1. STAUNCHING NIGER DELTA'S OIL CURSE: STEMMING THE TIDE OF YOUTH RESTIVENESS IN CHIMEKA GARRICKS'S TOMORROW DIED YESTERDAY (2010).
- Author
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Akingbe, Niyi and Akwen, Charles Terseer
- Subjects
OIL spills & the environment ,PETROLEUM in literature ,ECOLOGY in literature ,ENVIRONMENTAL degradation - Abstract
An attempt to illustrate how the environment has a far-reaching, marked impact on literature in respect of Chimeka Garricks's Tomorrow Died Yesterday (2010) entails an eclectic, cross-disciplinary preoccupation. It is an initiative that considers why Niger Delta's youths have to contend with not only enduring economic disenfranchisement but also environmental degradation emanating from regular oil spillages in the region. Often in a particular ecocritical literary work, a writer has to present a balanced view. For Garricks, artistic, political, economic and environmental concerns raised in the novel are inextricably interwoven with Niger Delta's youth restiveness. The article reassesses how this novel portrays the interaction between environmental degradation and youth marginalisation in the oil-bearing Delta region in contemporary Nigeria. It further examines the way Garricks explores the theme of environmental devaluation of his Niger Delta society as it impinges on the youth restiveness in Tomorrow Died Yesterday. The paper interrogates the power of imagination in its appropriation of word, imagery and symbolism to represent the debilitating problematic of environmental concerns in the oil-bearing region of Nigeria. Ecocriticism is utilised as the theoretical framework to argue that socioecological issues of the Niger Delta constitute the major focus of the novel as they underpin the economic emasculation of youths from the region, underlined in the lives of the characters portrayed in the novel. The paper concludes that the radical transformation of the Niger Delta from a peaceful littoral haven into the ransomtaking enclave of the present is grounded in Garricks's creative depiction of the youths' debilitating economic marginality, derived from the perilous environmental degradation of that region in the past decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2016