Environmental Sustainability, Security, and the Politics of Ecological Violence in Nnimmo Bassey’s Eco-Poetry (Published)
This study interrogates the ecological crisis in Nigeria’s Niger Delta through an interdisciplinary synthesis of postcolonial ecocriticism and environmental security discourse, foregrounding the intricate nexus between environmental sustainability and national security. Drawing on a qualitative methodology grounded in close textual analysis, the paper examines selected poems from Nnimmo Bassey’s We Thought It Was Oil, but It Was Blood and I Will Not Dance to Your Beat. It argues that Bassey’s eco-poetry transcends conventional environmental protest to function as a critical discourse that reconfigures ecological degradation as a form of structural and securitised violence. Central to this analysis is the symbolic triad of earth, oil, and blood, which encodes the entanglement of ecological devastation, economic exploitation, and human insecurity within the Niger Delta. The study further demonstrates how Bassey’s poetic imagination exposes the paradox of petro-capitalism, wherein resource abundance engenders poverty, militarisation, and socio-political instability. In sum, the paper contends that eco-poetry constitutes an epistemic and political intervention that advocates sustainable resource governance, ecological restoration, and the realisation of the Sustainable Development Goals as prerequisites for peace and stability, in Nigeria.
Keywords: Environmental Justice, Environmental sustainability, National Security, Niger Delta eco-poetry, environmental security discourse, postcolonial ecocriticism
Human-Nature Interactions in the New Normal World: A Study of Selected Pandemic Poems (Published)
The global outbreak of the Corona Virus disease in this 21st Century not only shocked the sensibilities of people but also introduced emerging patterns of behaviour and interactions that have become the new normal. One of such altered interactions is in the aspect of human-nature relations. Many scholars have churned out volumes on the scope and implications of human activities on the environment; others have linked human-induced environmental challenges to patriarchal social conditioning and proposed the dismantling of all forms of dualisms, especially the human-nature dualism. But not many have represented the disposition of humans to the natural environment in the new normal world. Hence, this paper examines the selected pandemic poems in the light of emerging patterns of interaction with the environment, using the eco-critical theory. The study concludes that the selected poets have presented the new normal as a panacea to the lingering environmental challenges which have defied many solutions in the past decades and recommends further foray into environmentally friendly adaptation discourse in the new normal world. It is important for promoting the study of content and style in eco-critical discourse and for raising consciousness towards environmental sustainability.
Onyechigoziri Chikere and Okachukwu Onuah Wosu (2022) Human-Nature Interactions in the New Normal World: A Study of Selected Pandemic Poems, European Journal of English Language and Literature Studies, Vol.10, No.7, pp.1-8
Keywords: Ecocriticism, Environmental Justice, Human nature, new normal world