Green Consciousness: G'ebinyo Ogbowei And the Poetry of Environmental Praxis

Abstract

It is no news that environmental issues have permeated recent literary writings, just as Postcolonialism and Neo-colonialism did in the later part of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries African and Nigerian literatures. This new bride of artistic consciousness is derived from the need to restore the pristine environment from untoward despoliation, deforestation, and greenhouse gas emissions. Thus, this study considers environmental restoration as the artistic focus of G'Ebinyo Ogbowei's poems against the backdrop of Green consciousness. Consequently, the Green consciousness in the poems of Ogbowei is noted as an aspect of his environmentalism purviews. Environmentalism here refers to the activist role poetry and other genres of literary creations have played in calling for the restoration of the pristine environment - the Niger Delta environment, in the view of this study. Green theory is employed in this study to analyse the environmental praxis of some of the poems. Note that Green theory as a recent critical theory in literature, discusses the prognosis of ecological damage, the primacy of nature; its biological and ecological survival in an era of anthropocentrism. Green Studies is often regarded as the bedrock of Eco-Criticism. It also takes into consideration the political and economic dimensions to environmental protection and survival. These dimensions give rise to what is regarded as Green Political theory and Green Economic theory. However, in this study focus is on Green theory as an ecocritical concept. This work is carried out with particular attention to Ogbowei's poems entitled 'moods of the wounded river' to showcase his activist role in calling for the return of a pristine environment.