(East) African postcolonial ecocriticism: Revisiting Okot p’ Bitek’s Song of Prisoner

This article celebrates Okot p’Bitek’s contribution to East African literature in general and the song school of East Africa in particular, by revisiting one of his less-known works, Song of Prisoner on the fiftieth anniversary of its publication. I subject the text to a close reading in order to demonstrate how p’Bitek uses imagery that is drawn from East Africa’s natural environment in a way that evokes issues that are an assault on the prevailing social and political order in East Africa at the time, in a nuanced manner. With the benefit of hindsight, the paper establishes that p’Bitek’s attempt to preserve his natural environment (that of East Africa) through writing it into his poetry, was a precursor for texts that would later be examined within the framework of the contemporary critical theory of postcolonial ecocriticism, and that using the text, one can narrow the scope further in a manner that takes into account the specificities of (East) African environmental literature. In so doing, the paper establishes that p’Bitek indeed highlights social realities through his poetry, in order to launch his attack on the existing neo-colonial capitalistic order prevailing at the historical moment of his writing, thus confirming that he displays a social vision that strives for decolonisation without the exploitative aftermath encapsulating modernity. The paper thus demonstrates how this poem is still relevant as a study to the student of East African literature reading it in the 21st century.

Ecocriticism

This review of publications in the field of ecocriticism in 2019 comprises seven sections: 1. Introduction: Ecocriticism, Climate Change, and COVID-19; 2. Anthropocene Ecocriticism; 3. Affective Ecocriticism; 4. Postcolonial Ecocriticism; 5. Zoocriticism and Phytocriticism; 6. Ecocriticism and Ecomedia Studies; 7. Conclusion. The review focuses on six monographs, one edited book, and two journal issues. Ecocriticism publications in 2019 reflect an imperative to devise new means of signification in response to planetary concerns. The biospheric urgencies of the Anthropocene and its catastrophic imprint of climate change continue to draw ecocritical attention to issues of time, scale, embodiment, and affect. Attuned to the Anthropocene context, 2019 publications demonstrate sustained attention to posthumanist thinking, including more-than-human ontologies. More specifically, the year brought valuable additions to postcolonial ecocriticism, affective ecocriticism, and zoocriticism as well as strides in the theorization of ecophobia. New directions in phytocriticism, hydrocriticism, and sumbiocriticism (an ecocritical mode attentive to the manner in which a text engages ideas of symbiosis) evince the field’s ongoing diversification within the environmental humanities ambit. 2019 saw significant developments in ecopoetic studies as well as highly generative confluences between ecocriticism and ecomedia studies, two complementary fields regarded historically as separate domains. The extension of ecocritical methods to the literatures of Turkey, Pakistan, Cuba, and other non-anglophone contexts signifies the continuous evolution of the field beyond its provenance in British and American studies of nature writing.

“Sing the Bones Home”: Material Memory and the Project of Freedom in M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!

M. NourbeSe Philip’s 2008 book-length poem Zong! represents maritime materialities below the sea’s surface in relation to aesthetic geographies of the sea in the aftermath of slavery as an abyss of loss, thereby extending modernist aesthetics while offering a strategic and revisionary response to male-centered modernist writing. Keen attention into the sea as an innovating and renewing source reveals that the poem imagines the sea as a literal, formal, and thematic agent for the “decontamination” of language—which, Philip maintains, is contaminated by imperialism—and of the received history about slavery. The poem focuses its investigation on the case of the 1781 Zong massacre and the Gregson v. Gilbert maritime insurance case that arose in its wake. Zong! mourns the massacre of 150 Africans who were thrown overboard so that owners of the slave ship could collect insurance money on lost “cargo”. In conversation with Caribbean poets and thinkers, such as Grace Nichols, and African oral traditions, the poem explores forms of memory that go beyond the non-history officially afforded to the enslaved and their descendants. Throughout the poem, the sea is a site of decontamination through which Zong! stages its attempt to recover the unrecoverable. While many scholars have understandably focused on the events aboard the ship, a small number of ecocritical readings have highlighted the poem’s engagement with the materiality of the sea. Drawing on postcolonial ecocriticism and black feminist theories of the human, this article will discuss the sea as a material geography, going deeper to investigate the poem’s rarely discussed focus on biological and chemical materiality as juxtaposed to representations of black women’s flesh, arguing that it functions as a feminist provocation to both human exceptionalism and the racial boundaries of the human.

An Ecocritical Reading of Selected African Poems

This paper discusses some ecocritical ideas in selected poems by Kofi Awoonor, Kofi Anyidoho and the Negritude poets David Diop and Birago Diop. Drawing on postcolonial ecocriticism theory the paper focuses on ecocritical symbolisms and their ramifications in order to show how African poets attend to the environment, community and modernity’s many flaws. The consideration of the Negritude poems in this study stems from the fact that Negritude Literature in general and the selected poems in particular have been examined mainly within the context of Black African identity and the antiracist effort in general. The paper demonstrates that ecological motifs or symbols are deployed by some African poets to express life, survival, and nostalgia.

“They’ve killed the dogs!”: Land, literature and canines in contemporary Zimbabwe

This article explores the positioning of the dog in representations of farm takeovers in Zimbabwe between 2000 and 2017. It highlights the localised embeddedness of animal lives within social processes at a specific juncture of postcolonial history. The article focuses particularly on this moment marked by abrupt reversals of power, geographical distributions of people and animals, and the erasure of many physical and psychological borderlines. It focuses particularly on two novels, Graham Lang’s Place of Birth (2006) and Ian Holding’s Unfeeling (2005). It examines ways in which dogs feature as both physical presences and as psychological refractors for human responses to the violent invasions depicted in these novels. Animals of all kinds have been largely neglected in studies of the land-appropriation process, and the article gestures towards the fruitful combination of animal studies and an historically-situated, multispecies, postcolonial ecocriticism.