

For Ifowodo, however, Sharibu is not merely a symbol.

He sees the poetry as an attempt to restore agency to a young woman whose story has often been told by others.

That concern explains his insistence that the oppressed must be allowed to speak and to possess subjectivity.

The poet therefore turns biography into poetic testimony.

Sharibu becomes a figure through whom the collection examines freedom, faith, womanhood, captivity and the right to define one’s own identity.

Beyond Nigeria’s Borders

Although the collection begins from a distinctly Nigerian experience, its concerns are not confined to Nigeria.

Ifowodo extends the inquiry to the Middle East and the wider history of religious controversy. The collection engages with the Salman Rushdie controversy and the broader question of what happens when literary or intellectual expression encounters religious absolutism.

That expansion is important.

It prevents the book from treating religious intolerance as exclusively Nigerian.

Instead, the poems place Nigeria within a wider history of conflicts over belief, expression and the boundaries of religious authority.

The Many Ways of Understanding the Divine

Ifowodo also moves beyond contemporary religious extremism to consider different ways of understanding spirituality.

Traditional African perspectives form part of that inquiry.

The collection therefore does not simply contrast one religion against another. It explores the broader human impulse to interpret the divine and then asks what happens when one interpretation claims exclusive authority over others.

This creates a more complicated literary terrain.

Faith becomes both personal conviction and social force.

The poems examine the point at which conviction can turn into exclusion.

From “Creeds” to the Final Question

The collection itself underwent several conceptual changes before arriving at its final title.

Ifowodo said the manuscript began under the working title Creeds and the Incredulous, before evolving through another formulation, The (In)credulous.

The parenthetical construction was intended to accommodate both the credulous and the incredulous.

That evolution reveals something about the book’s intellectual concern.

The collection is not simply asking what people believe. It is interested in the relationship between belief, doubt and intolerance.

Its opening question, “What is your creed?”, became an early impulse for the work.

From there, the poet developed a broader inquiry into the ways human beings construct systems of belief and use them to understand, exclude or confront one another.

Craft Before Message

Perhaps the most important artistic qualification in Ifowodo’s explanation of the collection is his insistence that craft comes before message.

Although Why Does God Need a Gun? deals with war, intolerance, grief, faith and violence, he argues that none of those subjects automatically makes a poem successful.

The subject already exists in human history.

What matters to the artist is how the subject is treated.

That distinction places the collection within a broader debate about socially engaged literature. A poem may address a major political or moral question, but literary significance still depends on language, imagery, structure, metaphor and form.

For Ifowodo, therefore, the political or philosophical message cannot substitute for artistic execution.

Two & a Half Years of Poetic Construction

The collection did not emerge overnight.

Ifowodo says it took roughly two and a half years to turn notes and impulses into completed poems, although the ideas behind the work had existed for considerably longer.

That distinction between inspiration and construction is revealing.

A provocative idea may initiate a poem, but the poet must still discover the right language to embody it.

Ifowodo identifies that search as one of the central challenges of writing.

The writer must find the words, images and metaphors capable of carrying an idea without reducing the poem to an argument.

The Writer as First Critic

For Ifowodo, the creative process also demands self-criticism.

He describes the writer as having to become the work’s best critic, and says he approaches his own writing without sentimentality.

That attitude reinforces his emphasis on craft.

The poet cannot simply trust the emotional power of an idea. He must interrogate the poem itself.

Does the image work?

Does the metaphor carry its weight?

Does the language remain poetry rather than becoming prose disguised as verse?

These questions become particularly important when a writer addresses emotionally charged subjects such as terrorism, religion and death.

A Poet With a Legal Mind

Ifowodo’s intellectual background also adds another dimension to his writing.

He trained and worked as a lawyer before pursuing literature and earning an MFA. The Nigeria Prizes describes him as a lawyer, poet, writer, activist and columnist, with six poetry collections to his name.

That background helps explain the argumentative energy of his work, although the poet himself places artistic craft above message.

His literary career has already produced several recognised collections, including Homeland and Other Poems, Madiba and The Oil Lamp.

Now, with Why Does God Need a Gun?, he turns once again towards questions of violence, freedom and human responsibility.

Beyond Recognition

The prospect of winning the $100,000 Nigeria Prize for Literature has financial significance for Ifowodo, but he says the recognition would not interrupt his creative work.

He already has three projects in progress and has begun taking notes for another collection.

If he receives the prize, he also plans to establish a literary prize at his alma mater, Federal Government College, Warri, Delta State.

That proposal connects personal achievement with institutional literary development.

Instead of treating a literary award solely as individual recognition, Ifowodo’s stated plan would direct part of its value towards encouraging another generation of writers.

The Human Question Behind Artificial Intelligence

The poet’s concerns also extend into the changing world of creative technology.

Ifowodo has expressed reservations about the expanding influence of artificial intelligence in creative work. His objection rests on the belief that creativity is deeply connected to human experience.

For him, information alone cannot reproduce the full complexity of artistic creation.

Empathy, feeling, memory and the unpredictable nature of human responses remain central to literature.

That position introduces another question into the debate surrounding Why Does God Need a Gun?: if the collection is fundamentally concerned with belief, suffering and human responsibility, can those experiences be adequately represented without human subjectivity?

For Ifowodo, the answer appears to be no.

Poetry as Witness & Question

Ultimately, Why Does God Need a Gun? is structured around questions rather than easy answers.

Why do people use violence in the name of God?

Why does religious difference become a reason for denying another person’s humanity?

What happens to freedom when belief becomes absolute?

And what responsibility does poetry have when societies confront violence and intolerance?

Ifowodo’s collection approaches those questions through the discipline of poetry rather than political argument.

Its ambition, as he describes it, is therefore not simply to condemn religious violence but to investigate the human thinking that makes such violence possible.

That places Why Does God Need a Gun? within the continuing Nigerian tradition of literature that treats poetry as both artistic practice and an interrogation of society.