Versifying the environment and the ‘Oil Encounter’ : Tanure Ojaide’s Delta Blues & home songs
Date
2013
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
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Publisher
CSSALL
Abstract
This paper focuses on Nigeria’s Niger Delta using literary representations
from the region to interrogate the oil encounter and an exploration of its
impact on social and environmental structures. The paper situates Tanure
Ojaide’s Delta Blues & Home Songs (1998) within the discourse of
environmental justice and ecocriticism, reflecting on the poet’s excoriation
of the oil encounter as the harbinger of environmental degradation. Of
particular interest is the unique and alternative insight – a kind of
insider/indigenous knowledge – this text provides in the agitations for
environmental remediation and social justice. The paper argues that through
the geography of lived and imagined memory of the pre-oil exploration past,
the poet stretches our scientific and technological imagination in proffering
solutions to the environmental and social challenges that attend the oil
encounter. The poet calls for a lived kind of environmentalism as he invites
the reader to inhabit the cultural world of his Niger Delta where he
imaginatively recalls the past – of his childhood – of fishing and farming;
when ‘the old ways were still very vibrant’ (Ojaide, Poetic Imagination
1996:121). The paper concludes that this near utopian past which the poet
versifies, becomes a model for the remediation of the oil-polluted Niger
Delta environment. Part of the work of this paper, then, reflects on the
particular contributions that literary and cultural perspectives can offer in
apprehending the twin issues of justice – environmental and social –
occasioned by the oil encounter, and how these perspectives might fruitfully
enter into a conversation that is largely dominated by the sciences.
Description
CITATION: Aghoghovwia, P. O. 2013. Versifying the environment and the ‘Oil Encounter’ : Tanure Ojaide’s Delta Blues & home songs. Alternation, 6:175-196.
The original publication is available at http://alternation.ukzn.ac.za
The original publication is available at http://alternation.ukzn.ac.za
Keywords
Ojaide, Tanure, 1948- -- Criticism and interpretation, Niger River Delta (Nigeria) -- Poetry, Environmental literature -- History and criticism, Social Justice in literature, Ecocriticism -- Africa
Citation
Alternation: Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of the Arts and Humanities in Southern Africa (Formerly International Journal for the Study of Southern African Literature and Languages)
Aghoghovwia, P. O. 2013. Versifying the environment and the ‘Oil Encounter’ : Tanure Ojaide’s Delta Blues & home songs. Alternation, 6:175-196.
Aghoghovwia, P. O. 2013. Versifying the environment and the ‘Oil Encounter’ : Tanure Ojaide’s Delta Blues & home songs. Alternation, 6:175-196.