Eco-Critical Literature: Regreening African Landscapes

6. Degraded Environment and Destabilized Women in Kaine Agary’s Yellow-Yellow

95 6 Degraded Environment and Destabilized Women in Kaine Agary’s Yellow-Yellow -՘˜ÞÊ
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LÀ>Ž> The outburst of ecologically conscious writing in Nigeria since the 1990s is by no means fortuitous. The phenomena can be described as a programmed response to the danger posed by the large-scale ecological disaster occasioned by oil exploration and industrialization. This new literary gusto, according to Byron Caminero-Santangelo, points not only to the ways that Africans have mobilized against environmental degradation, but also to the grave environmental problems faced by Africa which have become, especially in conjunction with social problems , a significant threat to its present and future well-being. (698) Though, the point must be made that Nigerian writing, which thematizes the environment, predates the 1990s. J.P. Clark’s “Streamside Exchange,” Gabriel Okara’s “Piano and Drums,” and Wole Soyinka’s “Idanre,” among others, make profound philosophical and metaphysical statements regarding their milieu. These works fit into what Kwaku AsanteDarko describes as “embody[ing] a pedagogy of ecological awareness” (6). However, it is in Niyi Osundare’sÊ/ iÊ ÞiʜvÊÌ iÊ >ÀÌ and Tanure Ojaide’s >LÞÀˆ˜Ì ÃʜvÊÌ iÊ iÌ>, both published in 1986, that one encounters a programmed and well articulated apprehension of the danger to which the environment is subjected. While Osundare bemoans the destruction of the pristine forest due to capitalist encroachment, Ojaide laments the devastation of his Niger Delta ecology by oil exploration. Both works, though considered as eco-lit, respond to different vistas of environmental degradation . Osundare views this phenomenon from the prism of deforestation and other eco-hostile activities of man, while Ojaide apprehends it from the trepidation of being a witness to a frazzled environment arising from the dire consequences of oil exploration. What can be said of Osundare’s 96 ECO-CRITICAL LITERATURE and Ojaide’s nature writing is articulated in William Slaymaker’s view as follows: Black African critics and writers have traditionally embraced nature writing, land issues and landscape themes that are pertinent to national and local cultural claims and that also function as pastoral reminiscences or even projections of a golden age when many of the environmental evils resulting from colonialism and the exploitation of indigenous resources have been remediated. (684) These two poets who have remained Nigeria’s most significant poets since the 1980s can be regarded as pathfinders for the genre of eco-conscious literature that is fast evolving in Nigeria, especially among writers from the country’s Niger Delta region. This is so because as has been noted again by Slaymaker, “Ecocriticism and the object of its study—environmental literature—are more recent developments in the course of literary history” ( 129). The predominance or concentration of eco-lit in the Niger Delta region derives from the reality that the region remains one of the most ecologically devastated in the world. The region’s experience of the oil boom easily translated into doom as the oil multinationals as well as the nation’s successive governments, whether military or civilian, connive to put the region’s ecology under severe and inhuman pressure. While the oil multinationals indulge in environmentally unfriendly practices, the government looks the other way, provides security for them, and brutally represses any dissenting groups affected by the horrendous deeds of the foreign oil firms. Therefore, while the government remains rich alongside its foreign collaborators (the oil firms), the indigenes of the oil-producing Niger Delta continue to recede into the abyss of impoverishment. Over the years, oil exploration and exploitation in the Niger Delta have assumed different frightening representations. It has become the harbinger of poverty, disease, death, pollution, extinction of biodiversity, loss of means of livelihood, agitation, restiveness, militancy, criminality, and varying degrees of ecocide pointing in the direction of Armageddon. The Nigerian writer Tanure Ojaide puts it quite succinctly, “[B]ut the major problem had to do with the discovery of oil in the Delta. The oil boom became doom for the inhabitants of the region” (*œïVÊ“>}ˆ˜>̈œ˜, 122). This reality, frightening as it is, is the lived condition in the region today. It has generated different responses in the form of intellectual "}>}>Ê"ŽÕÞ>`i 97 engagement and civil disobedience (as represented by Ken Saro-Wiwa, the late writer and environmental rights activist), armed struggle against the Nigerian nation by different militant groups, and, quite significantly, literary works—be they poetry, prose or drama. G.G...