Versifying the environment and the ‘Oil Encounter’ : Tanure Ojaide’s Delta Blues & home songs

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dc.contributor.authorAghoghovwia, Philip Onoriodeen_ZA
dc.date.accessioned2014-07-07T12:13:24Z
dc.date.available2014-07-07T12:13:24Z
dc.date.issued2013
dc.descriptionCITATION: Aghoghovwia, P. O. 2013. Versifying the environment and the ‘Oil Encounter’ : Tanure Ojaide’s Delta Blues & home songs. Alternation, 6:175-196.en_ZA
dc.descriptionThe original publication is available at http://alternation.ukzn.ac.zaen_ZA
dc.description.abstractThis paper focuses on Nigeria’s Niger Delta using literary representations from the region to interrogate the oil encounter and an exploration of its impact on social and environmental structures. The paper situates Tanure Ojaide’s Delta Blues & Home Songs (1998) within the discourse of environmental justice and ecocriticism, reflecting on the poet’s excoriation of the oil encounter as the harbinger of environmental degradation. Of particular interest is the unique and alternative insight – a kind of insider/indigenous knowledge – this text provides in the agitations for environmental remediation and social justice. The paper argues that through the geography of lived and imagined memory of the pre-oil exploration past, the poet stretches our scientific and technological imagination in proffering solutions to the environmental and social challenges that attend the oil encounter. The poet calls for a lived kind of environmentalism as he invites the reader to inhabit the cultural world of his Niger Delta where he imaginatively recalls the past – of his childhood – of fishing and farming; when ‘the old ways were still very vibrant’ (Ojaide, Poetic Imagination 1996:121). The paper concludes that this near utopian past which the poet versifies, becomes a model for the remediation of the oil-polluted Niger Delta environment. Part of the work of this paper, then, reflects on the particular contributions that literary and cultural perspectives can offer in apprehending the twin issues of justice – environmental and social – occasioned by the oil encounter, and how these perspectives might fruitfully enter into a conversation that is largely dominated by the sciences.en_ZA
dc.description.versionPublisher's version
dc.format.extent22 pagesen_ZA
dc.identifier.citationAlternation: Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of the Arts and Humanities in Southern Africa (Formerly International Journal for the Study of Southern African Literature and Languages)en_ZA
dc.identifier.citationAghoghovwia, P. O. 2013. Versifying the environment and the ‘Oil Encounter’ : Tanure Ojaide’s Delta Blues & home songs. Alternation, 6:175-196.en_ZA
dc.identifier.issn2519-5476 (online)
dc.identifier.issn1023-1757 (print)
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/10019.1/92287
dc.language.isoen_ZAen_ZA
dc.publisherCSSALLen_ZA
dc.rights.holderAlternationen_ZA
dc.subjectOjaide, Tanure, 1948- -- Criticism and interpretationen_ZA
dc.subjectNiger River Delta (Nigeria) -- Poetryen_ZA
dc.subjectEnvironmental literature -- History and criticismen_ZA
dc.subjectSocial Justice in literatureen_ZA
dc.subjectEcocriticism -- Africaen_ZA
dc.titleVersifying the environment and the ‘Oil Encounter’ : Tanure Ojaide’s Delta Blues & home songsen_ZA
dc.typeArticleen_ZA
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