REIMAGING THE PASTORAL IN BARINE NGAAGE’S SONG OF DAWN

Abstract

Creative texts deploring the oil-induced destruction of the natural environment of the Niger Delta parsimoniously romanticize the lost pastoral environment. The idealization of the pastoral is stimulated not by an interest to essentialize the pastoral, but by a concern with the oil politics in Nigeria with its vitiating import for the human dependants on the environment. As instantiated in Olaniyi Okunoye’s “Alterity, Marginality and the national Question in the Poetry of Niger Delta” and a few other essays are examined in this paper, the concern for the effects of the oil politics is also heaved into the scholarship generated by the environmental texts. Departing from the anthropocentric focus of much of the literary scholarship on the Niger Delta environment, this paper with a slant towards culture and environment intersection in Ecocriticism, examines in Barine Ngaage’s Song of Dawn the imbrication of culture and the environment. The collection reveals a culture and nature interface in which both establish their utility on the basis of the existence of the other with neither being dominant over the other.