In a proper world, no respectable critic should be engaging with two of the books on the NLNG’s Nigeria Prize for Literature 2026 shortlist. And it is not because they are “bad”—one can’t use the word because “bad” is a critical term. These books, Why Does God Need a Gun? by Ogaga Ifowodo and Unbind Me Now by James Ngwu Eze, are something else altogether; they fall outside the purview of criticism.
The third, Tares Oburumu’s Flora’s Love Colony, is better.
But as a Nigerian, you are forced, all the time, to pay attention to new lows, to use your intelligence in service of the unintelligent, to make sense of nonsense. I don’t know anywhere else in the world where the Ifowodo and the Eze books, which are not mediocre—they come far below what Whitman called “the mean flat average”—would be in the running for a $100,000 literary prize. (I concede that my travels in the world are limited.)
I.
Mr Ifowodo’s book is about fanaticism, different kinds of it, as he tells us in “A Note on the Poems”. The note, which opens the collection, does not illuminate the poems in any way, but it successfully summarizes them, so that if one has read it one really has no reason to read the book. There is nothing poetically interesting about the poems; they are all about what they are about and nothing more. And even at that, they offer neither a coherent view nor a convincing one.
The central part of the book is written for Leah Sharibu, the girl who was one of many kidnapped by Boko Haram from a school in Dapchi in 2018. While the other girls have been released, Sharibu has not, because she refused to renounce her faith. Her resolve in the face of what must be inexplicable terror has inspired many: Wole Soyinka, who also wrote her a poem, compared her to Malala and said it is in people like her that the hope of humanity rests. In the title of Ifowodo’s sequence, “From the Forest of a Million Demons”, there’s a light allusion to a book translated by the laureate: D. O. Fagunwa’s Forest of a Thousand Daemons.
If we compare the two titles, we begin to see what is wrong with this sequence. Fagunwa’s novel is a serious moral study that’s also a lot of fun to read. But it is fiction. Ifowodo’s poem for Sharibu is supposed to be, as he says, an “imaginary” exploration of actual events—imaginary because Sharibu’s life, and what has befallen her for almost ten years, is behind a veil. But the life that it centres is not imaginary: here we are concerned with a lived life, one of the most heroic in my lifetime. Why employ a title that references a work of fabulous fiction for a sequence of poems dealing with that life?
First, it is a bookish title. In defiance of Boko Haram, which means “Learning or books are forbidden”, Ifowodo wants to emphasise that books indeed matter. The second reason concerns the setting: To avoid arrest and surveillance, Boko Haram members reside in the forest (at a point it was Sambisa).
But the poet has changed two words. In place of Fagunwa’s “Thousand Daemons”, he has “Million Demons”. There is something wrong with this, and what is wrong with it is what is wrong with the poet’s entire vision of this young woman and her endurance. “Million demons” puts the whole business in a landscape that is more fantastic than anything Fagunwa ever wrote.
Daemons, as Soyinka deploys the term, belong solidly to folktales: they are not humans nor are they used to excuse human behaviour. And they are only a thousand, which seems to be the farthest reach in fanciful tales of this kind (Scheherazade tells stories for a thousand and one nights). When a company of “demons,” in the sense in which Ifowodo uses the term, speaks in Scripture, they say “We are legion (many)”—without a specific number. Millions pushes belief.
But who are these demons? Since it is men who carted Sharibu away to the forest and who make their home there, he is referring to men. Evil is a disgusting thing, but when it wears a human face it must be understood and spoken of in human terms. Calling militants demons is both unreasonable and disingenuous and warps the moral landscape of the sequence. In such a landscape, there can be no real evil, there can be no moral seriousness, and the moral weight of what Leah Sharibu did can neither be estimated nor praised.
Ifowodo is one of those persons who make the mistake of thinking that evil (or the variety known as terrorism) is shallow or stupid. And because he thinks so, his vision of moral heroism comes across as child’s play. And because his poetry here purports to be about both evil and moral heroism, his poems are no better: it is like a child’s attempt at scrawling a heart just as he begins to fall asleep. This is from “XIII” (the book’s title section):
I wanted to say to the holy gunman
eyes hot triggers of his soul, staring dazed
stripping me of the coarse conversion clothing
of his feigned faith:
Why does God need a gun?
I am a child, can’t you see?
Is it written on my face:
“This is Satan not in serpent’s
guise but a child’s”
Are you so blinded by lust and blood
you can’t tell I’m not the infidel
that haunts your dreams?
Does holiness burn the brain?
I could be your daughter!
Is breaking hymens and hearts heaven’s harvest?
How many children will you bleed for sacrifice?
Here, Sharibu, who turned 22 last year, is a whiny little girl. Not a young woman with a resolve. But I would rather imagine her stoical than puerile, asking these silly questions, because that accords with the facts. This indirect portrait, and the others in the sequence, are just as disfiguring of the quality of woman that she is. Ifowodo’s vision of her would forever have her be a toddler. There is a total lack of regard, of imagination at work here. There is a failure to honour by the seriousness of craft the seriousness of faith that Sharibu has shown.
What I have said about the first half of the book is no less true of the rest. Overall, the poetry suffers from the same kind of narrow-mindedness that the poet condemns in fanatics; it runs on his own righteous anger at the unrighteousness of their “righteous” violence. He has convinced himself that the justness of his belief in the absurdity of fanaticism (from the bearded gunman of the sequence to the pastor who does rituals in “They Flocked to Him” to the woman who sees herself as belonging to a spiritual husband, in “So, then, She Took to Water Worship”) is enough: the poetry must be in that.
The judges of the NLNG, always looking for topicality, have bought that view and swallowed it whole, but no clear-eyed reader with any feel for valuable language would. The Ogaga Ifowodo who wrote The Oil Lamp, a book I wish were more well known and more widely read, a book of balanced, sustained attention, worthy of the legacy of J. P. Clark and the Niger Delta—that younger, sharper Ifowodo himself would not buy that idea, or the junk poetry that is its product.
II.
How shall I describe James Ngwu Eze’s Unbind Me Now?
It is a series of poetic tantrums thrown by a man who believes himself to be called to speak on behalf of the people of the Middle Belt, Igbo people, and Nigeria—a man who thinks that what he says has such urgency and power that it will eventually rattle the foundations of evil as he imagines them, that these tantrums will, in short, lead to a revolution.
The things Mr Eze says in a hundred pages are mostly the same. He talks about the government (“tell mr president, it’s time / for a bruised tongue to talk,” writes he in “burning idioms”), the genocide in the Middle Belt (“tell hegseth / our doors are open,” he writes in “holy rain”), racism in America (there is a poem to George Floyd), and even the pandemic (“a virus has crept through broadway’s veins,” in “an apple with a hole in the heart”), and so on.
These tantrums are poetic in the way that greeting cards are poetic. At times they read like a parody of Niyi Osundare: in “nigeria”, for instance, he writes that “nigeria has swallowed a pestle / she must sleep standing straight” (Even Osundare can’t beat that). Sometimes they read like a parody of Okigbo, whose words give the book its title. Eze takes from Okigbo as he likes and imitates him without much discrimination. There is “a hen mid-term” in “divination time”, and where Okigbo says “NO in thunder”, Eze says, “I speak in thunder.” (The poet, I suspect, considers himself—and would like us to consider him—heir to that fine poet.)
Sometimes it is Soyinka whom he takes from. He writes of “manacled voices” and “a manacled tongue”—both are adjustments of Soyinka’s “manacled feet”, in “Chimes of Silence”. In “our chants have grown teeth”, he has the following lines:
and this dust—
shall speak for us
and the whispering winds—
speak for us
let the brooding clouds—
speak for us
the roaring flames—
speak for us. . .
This is a very open imitation of “Koko Oloro” by Wole Soyinka (“Farm or hill / Pray for me”).
As must be obvious to the reader from the examples I have drawn, Eze has a way with words. I know no one who has such an African vocabulary, who moves with such ease (Bolekaja critics would be so proud). He probably eats poems for breakfast.
Take a look at this beauty from “abandoned building”:
I built a castle in the sand
with stairs stretching to the sky
and the clouds hugging the spires,
but the flood drank it up.
O what a tragedy, what an absolute tragedy—that flood.
Some poets are lords of the incongruous metaphor, others lords of the flaccid image or line. I am sure in my heart of hearts that Eze would successfully vie with any Nigerian poet for the throne in those two areas. But, above all, he is unarguably, incontestably, Lord of the Cliché!
See this (from “prison without walls”):
but why did they rob tomorrow of its colour,
and hinder tender buds from blooming to petals,
leaving in our hearts the algorithm of fire?
Or this (from “crossroads”):
hope shallow flower again in this valley.
and the red sun shall sink over our hills.
More: “the star spangled banner / flutters in the distance” (“take it from me”); “shall the rising dust herald change” and “hopes crushed to earth” (“a farewell to silence”); “but we rose like the phoenix” (“we wear their fear like a jewel”); “we are of the earth / though drained of sap and vigour” (“bullet wounds”); “peppery verses / that sting the eyes of tyranny” (“silence”); “tell the sun to sheathe her anger behind the clouds; / rage deferred trembles through the crowd” (“apocalypse”); “sowers of grief are garlanded with medals” (“a fistful of questions”); “debris of broken dreams float in the air” and “enraged youths found valour in a common dream” (apocalypse); and “the skies don dark clouds; / mourning our stolen laughter” (“sit-at-home”).
But Mr Eze can be original, too—too original. In “elegy to memory,” “the leaves dance afro-beats”. (Sadly, he does not tell us whether it’s “Fia” or “Pakurumo”; one has to know these things.) In “a farewell to silence”, “silence incubates / the eggs of spring.”
The rhetorical questions are best. Say, “who shall challenge the / sun to a duel of eyeballs?” (elegy to memory.”) Not me. And “who shall believe our magic?” (“stolen voice.”)
The NLNG prize, sir. Surely the NLNG prize.
III.
Two statements may give a sense of how I feel about Tares Oburumu’s work. One is by W. H. Auden: “The difficulty for a man [who is a poet] is to avoid being an aesthete—to avoid saying things not because they are true, but because they are poetically effective.”
When I read Mr Oburumu’s debut collection, Origins of the Syma Species, I wrote an unpublished review titled “Notes on a Rambling”. I was frankly irritated by how he kept going on and on, in poem after poem, about things that made no sense in the context of the poem or outside it, name-dropping this or that person without anchoring the allusion, with references that could not be traced (he noted a poem by Cheswayo Mphanza that, unless it turns up tomorrow, Mphanza never wrote)—as if he had written the book in a hallucinatory state.
Things are better in Flora’s Love Colony, though he still suffers from what Auden warns against. It is a flaw in Nigeria’s male poets like Romeo Oriogun and Gbenga Adesina. All three poets also share the illusion that they are writing about history. But what they write about is History, one big abstraction that they riff on as they please.
In Oburumu’s new book, he is supposed to be writing about “Flora Shaw’s love colony”, Nigeria. One must go gently, but to start somewhere, “Nigeria” (the name) was not a matter of romance as the legend has it, and as Oburumu writes in “1914”. Shaw was not some naive girl who just dreamed up a name for a country. She was a first-rate intellectual: a brilliant and an informed political commentator in her day, she wrote for ten years for The Times on colonial affairs. She was a friend of some of the most important people in British imperial politics, from Neville Chamberlain to George Taubman Goldie (who may rival Lugard for title of Founder of Nigeria), and Lugard himself, whom she married in her forties—not out of sweet romance—but as a commitment, in her own words, to “the public thing”.
They married on 11 June 1902. Flora Shaw approved of, but did not in fact coin, the term in an article she wrote for The Times in 1897, when she and Lord Fredrick Lugard were only close friends. Officers of the Royal Niger Company had already been using “Negretia” (the Latin form of Nigeria) as a passcode of sorts for some time.
None of that is a defence or a claim that either Lugard or his wife had a right to name a nation of what was then about ten million people. But it shows how far these lines from Oburumu (“1914”) are from fact:
The moments their lips, like lovers
caught in a jitterbug, touched, she gave the astonished
thicket from which we were merely voyeurs, a name.
One does not expect a poet to be factual; a poem is a work of imagination. But one expects that if you claim to be writing about history, you establish a firm ground of fact and stand upon it to riff. Oriogun does not do this, nor does Adesina, and neither does Oburumu. The result is that you can’t quite make out what you are reading; the whole picture is indistinct, false, and often oversaturated (they replace detail with colour).
In the beginning was the rafting, too, before the empty
ships made of conquest arrived at the shore where
Pepple was the king, where the world was one world,
as soft as silk moving the air. We, the sea-dwellers
were capable of love in the way the waters flow . . .”
This idyllic picture (“Opobo, Notebook Island”) is not tainted by the truth, which is its great defect. An ex-slave and shrewd trader, Jaja became king when he defected from Bonny and founded Opobo in 1869 (the founding document, the Minima Agreement, was signed in that year). The years before were rude and very bloody. In 1837 when Pepple V (William Dappa Pepple) mounted the throne of Bonny, Jaja was a young trader and the “ships made of conquest” were already on the coast. The wahala was in the tussle between the king and Alali (or Anna People), whose house Jaja became head of. In 1855 a civil war broke out where three hundred men, tired of fighting, “ignited some gunpowder and thus ended their miserable existence,” as a British supercargo reported. It was one of many. Jaja’s break from Bonny also took place during a civil war. The sea-dwellers were far from being at ease during this time.
Oburumu also does this thing where he seems to collapse time, but it is more accurate to say he makes a mess of time. In “All Harrow, the Gwaris”, “Lugard watches the battlefield from his balcony / carved out of World War II, walks into his dream / of conquering the land”. This would appear to refer to Lugard’s march against Kano in 1803. But watch from the balcony? He was part of the expedition. And what does World War II have to do with it? He was eighty-seven when he died in 1945.
In “Sea, Voyage, Love”, “History is pre-colonial Britain” and the poet is travelling with the Queen. What is meant by “pre-colonial Britain”? England before Rome conquered it, or before the Anglo-Saxons did, or before the Normans?
***
The second statement that comes to mind when I think of this poet’s work is by James Booth. He was writing on a poem of Soyinka. He said, “Brilliant and assured in tone as Soyinka’s poetry undoubtedly is, it is also . . . metaphorically irresponsible and syntactically messy.” Oburumu is a brilliant poet—though an unfinished one, one prone to grandiloquence. Still his work cannot be said to cohere, or to have signification.
I wish I could quote “Chorus”, a poem that is a bundle of incongruities, as if plucked out of The Palm-Wine Drinkard, with confusing grammar. It has these lines: “foreshadow what will become / of me if I leave home in search of the things I have / not lost as a child” (my italics). It is obvious that this should be “the things I did not lose as a child”—the original distorts whatever he is trying to say.
A poet like this has to be judged by his moments (a line, two lines, a stanza, though he rarely writes in stanzas). But Oburumu’s best moments are also full of misses. Nevertheless:
The love of the Vatican is moved, with harps & pedals
from the little lights of Civita Di Bagnoregio,
to the small details of Christ, obsidian blood . . .
And:
Does God believe in Alain Borer enough for him
to believe in God?
I don’t even know who Alain Borer is, but I like the way of the question. I can only hope that if the NLNG Prize Committee are wise enough to award him, because his book is the only thing worth considering on the list, I hope Mr Oburumu finds his way in language and sticks to it.
But I doubt Oburumu’s Colony will make it. Ogaga Ifowodo is a veteran. He was shortlisted for A Good Mourning in 2017 and told Kola Tubosun he was sure he would win it. It went to Ikeogu Oke. The judges are unlikely to want to disappoint him a second time. E
