Nature, Environment, and Activism in Nigerian Literature

Sule E. Egya

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367436056
• eBook ISBN: 9781000050080
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: African Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Nature, Environment, and Activism in Nigerian Literature is a critical study of environmental writing, covering a range of genres and generations of writers in Nigeria.

With a sustained concentration on the Nigerian experience in postcolonial ecocriticism, the book pays attention to textual strategies as well as distinctive historicity at the heart of the ecological force in contemporary writing. Focusing on nature, the environment, and activism, the author decentres African ecocriticism, affirming the eco-social vision that differentiates environmental writing in Nigeria from those of other nations on the continent. The book demonstrates how Nigerian writers, beyond connecting themselves to the natures of their communities, respond to ecological problems through indigenous literary instrumentalism. Anchored on the analytical concepts of nature, environment, and activism, the study is definitive in foregrounding the contribution of Nigerian writing to studies in ecocriticism at continental and global levels.

This book will be of interest to scholars of African and Postcolonial literature, ecocriticism, and the environmental humanities.

1
Introduction

The Nigerian experience in postcolonial ecocriticism

In the concluding chapter of his book Different Shades of Green: African Literature, Environmental Justice, and Political Ecology, Byron Caminero-Santangelo remarks that “postcolonial regional particularism will not only be attentive to shared characteristics of a place in the world but also pay close attention to differences within such a place” (184). In this book, I pursue this logic further: ecocriticism in Africa needs to go beyond regional particularism to a national one for greater attentiveness to differences within the region. That is, we need to decentre the category “Africa” as we think in terms of ecological differences. There are two immediate reasons for this. First, it is by now a well-known epistemological argument that we cannot lump together the historical and cultural particularities of the region’s peoples, whether in the precolonial past or post-colonial present, especially as it regards knowledge production.¹ Beyond visible commonalities, differences abound, some of them profound and with socioecological consequences. Second, ecocriticism as a field of studies thrives on the notion of difference. Launched in North America, as its history indicates, with studies of the particularities of American nature writers (see especially Lawrence Buell’s The Environmental Imagination), ecocriticism has continued to emphasise that while ecological crises can be of a global scale, the best way to view them would be from a local lens by which the local becomes the locus of understanding the global. Besides, with an increasing focus on the nonhuman, the material, there is the need to continue to stretch the logic of difference because natural worlds are rooted in localities.

Nigerian literature is famously rich in evocation of environment, both physical and non-physical. In the non-physical aspect, the imagination is tied to writers’ cultural, spiritual connection to a place, usually their birthplace (as in the case of Christopher Okigbo hinging his inspiration to his birthplace’s water goddess Mother Idoto and Wole Soyinka to the god Ogun). In the physical aspect, there is a lot of attention to natural (biotic and abiotic) life forms such as water, trees, mountains, the sun, and the moon. There is a growing activism for the protection of such life forms, especially in sites of industrial extractions. This book is a theoretical and analytical study of this broad spectrum of the environment in Nigerian literature, under three linked and intertwined conceptual categories: nature, the environment, and activism. It is crucial to emphasise, from the outset, that the categorisation into three is methodological, mainly to construct an interpretive approach. My aim is to present, with attention to the three categories, the distinctiveness of Nigerian experience in what has come to be known as postcolonial ecocriticism. This is the first attempt, as far as I know, to focus on Nigerian literature with a program-matic outlook that foregrounds its socio-ecological force, ranging from nature-human relations to the present ecological crisis and to deliberate efforts made by writers to save the earth. Furthermore, the book projects the rich tradition of environmental writing in Nigeria, which is usually subsumed in studies that focus mainly on the continent of Africa as a whole without paying sufficient attention to national or sub-national particularities. The book, it is also hoped, should correct the impression that literary environmentalism in Nigeria is only about the Niger Delta region. Because of the growing body of writings on the eco-destruction in the region as a result of oil extraction, most studies on ecocriticism in Nigeria have tended to focus on only the region. The scope of this book is wide and encapsulates other forms of environmental literature in Nigeria.

Theoretical and methodological approaches are rooted in postcolonial ecocriticism – an ecocriticism that takes into consideration the peculiarities of Nigeria as a postcolonial society. This bottom-up approach to the study of environmental literature, which most postcolonial ecocritics have preferred (see Slovic, Rangarajan, and Sarveswaran 1–10; Bonnie and Hunt 1–13), can only be realised if we think beyond continental generalisations. Aside from establishing the distinctiveness of Nigerian experience, I pay keen attention to how humans relate to their environment in Nigeria in the past and in the present. I develop ideas from material ecocriticism, especially within the frame of what Karen Barad calls “agential realism” (see Kerridge 19). In the context of this agential realism rooted in Nigeria’s oralities, our understanding of human agency is radicalised so that humans alone do not claim agential powers where other nonhuman beings are involved. Also referred to as distributed or shared agency (see Cajetan Iheka), the recast form of agency in material ecocriticism acknowledges nonhuman beings and objects in situations where they assist humans to accomplish a thing. With this background, I project the pre-modern and modern relationship between humans and their environments in Nigeria and conclude that unless the relationship based on interdependence is sustained, there may be no environmental future for Nigeria, no matter the degree of activism.

This study responds to recent works in postcolonial ecocriticism, from which it has benefitted. Caminero-Santangelo’s Different Shades of Green, F. Fiona Moolla’s Natures of Africa: Ecocriticism and Animal Studies in Contemporary Cultural Forms, and Cajetan Iheka’s Naturalizing Africa: Ecological Violence, Agency, and Postcolonial Resistance in African Literature have made significant contributions to the field. Caminero-Santangelo’s monograph is more concerned about environmentalism in Africa, especially in the context of global capitalism, consistently making the case that the conditions in Africa demand situated protocols for a fruitful understanding of environmental struggles and writings in Africa. Moolla’s edited book of essays pays attention to cultural and spiritual connections that humans establish between them and their environments in different parts of Africa, each society having something that is really peculiar to it. Iheka’s book, perhaps the most recent in the field, attempts to expand the scope of African ecocriticism to the extent that it considers some unlikely literary texts, such as Nurrudin Farah’s novels, which have not previously been read from an ecocritical perspective. Iheka argues emphatically that in African ecocriticism, our focus should shift from human-centred ecocritical concern to other-than-human-centred ecocritical concern. All these books have chapters on Nigerian ecocritical writing, especially on the Niger Delta region, but their focus is on continental particularity, with Nigeria being treated in comparison with other nations of Africa. One main issue that differentiates my book from them is the exclusive attention to Nigeria. This enables me to pay closer and keener attention to local details, thereby presenting a comprehensive ecocritical study on Nigeria, the type that does not exist yet. To this extent, canonical and relatively unknown texts are read side by side to, on the one hand, demonstrate the textual depth of Nigerian ecocriticism and, on the other, to bring the richness of Nigerian eco-writing to the attention of international ecocriticism. In this premise, my central argument is that environmental issues are necessarily local, even though there are global connections, and attention to the local remains the most viable approach to understand the contribution of writers and other cultural artists to the fate of the earth. The distinctive Nigerian experience, as a body of ecocritical writings, is crucial to the understanding of not only the African situation but also the global situation. This book pays closer attention to historical details and locally derived artistic strategies, and it offers insights to current environmental realities in Nigeria.

Nigerian ecological-postcolonial particularity

I deliberately place “ecological” before “postcolonial” in the hyphenated word of the subheading. This is an operational strategy of the framework within which the selected texts in this study are read. It is meant to indicate that, as evident in Nigerian history and literature, before the peoples who make up Nigeria today experienced the postcolonial, they had experienced the ecological and have continued to do so.² In other words, Nigerian literature, perhaps more than any other national literatures in Africa, remains a rich resource with which to validate the argument that nature and the environment, the biotic and the abiotic life forms, and indeed the relations between the human and the nonhuman, have long been thematised in Africa before the emergence of what we now know as ecocriticism. Writing in 2007, William Slaymaker could, therefore, conclude that “Nigerian literature is a treasure trove for the ecocritic and literary environmentalist” (130). To unveil this “treasure trove,” as is my major aim in this book, is to project the aesthetic compass of Nigerian literature from the traditional lore to the modern craft. As my focus here is on the modern craft, which, of course, takes its life from the traditional lore, I return us to the categories of nature, environment, and activism, as they structure written eco-literature. By elaborating on them here, I attempt to construct the particularity of the ecocritical experience in Nigerian literature.

Nature, environment, activism

I use nature as a concept to capture the closeness of humans to their natural-spiritual environment, their interdependence, and the fruitful world of harmony that is imagined by writers. People’s closeness to nature in the precolonial past, their understanding of their ecology, and their spiritual connections to the ecosystems were ways through which they were othered by colonial institutions (government, religion, education) through the discourse of primitiveness. While the colonialists chose to view it as primitive, pagan, and superstitious, the people’s connection with the natural world was such that they saw themselves as part of the world, and the form they took as human was tentative, ephemeral, and impermanent. Life was thought of in the form of a cycle whereby the human dies and returns to the dead and then prepares to return to the world through the process of incarnation.³ The human form, in its transience, becomes something of a bodily ensemble of other life forms, which need attending to in the form of constant recognition and interaction. For instance, connecting himself to Mother Idoto, as Okigbo does in the poem “Idoto,” implies recognising the attributes of the goddess in his lineage, in himself, and constantly interacting with her spiritually and physically since it sometimes entails going to a specified river to perform certain rituals:

Before you, mother Idoto,
naked I stand,
before your watery presence,
a prodigal

leaning on an oilbean;
lost in your legend….

(1–6)

The persona, having strayed into western modernity, chooses to return, now seeing herself/himself as a prodigal. In other words, having compared the two (tradition and modernity), s/he realises that s/he had earlier taken a wrong decision. To return to the water goddess, to the native ways of life, is to privilege nature, as the poem does.

There is also a strong form of interdependence, valued in traditional society as much as taking water out of a river for domestic purposes. This interdependence is a phenomenon that seeks to destabilise the rationality of enlightenment/modernity in the present time whereby some literary works suggest a return to ‘nature’ by staging indigenous epistemologies as a way forward for societal progress. In point of fact, Okigbo’s notion of prodigality is a metaphorical rendering of the agitation, since colonial time, that a retreat from a rather failed west-rooted modernity, indeed a return to traditionalism, is one way for Nigeria to get to know the roots of her socio-political problems. Writers discussed under the category of nature are not necessarily conscious environmental writers in that their interests are shaped by traditionalism or, if you prefer, nativism, and the nature (human-nonhuman relations) described in their works is part of the larger context of the pre-modern social space. This is, however, not to think of nature as being in the past because it is pre-modern. It is, rather, in a continuous conflict with failed modernity in Nigeria – failed because the promises of modernity are yet to be fulfilled, and traditionalism constantly reminds us that rather than continuing to hope on modernity, we need to return to nativism. The points about nature are fully fleshed out in Chapter 2.

In the case of environment, I focus on the aestheticisation of the Nigerian built landscape. That is, the human-influenced environment in literature, from the rural to the urban, especially with the onset of modernity. One of the consequences of modernity is the transformation of rural and urban spaces, described by Emily Brownell and Toyin Falola as a “massive human intervention in landscapes and […] encroachment of the modern world into [African] nature” (1). In colonial terms, this transformation is viewed as western civilisation. By now, people have been persuaded to abandon their natural way of living, their close contacts and interdependence with nature, and to adopt the sophisticated sheltering of modernity. This entails destroying nature to create a built home, western-style. Powerfully drawn to modern consciousness by colonial narratives, Nigerians (especially the emerging elite) acquired a taste and a technology by which they effect the destruction of nature in order to raise structures as a normal way of living. But the urbanisation process, even from the beginning, is fraught with insufficient urban and regional planning. One of the early poems of J. P. Clark titled “Ibadan” captures the potential chaos that will eventually become characteristic of most Nigerian urban centres. The six-line poem reads,

Ibadan,
running splash of rust
and gold – flung and scattered
among seven hills like broken
china in the sun.

The rust of the roofing zincs, when reflected by the sun, gives a gold colour. But it is deeper than that, as the feeling of having gold is what most people feel when they are lucky to have a white-collar job and live in a city like Ibadan. The sense of golden modernity is contrasted with the reality of rust. The city, unorganised, unplanned, and untended, gives the picture of broken china from an aerial view. In this short poem, Clark powerfully interrogates the kind of modernity that bids us to leave the comfort of nature, migrate to the city (notice the reality of overpopulation in “flung and scattered”), and live in rust while having the feeling of possessing gold.

With neo-liberal capitalism, Nigerian landscape becomes severely pressured by the technology of building, of exerting forces on nature. Even before flag independence, what eventually became a large-scale modern invasion of nature in Nigeria began in 1957 with the discovery of crude oil in Oloibiri in the Niger Delta region. The Delta region, till today, remains the most sordid example of the de-naturing of Nigerian landscape, where the effects are vivid and unashamedly left unclean – oil spills, gas flares, abandoned large equipment, polluted waters, etc.⁴ Beyond human-caused environmental hazards, Nigeria has come to contend with the effects of climate change, which have manifested mainly in the forms of excessive rains, flooding, erosion, desertification, drought, etc. Literary works are increasingly emerging in different traditional genres and in new ones (open mic poetry, stand-up comedy, documentary film) dealing with the fate of the landscape in the present time. The literary works are concerned with the creation of the modern space, through urbanisation, to cater for a modern life and how the creation profoundly affects the physical environment. At this point, the Nigerian writer has become conscious of the environment, particularly its crises, which are, in the view of the writer, the consequences of failed modernity. Chapter 3 is where I further purse the degradation of the environment as a result of human activities and climate change.

Describing the physical environment or the landscape, as some conscious environmental writers do, is not enough. A strand of environmental writing, therefore, pushes the boundary towards activism, whereby emphasis is laid on the instrumentalism of literature to the extent that the writer could be viewed as militant. In this premise, I use the category of activism to draw attention to environmental writing that is aggressively confrontational to institutional powers in zones of deliberate eco-destruction. The notion of activism pursued here is mainly textual to the extent that my attention is on the activisms of the characters in the texts, not necessarily of the authors, although I present the argument that the texts’ focalisers are often the voices of the authors. I, therefore, attempt to shift the focus from the writer-activist (Nixon, Slow Violence 14–16) to the activist imaginary created through the force of literary alterity. It is a fact that environmental activism, the type I deal with here, is more dramatised in what is emerging as the Niger Delta eco-writing – a category that emerged as a result of the judicial killing of Ken Saro-Wiwa, who suffered persecution for his environmen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: the Nigerian experience in postcolonial ecocriticism
• 2 Natures
• 3 Environments
• 4 Activisms
• 5 Conclusion: the future of Nigerian ecocriticism
• Works cited
• Index