Eco-Critical Literature: Regreening African Landscapes

7. The Niger Delta, Environment, Women and the Politics of Survival in Kaine Agary’s Yellow-Yellow

109 7 The Niger Delta, Environment, Women and the Politics of Survival in Kaine Agary’s Yellow-Yellow }œâˆÊ Փ>‡1`i ]Ê i«>À̓i˜ÌʜvÊ ˜}ˆÃ ]Ê
˜>“LÀ>Ê-Ì>ÌiÊ1˜ˆÛiÀÈÌÞ]Ê ˆ}iÀˆ> Introduction Since the discovery of economically viable petroleum in the Niger Delta of Nigeria in 1957, the natives have witnessed their ecological, social, and economic apparatus rapidly deteriorating. The damage from oil operations is unremitting and collective, and has acted synergistically with other sources of ecological strain to result in a severely damaged coastal ecosystem that has compromised the livelihoods and health of the region’s impoverished residents. The indigenes in that region have continually cried out against the absolute hopelessness and subjugation by the oil companies and the insensitivity of the federal government to their plight. They cry out against a system that has compelled them to abandon their land for oil explorations without consultation while offering negligible compensation. Their nightmare is further compounded by what Ukpevo decries as the 1979 lurid constitution, which afforded the federal government full ownership and rights to all Nigerian territory and also the decision that all compensation for land would “be based on the value of the crops on the land at the time of its acquisition, not on the value of the land itself” (17). Since the exploration and exploitation of oil in the region have become a potential danger to the existence of the people who occupy this marginal space called the Niger Delta, confrontations of different kind have become the most pragmatic means of resisting the destruction of their ecosystems and their future. The youths of the region have taken it upon themselves to resist the mindless rape of the Niger Delta. As the con- flict between youths and the oil companies escalates to a level of greater seriousness and intensity on both sides, as terror reigned in the once fertile 110 ECO-CRITICAL LITERATURE swamps of the Niger Delta, certain muffled voices occasionally pierce the sounds of gun and mortar. Beneath the rampaging youths and the ravaging oil companies lie a group whose squeals and squeaks are almost drowned and submerged by the violence around them—the anguished voices of the women and girl-children. This situation has pushed writers in that region and some other concerned voices in the Nigerian literary scene to decry the sordid state of affairs through literary ecocritical and humanistic view points. Lawrence Buell defines ecocritical perspectives in literature as “[a] study of the relationship between literature and the environment conducted in a spirit of commitment to environmentalist praxis” (430, n.20). At the same time, Worster holds that “[e]cology . . . seemed to be a science that dealt with harmony, a harmony found in nature, offering a model for a more organic , cooperative human community” (363). Judging from the ecological disasters brought upon the Niger Delta people and their natural world, especially those caused by the exploration and exploitation of oil, this chapter examines Kaine Agary’s 9iœÜ‡9iœÜ, with emphasis on how she artistically explores environmental issues and the effect of these ecological problems on marginal groups like women and the girl-child in her debut novel. The chapter also also x-rays 9iœÜ‡9iœÜ as an attempt to give a nuanced view of women entrapped in the Niger Delta turmoil with a more chronological accuracy. The scholarship will aim at proving that the sociopolitical conditions in the Niger Delta compel women and girl-children to daily confrontations with forces militating against their existential survival and that these women and girl-children lack substantive protection at the immediate domestic environment and as such, are the real victims of the oil exploitation. Yellow-Yellow a Sociopolitical and Ecological Suppurate Literature delves into ecological issues when it crosses into the boundaries of human inchoate imagination where critical perceptions of human psychological individuality and political themes merge with the subject and object, body and environment, nature and culture. The writer delving into ecological issues aims at manifesting that articulated form of analytic modes of academic discourse channelled toward the experientially based forms of writing that Scott Slovic terms the “narrative scholarship” (12). This means that ecological literature is to be located within the delicate balance of the relationship between the human and the nonhuman world "}>}>Ê"ŽÕÞ>`i 111 where it seeks to bridge the chasm between the human and contemporary environmental situations. Consequently, this concept denotes the writer’s ability to explore the fundamental environmental...