Eco-Critical Literature: Regreening African Landscapes

12. Transcending the Discontents of Global Capitalism: Toward the Dialectics of De-commodified Environment in Daydream of Ants and Other Poems and The Eye of the Earth

191 12 Transcending the Discontents of Global Capitalism: Toward the Dialectics of De-commodified Environment in Daydream of Ants and Other Poems and The Eye of the Earth 1âœiV ˆÊ Ü>}L>À> The inheritance I sat on for centuries Now crushes my body and soul. (Ojaide, iÌ>Ê ÕiÃÊ21) Earth is nothing more than A cauldron of dry dreams. (Osundare, / iÊ iÃiÀÌÊ œ“iÌ 237) Introduction: The Siege of Global Capitalism, Eco-poets, and the Nation This chapter provides an aesthetic framework for understanding the ways in which global capitalism (globalization) has reshaped the topography and benchmarks of environmental, ideological, political, and socioeconomic relations, both at national and global spheres, as well as exerted adverse pressures on the continental bliss of developing nations—particularly Nigeria. Consequently, Tanure Ojaide’s and Niyi Osundare’s collections of poetry, >Þ`Ài>“ÊœvÊ
˜ÌÃÊ>˜`Ê"Ì iÀÊ*œi“à (1997) and / iÊ Þiʜv Ì iÊ >ÀÌ (1986), respectively, shall be used as texts to unearth the dimensions of the environmental upshots of the presence of the multinationals (cultural agents of global capitalism) on Nigeria’s (the Niger Delta’s) environment . As global capitalism problematizes the dynamic of subordination and domination of nations as well as reinforces the logic of core-periphery thesis, the lingering aftertaste is that periphery nations are continually in the shadow of multinational corporations, which manifests in the commodi fication of the environment as well as marketization of socioeconomic relations. Behind the mask of globalization, the multinationals undermine the Niger Delta’s environment, biodiversity, and people. Although the 192 ECO-CRITICAL LITERATURE volumes refract the commoditization of Nigeria’s environment, they also essentialize the poetics of transcending this environmental malaise, which resonates with negating the actualities of commoditized environment on the heels of global capitalism for a reinvented Nigeria. Since Nigeria’s political independence in 1960, the nation is mired in the crisis of leadership and nationhood precipitated by the bungling mode of governance instituted by the political class and their compradors, the multinational oil corporations, to perpetually hold the people down as well as to frustrate the nation’s attempt to be developed and valued in the comity of nations. This has also impacted negatively on the nation’s environment . More than five decades since Nigeria gained political independence , there seems to be palpable dissonance between the hopes as well as aspirations that the people had as it became politically independent, and what has become of self-rule in the nation. This disequilibrium between people’s hope and what is the actual nature of political leadership has animated a brand of literary experience that reverberates with what Emmanuel Obiechina called literature of “post-independence disenchantment ” (). This literary pattern animates the Ojaidean “activist role of the verbal art” (in Shantz “Beyond Socialist Realism,” 111), a revolutionized kind of writing Osundare defined as “man meaning to man” (-œ˜}Ã, 3). It is the type of literature that gauges Nigeria’s burden of memory in the wake of bungling leadership as well as environmental-unfriendly politics that percolates its nationhood. In maintaining that the paradigm that espouses the continued significance of the people’s hope at Nigeria’s attainment of political independence is no more valid, as well as the urgency of nationalist aesthetics given the actualities of postcolonial Nigeria, recent poetic voices in the nation are geared toward unearthing this departure. Thus, Nigeria’s political experience has thrown up the saliency of what could be described as an aesthetic paradigm shift (in the Kuhnian sense), a departure from anticolonialist –committed literature, to literary engagement with the inanities of “internal colonialism” speckled with globalist project. This unsavory landscape that finds accommodation in the timbre, tenor, and texture of eco-critical Nigerian literature, is described by Chidi Amuta as “the politicisation of the Nigerian literary imagination” (92). Given this backdrop, the postcolonial Nigerian condition as well as “the global economy and the forces of globalisation have become prominent characteristics of the current paradigm of world politics” (Monshipouri, Welch, and Kennedy 966). Modern Nigerian (eco)-poets have risen to this occasion. "}>}>Ê"ŽÕÞ>`i 193 Oil politics is one of the main hues of Nigerian political woes. This is so given what oil represents in the country. Virtually all political operations in the nation stem from oil, which accounts for nearly all of Nigeria’s GDP (Obi; Ojakorotu; Nwagbara “Political Power,” “Poetics of Resistance,” “In the Shadow”). Oil is the main reason for the presence of the multinationals. Beyond the rhetoric...