Ogaga Ifowodo has exciting news! He has a forthcoming collection, Why Does God Need a Gun?, which will be published by Masobe. Ifowodo has wonderfully shared six excerpts from the long title-poem, “From the Forest of a Million Demons (Leah Sharibu Lifts the Veil),” which forms the spine of Why Does God Need a Gun?
Enjoy the read, and keep an eye out for the release of the full collection!
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FROM THE FOREST OF A MILLION DEMONS
(Leah Sharibu Lifts the Veil)
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,
……eluding all arms, outrunning
………….my father and merging
with the night as she
……came to take me back home,
……………..screaming, louder and louder,
each step drumming on my heart:
………“Leah, don’t be AFRAID,
……….I’m coming to get YOU!”
…………..Leah, DON’T be AFRAID,
…………..I’m COMING to get YOU!!”
……………..“LEAH, DON’T BE AFRAID
………………I’M COMING TO GET YOU!!!”
She ran and called to me
………..ran and called to me,
flew across a clear river,
………..its silver fishes turning
….baby crocodiles,
landed on a sand dune belching
………blood and smoke
………………….ran even faster, towards
………a burning clutch of prehistoric trees,
fringing a frothy forest, branches
swinging low with crying baby girls
………and she fell at their feet, roots
……like monstrous cords of hair
…………….with eagle’s claws
………….digging into the earth . . .
I was stopped by a gun
from entering the forest
…………of prehistoric trees.
….I prayed to be back in the dream
….to beg mother to go back home,
…….was warned to stop screaming
…or be gagged and tied to a naked tree
its stripped bark bleeding on dead leaves.
At First, I Counted the Nights
At first, I counted the nights —
…….only the nights: daylight brightened vision,
any hope of leaving the forest, yet
returning in the gloomy shadows of sunset,
they bring news that sinks our hearts
like a stone in the river of our blood.
I gave up on the thirtieth twilight.
Then there was 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 mid-day dazzle of a night
that could not stop weeping, the light burned
my skipping heart with a dagger-flash —
….God slashing the stained cotton clouds
above our downcast heads, flaring
the promise of banishing darkness.
I saw only the shadow of a gun ready to spit
red-hot hate on the pure face of the moon.
Suffer little children to come unto me . . .
Have they brought me to their unlettered God
hiding in the forest, who called battle
……………..against sleeping children,
to save them from books and blackboards?
They Stripped Us of Our Captives’ Clothing
They stripped us of our captives’ clothing,
covered us in the cotton crudeness of their feigned faith
and pronounced us converts to raging fear,
new brides of the mujahidin, saviours of God,
beloved virgin bearers of whoring warriors.
How could I love a god that loathes me?
How could I bear the profane look and touch
……………………………………of his lewd priests?
My blood pulsed beneath the linings of my heart,
under the coarse accoutrement of forced doctrines.
………….“Leah, don’t be AFRAID,
…………..I’m coming to get YOU!”
Moved again beyond my mother’s arms, echo
of a dream lost in dustclouds, drowned
in the deafening drone of choppers
that bomb treetops and anthills far from us,
I fear I’ll be a mother before I’m free,
one midnight the shamed moon hiding its face,
the present tensed infinitely,
and must build my last defence
in the faith of my father, in a God
that will not make little children suffer to come unto him.
I watch them pray, guns ready but laid by the side,
rising-and-bending, rising-and-bending
………in half reverence,
forehead-to-earth, forehead-to-earth
……..in full submission — to what God?
As they pray facing where the sun rises,
darkness swells and veils my eyes with tears.
Suffer the little children . . .
I watch them pray to the burnt-black stones
in the armoured cages of their hearts,
under trees cowering from the angry sky,
the air still and stale all day stirs to sweep
their devious words under dead leaves —
……somewhere in blood-dimmed light
……there’s an altar for their prayers?
I watch them pray to the stone in their hearts,
chant in vain as if to wake the dead,
evening whirls them into a hollow ritual
of atoning for crimes still curdling in their veins.
It doesn’t matter the hour they pray: shadows
fall on their white thobes, dyeing
them darker than their battle blacks.
And I pray, the sun a dying ember:
have mercy, Merciful God, for schoolgirls
in a world paralysed by prayerful men.
And then they rise. From the tattered
rugs stepped on too solemnly, feet washed
of sinful dust, blood of the slain stowed
beneath fingernails, their faces glowing
with God, ablution and absolution,
prostration and persecution, worshipping
the burnt-black stones in their hearts.
I cannot take my eyes off their faces
now so aflame with divine decrees
to slash and slay, bomb and burn,
snatch and rape, take as slaves, to make
all weep and mourn who survive their God.
I watch their faces glow with the sacred
seal for tomorrow’s battle plan:
the book-besotted place to raid,
the infidels to convert at their death,
the believers to slay while they pray,
the acres of crop to set on fire
and the virgin spoils of holy war!
the virgin spoils of holy war!
virgin spoils of holy war!
And soon they are cleaning their guns,
sharpening axes, and sniffing, smoking,
popping pills, scratching a furious itch,
eyes glazed by a dream of heaven in hell, red,
rolling inward, a glimpse of paradise, sinking
into the black hole nothing can fill.
A blackbird, noonheat suddenly softening,
spreads its wings and rides the current to the hill.
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
in whose crude cotton faith blacks out?
Who will listen to the cries of little girls
in a world deafened by guns, bombs, weeping?
I have put all my hope in God
but is He aware?
If I could, I would buy a bell
to wake Him up.
The forest is my new school, its leaves green pages.
I will learn its indifference to whatever blight or bounty the nights and days ahead bring.
I will watch the leaves yellow and crab on boughs bathed with the never dying dust.
I will listen to the song of drying sap and the nervous ants racing up flaking tree trunks.
See how raindrops frothlessly wash the heads of the trees, rinsing down to their roots.
Have the gates of our school been reopened, our tears mopped from the floor of the dorm, the sad odour of God’s saviours scrubbed from the walls?
I will keep hoping the birds will come; lately, they’ve been keeping their distance.
In the heart of the season, the rains stay wrapped in the clouds and angry winds whip sand in itching eyes.
Yesterday at noon the sun scorched my scalp, snapped my head at an acute angle up at the sky.
I watch time stretch through its long shadows, and watch its hands shrink into a dwarf’s.
A rogue aroma of coal-grilled fish tells me I have forgotten the smell of fresh fura and my mother’s cooking.
Will the snake hiss before burying its fangs in my calf or silently sink the venom in a vein?
I saw three vultures perched on the baobab’s highest branch, forty feet away: I prayed it be hunted beast, not human, the awaited feast.
See the smoke of simmering fires slowly disappearing, mourning what died.
Desert dust sails with the wind through the trees, settles like talcum on my forehead.
How day changes its colours, light rays scattered and dulled too quickly.
How silent the night, how scary the growls of a motorcycle.
Look at the faces of God’s saviours, fearful and forlorn, trapped between death and a fugitive’s fate.
Look at the faces of the righteous sworn to a strict code of saving God with guns and bombs!
Hear the roar of an airplane, see the holiest warrior lead the dash, as if Satan is at his elbow, pointing his gun at him! See him stop for a trembling second and look up, begging the moon to lift him out of the forest of his fears to the last sky of his dreams.
All the trouble it takes to hug guns and bombs, to conquer sleeping schoolgirls with only books under their pillows!
Will a bomb fall on us from a plane tricked from its course?
A yellow scarf snagged by a tent pole insists on proof of the vagabonds’ presence: I did not reach for it; let it bear what witness it will.
I can’t tell if the weeping I hear now is from me or the wind whirling fallen leaves for a confetti to lighten the mood.
If I stare long enough, my eyes never squinting behind the mesh of the forced faith burqa, will I notice the line between a girl and a tree?
If I stare and blink and stare and blink and stare and blink, my eyes safely stowed in my skull behind the mesh of the forced faith burqa, will I see my escape path past the armed guards through the trees? Will the trees swarm me like a million demons?
A date palm does not go to school, a date palm cannot hold a book in its hands, a date palm has no date to remember: I should plant my heart and become a date palm.
Somewhere in this forest, bees are making honey: if I die here, may my soul go up to God, my body grow up as honeysuckle.
The frantic order to flee this minute to another camp and not look back.
Will this or the next or the one that follows be our death camp?
Will this or the next or the one that follows make me the trophy virgin wife?
Will this or the next or the one that follows be where I birth new saviours of God?
Who will shepherd lost children out of the ever-thickening forest of fear?
This forest or wherever else they may take us is my new school.
I’ll learn to read the air and the faces that appear in it like books.
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