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In this article I focus on Gabeba Baderoon's engagement with nature and the ecological nuances in her poetry. Baderoon is an accomplished South African poet with four poetry collections to date: The Dream in the Next Body (2005), The Museum of Ordinary Life (2005), A hundred silences (2006), and The History of Intimacy (2018). These poetry collections sustain Baderoon's ecofeminist sensibility as she engages with South Africa's ecoenvironmental challenges. In expanding the scope of how ecology impacts on poetry, I strive to illustrate how Baderoon's poetry is intimately bound up with the tropes of environmental humanities, ecofeminism, ecocriticism, and aquapoetics. I interrogate Baderoon's engagement with ecological concerns in South Africa. Previous critical works about her poetry often discount how her poetry creatively harnesses ecopoetic tropes to illustrate the problematics of ecological concerns, climate change, and environmental crises. Rather, they often fixate on the portrayal of racial politics of apartheid as it culminated in the poverty of black people in her poetry. Interestingly, Baderoon does not enforce a strict and total division between these thematic concerns in her poetry collections. I argue in this article that, within the framework of commitment to ecological values, Baderoon explores the relationship between human and non-human agencies in her poetry. Arguably, the conception of human relations with the environment enables Baderoon to advocate for the protection of plants, animals, and water resources for a sustainable ecosystem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I argue that the sacred in John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo's Remains of a Tide (Ibadan: Mosuro, 2018) and Harry Garuba's Animist Chants and Memorials (Ibadan: Kraft Books, 2017) evokes a contestation of meanings involving "claimed" and "unclaimed" spaces of the sacred. In the analysis of these poetry collections, I apply Paul Ricoeur's narrative theory of memory, and concepts of mythology and mysticism. The unclaimed space in the two collections remains impenetrable, deified, and fetishised, but the claimed space is accessible, liberal, and imaginable. In interaction with the unclaimed space, the claimed space breaks the barriers insulating the unclaimed space to interrogate the real and unreal. The claimed space also accommodates the depiction of symbolic objects of interest by the two poets. For both Clark-Bekederemo and Garuba, landscapes, introspection, and recollection are symptomatic responses to experiences of rupture between the claimed and the unclaimed spaces. This article also illustrates that during a rupture, the unclaimed space can take on new meanings and stereotypical symbols can be reshaped. The sacred in literature is complicated by a structure that blends elements of the familiar and the strange in unusual configurations. The sacred in the two poetry collections is delineated along imagined and reimagined spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Genuine euphoria, which accompanied the birth of multi-ethnic Nigeria nation-state in 1960, has been regrettably deflated and more than offset by the onrush of political tension that has ravaged its polity in recent times. Hence, the deforming pressure of inequity in contemporary Nigeria logically stands out as a corollary of political tyranny. From the standpoint of inequity, political marginality ostensibly poses a contentious decoding as it often raises poignant questions in the philosophy of meanings embedded in Esiaba Irobi's Why I Don't Like Philip Larkin. In connection to this, the historical referencing of the amalgamation of northern and southern Nigeria in the poetry collection provides a test-case for the thematic quest for Biafra republic's self-determination. Agonized by a perceived marginality, retreat to nationalism offers Irobi a convenient platform to affirm the predatory and ruthless suppression of the Igbo ethnic group during and after the Nigerian civil war (between 1967 and 1970). This paper asserts that Irobi takes power imbalance for his subject matter in order to build on these contrariety and contradictions. This build-up facilitates the exploration of tension between public duty and personal affections. Remarkably, the paper concludes that Irobi's poetic thrust of marginality in the collection espouses a fury which verges on resentment at the lopsided Nigeria nation-state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to articulate the interplay between history and (autobiographical) narrative spaces, and the relationship between those spaces, and the shifting role of memory in the delineation of self-construct against tyranny in Ken Saro-Wiwa's memoir A Month and a Day: A Detention Diary. The paper engages with Saro-Wiwa's twofold campaign against ecological degradation of Ogoniland by Shell and quest for resource control of the crude deposit found in Ogoniland in order to counterbalance its successive exploitation by the Nigerian ethnic majorities in his memoir. Saro-Wiwa, in the memoir, turns away in disgust and despair from the inglorious platitude that calls for the sustaining of Nigeria nation-state's theft of Ogoni and other Delta minorities' wealth by the ethnic majorities. The paper argues that Saro-Wiwa is convinced that the exploitative economic system, which impoverishes millions of oil-bearing Ogoni and other Delta nationalities for the benefit of Nigeria's ethnic majorities, would be unthinkable without the total political emasculation orchestrated by the country's defective federal structure. Suffice it to say, this anomalous appropriation has divided Nigeria into a deeply antagonistic nation-state where the Nigerian ethnic majorities perpetually dominate the Delta's minorities through a sustained military might. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism of the book “Americanah” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is presented. It talks about ethnic chauvinism and multiculturalism. Topics discussed include cultural intolerance, ethnocentrism and cultural conflicts between various civilizations of world. It also mentions social issues like tribalism, stereotyping and scapegoating.

An examination of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah reveals a mapping of exponential growth of obtrusive racial tension which leaves in its wakes prejudice, acrimony and hatred. The article argues that despite its dialogic engagement with the possibility of harmonizing the varied characters' racial/cultural backgrounds, Adichie's Americanah's experimentation with transculturalism faded in a miasma of morbid biases and despair. This failure has a marked impact on the cultural downturn in the lives of African immigrants and other economic migrants from other parts of the world who are trapped in the social contradictions prevalent in America and England. Through concerted efforts, Adichie negotiated interracial harmony among her characters in Americanah; especially among ethnocentric characters cocooned in private world of hate, snobbishness and recherché referenced by the turbulent contemporary world. Invariably, Adichie as a transcultural writer is bounded by the need to illustrate issues which verge on individuals' intolerance for people outside their ethno-cultural or socio-political backgrounds. Nevertheless, Americanah's transcultural trope appreciates the fluidity of the present age: the confluence of global cultures, the mobility as well as nomadic nature of the 21st-century man and the need to engender a monolithic cultural outlook in a culturally polyvalent society. The paper concludes that transculturalism could only manifest in a globally differing society if the walls of ethnocentrism and racism insulating it collapse. Curiously, transculturalism in Americanah ostensibly failed due to the obtrusive racial intolerance exhibited by the varied characters who appear to have determined to cling to the divisive racial sentiments identified in their attitude. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The thematics of Femi Fatoba’s They Said I Abused the Government (2001) and Wole Soyinka’s Samarkand and Other Markets I Have Known (2002) demonstrate the potential of art to bear witness to the bizarre, depressing anomie bedevilling Nigeria between 1993 and 1998. This anomie was ruinously orchestrated by the power-hungry military, who annulled the free and fair presidential election won by Chief M.K.O. Abiola. This military incursion into Nigeria’s political sphere was facilitated by a nebulous nationhood plagued by contending differences among its federating units. The notorious brutality of General Abacha’s regime was a cavalcade of incarceration and killings of real and imagined political dissidents. Especially, outspoken politicians who fell victim to unstable power-plays were kept in detention facilities across the country. They Said I Abused the Government and Samarkand and Other Markets I Have Known’s articulation of these ‘years of the locusts’ is epitomized by the closing of newspapers, brain drain, and the imagery of stasis and displacement. These occurrences are captured by the accusatory tone of Femi Fatoba and Wole Soyinka’s poetics as they protest the military brigandage in their works. The essay seeks to explicate how protest and satire have been harnessed to articulate the subversion of nationalism in postcolonial Nigeria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay engages with Nigeria's turbulent past in Wole Soyinka's Samarkand and Other Markets I Have Known and Femi Fatoba's They said I Abused the Government. Factionalism is adopted to poignantly map the pervasive tension which engulfed the Nigerian landscape during General Sanni Abacha's tortuous military regime between 1993 and 1998. The collections further reflect how satire intersect with protest to explore a sustained anger against the military. The increasing complexity of Nigeria's nationhood comes under close scrutiny as a patchwork of cultures encased in a tenuous geographical sphere, where people of differing nationalities and religions are stampeded into a nation by the obtrusive British colonial authority. These poetry collections articulate a great deal of connection in the thematics of satire and protest: poems in both collections are preoccupied with assertive criticism of Abacha's military subjugation. The paper's overarching concern is the delineation of brutality derived from the recent historical occurrences in Nigeria. Essentially, the poems significantly re-evaluate the potential of art to bear witness to the bizarre and depressing anomie which reverses Nigeria's sovereignty during this period. Where Soyinka's poetic hacks into the incongruity of Nigeria's nationhood, Fatoba's poetry generates vitriolic humour that verges on satiric tone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It would not be overstating of the fact to say that Chinua Achebe is aforemost African writer, whose influence has been felt in the African cultural affirmation. This is most obvious inThings Fall Apart, a novel crafted to challenge the European conventional assumption that Africa has no culture. However, where Achebe privileges Okonkwo as a paradigm of African communal standard bearer, the third generation Nigerian female writers discredit the masculine violence derived from the Okonkwo's tempestuous trajectory. The paper examinesthe Nigerian female writers' countering of masculinity in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart in order to imbue in their female characters a measure of assertiveness needed for a robust African communal development. The paper will further illustrate how Nigerian female writers like Buchi Emecheta, Zaynab Alkali, Lola Shoneyin, Chika Unigwe and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie have depicted various assertive roles accorded their female characters in the plots of their novels. The paper significantly relies on Judith Butler's theory of performativity which explains the difference between biological disposition and cultural motivation of gender for the development of women in the contemporary world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Commencing within the trajectory of perseverance, this paper sets out to examine the ways in which the phenomenon of waiting has been shrewdly explored by Niyi Osundare inWaiting Laughters[Osundare, N. (1990).Waiting laughters. Lagos: Malthouse]. Waiting is considered in the context of contemporary African literature and the poet’s own Yoruba tradition. It goes on to argue that the poet extends meanings of waiting far beyond their conventional limits, thus making it a complex, multi-levelled construct deployed as an instrument of resistance in the face of deplorable socio-economic and political conditions of contemporary African states. The paper identifies several manifestations of waiting: as patience, as natural progression, as social predicament, as historical inevitability, as humour, as laughter therapy, and as resistance. Each of these notions of waiting is an element of Osundare’s preoccupation with ways of overcoming the inequities, deprivations and injustices of African nations, and thus offers strategies for minimizing the effects of oppression. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]