Paper short abstract:

“Nature” & “environment” are not universal concepts, Ramachandra Guha warned in 1989. Neither are ecocriticism and écopoétique. This paper asks: what does this statement mean for a researcher or an author in Nigeria, the United States, France, or the Ivory Coast? Definitely, always something else.

Paper long abstract:

Ecocriticism or écopoétique means something different depending on whether we are based at a university in Nigeria, the United States, France, or the Ivory Coast; the language and the region of the world influencing both the method and the corpus. The aim of this paper is first to survey what ecocriticism/écopoétique means in English, in French, and in specifically how it is understood in West Africa. Second, it is about participating in the collective effort to challenge the chronology presenting Anglo-American ecocriticism as “the origin” of literary criticism of environmental perspectives. As Tanure Ojaide (Okuyade, vii) wrote: “There has been some form of eco-criticism in African scholarship long before it became vogue in the Western academy”. Finally, in order to engage with a postcolonial, West African construction of the environment, the importance of considering West African literary and scholars’ works – including the ones only published in West Africa – and the need to recognize “new kinds of environmental discourses” (Caminero-Santangelo and Myers), will be discussed.

Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I attempt to create a connection between the practice of ecocriticism in Nigeria and in Cameroon, two neighbouring West African countries that are historically and culturally linked in spite of their colonially framed dissimilarities.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I attempt to create a connection between the practice of ecocriticism in Nigeria and in Cameroon, two neighbouring West African countries that are historically and culturally linked in spite of their colonially framed dissimilarities. My starting point is the argument that environmental literature (as a creative practice and as a critical discourse) is necessarily local, paying attention to ecological particularities that define a locality. For instance, how does the postcolonial experience of each country shape the course of ecocriticism? In other words, how can the distinctive ecological experience of Nigeria or Cameroon feed the discourse of postcolonial ecocriticism? While emphasising the particularities of each country, I am also interested in drawing attention to the strands of environmental literature that suggest transnational ecocritical discourse from a West African perspective as opposed to, say, a Southern African perspective. How can the distinct experiences of West African nations in ecocriticism coalesce into what we may frame as West African ecocriticism? With a comparative analysis of the poetry of G’Ebinyo Ogbowei from Nigeria and the poetry of Nsah Mala from Cameroon, I pay attention to not only the present inter-connecting experiences of the Anthropocene, but also suggest that a West African ecocriticism will have to take into account traditional practices that preserve natures and promote planetary balance.

Paper short abstract:

This paper rereads Léopold Sédar Senghor’s pastoral poetry through a “decentered” ecocritical lens, by paying attention to how land-use and commercial agricultural expansion figure in his evocation of the peasant-land relation in the Serer groundnut basin.

Paper long abstract:

This paper rereads Senghor’s pastoral poetry ("Chants d’ombre", 1956, "Nocturnes", 1961) through Francophone and Anglophone ecocritical frameworks, by paying close attention to the depicted relation of the Serer people to land and to agrarian capitalism. Specifically, I explore how President Senghor’s poetic praise of the "paysan serer" sits in tension with his abolition of Serer land tenure through "la Loi sur le Domaine National" (1964) and builds upon colonial administrative policies in the Serer groundnut basin. As such, I respond to recent calls for a “decentered ecocriticism” (Egya; 2020), by reading Senghorian poetry for its local history of the “working landscape” (capitalist agriculture, shifting land tenure, and land grabs) that subtends his romantic evocation of peasant-land unity. I begin by discussing the productive tensions that the “pastoral tradition” poses for ecocriticism, highlighting Senghor’s “ecologically ambiguous” (Thornber; 2012) attitudes towards nature: at once extractive and romantic. Thence, I demonstrate how these poems articulate divergent currents in French and Anglophone ecocriticism, principally their “deterritorialized” and “rooted” offshoots. Pairing ecopoetics’ linkage of environmental consciousness to literary aesthetics (Blanc; 2008, Garnier; 2022) with Nigerian scholars’ attention to rural locality (Iheka; 2017, Egya; 2020), I argue that Senghor’s poetics offers an unacknowledged alternative to abstract, cosmopolitan theories of modernity by renowned Senegalese thinkers writing in English (Diouf; 2000, Sarr; 2016). Finally, by integrating contemporary political economic scholarship (Oya; 2005), I consider how historic transformations in land-use relate to the future of food provisioning, exports, and agribusiness in the context of neoliberalism and accelerating climate change.

Paper short abstract:

Nous analysons dans "La Mémoire amputée" (Werewere Liking, 2004) et "Puissions-nous vivre longtemps" (Imbolo Mbue, traduit par Catherine Gibert, 2021) la mise en récit de crises écologiques, l’engagement des populations dans la défense de l’environnement et l’évocation de l’avenir de l’Afrique.

Paper long abstract:

"La Mémoire amputée" de Werewere Liking et "Puissions-nous vivre longtemps" d’Imbolo Mbue sont des récits mettant en scène des figures féminines qui prennent en main leur destin mais aussi qui s’engagent pleinement dans la quête d’un avenir meilleur pour leur peuple.

Texte-carrefour où se croisent l’essai, le chant, le roman-autobiographie et le récit historique, La Mémoire amputée célèbre la résilience des femmes africaines. Mené au début comme une enquête sur un passé collectif et familial, le récit se transforme après en une excursion dans la mémoire profonde de l’écrivaine pour devenir une tentative de restitution de vies de femmes courageuses au service de leur communauté. Puissions-nous vivre longtemps se présente comme un récit polyphonique dans lequel un personnage féminin est la principale figure de la révolte. Dans ces textes, les deux écrivaines font prise avec le(ur) monde et les bouleversements qui le(s) traversent. Elles abordent, entre autres sujets, les questions écologiques liées à la crise environnementale. Au-delà de la célébration des femmes, elles donnent à réfléchir, sur la (les) valeur(s) de l’eau et de la nature, la représentation des rapports entre les humains et la nature, et appellent à repenser notre être au monde

Comment ces deux œuvres racontent-elles des lieux ? Comment s’y construit le cheminement d’une prise de conscience écologique ? Quelles sont les perspectives d’avenir pour une Afrique gangrénée par la pauvreté et la destruction de l’environnement ? La réponse à ces questions constituera la structure de notre analyse.

Paper short abstract:

We will conduct a comparative study of Oil Cemetery by Nwoye and Saara by M. O Beyrouk. This analysis will allow me to compare anglophone and francophone ecocriticism and their approach to extractivist practices. 

Paper long abstract:

We propose to conduct a comparative study of the novels Oil Cemetery May Ifeoma Nwoye and Saara by Mbarek Ould Beyrouk (2022). Through these texts, we will think together anglophone and francophone ecocriticism. Whileay Ifeoma Nwoye, a Nigerian author, awakens the reader to the extreme environmental degradation of the Niger River, prompting to engage in activism, Beyrouk, a Mauritanian author, denounces in his poetry social injustices and calls for the respect of nature. Both evidence extractive practices, to the "slow violence" suffered by cultural and social minorities. We will thus study their texts as environmental literature, that is to say their literary imagination or political discourse, and its means of expression, whether poetic, critical, fictional or real. In this way, We will bring anglophone ecocriticism into dialogue with francophone ecological thought, questioning their forms: one being more incisive, theoretical and political and the other poetic, almost philosophical. We will also comment on the position of the two authors: whether they are also activists, victims of environmental transformations, thinkers of the Africa of the future, etc. In fine, this comparison of two recent African texts will allow me to question the potentialities of literature in the face of the environmental crisis and to ask, as Dana Phillips did in 1999, whether the truth of ecology lie in literature. Can ecocriticism reconcile the environmental sciences, the political and ethical principles of an ecological approach with literary and aesthetic elements?

Paper short abstract:

Abdoulaye Mamani’s historical novel Sarraounia centres on the bloody encounter between colonial France and the Azna people of what is now Niger. Using a postcolonial ecocritical framework, I argue that the novel shows how nuclear energy futures are built on a foundation of war crimes.

Paper long abstract:

In 1898, the Central African-Chad Mission set out to consolidate French colonial holdings across the Sudan. The military venture was notoriously bloody, ultimately descending into depravity and the murder of leading officers by their own troops. In the preface to his 1980 novel Sarraounia, Abdoulaye Mamani writes, “On 2 January 1899, Voulet and his legion of Black mercenaries leave Ségou…They cross the lands of the Mossi, the Gourma, and the Djerma, pitilessly smashing all resistance…. [T]hey raze entire villages, decimating men, women and children with a rare savagery…. It is then that they arrive on Hausa lands…where they encounter a small kingdom governed by a magician-queen: Sarraounia.” Drawing on written archives and oral history, the novel depicts this encounter, detailing Queen Sarraounia’s heroic resistance and leadership.

France’s ultimate conquest of what is now Niger has paid off handsomely. In 1957, three years before Nigerien independence, France discovered large deposits of uranium which would prove to be the world's fourth largest. The country accounts for roughly 7% of global uranium supply and is a leading supplier to France, which relies on nuclear power for 80% of its energy needs. This paper examines Mamani’s novel and its account of the brutal, scorched-earth tactics of French colonialists as they laid claim to the African landscape and its mineral supplies. Using a framework of postcolonial ecocriticism, I argue that the novel shows how nuclear energy security rests on a foundation of war crimes—a past that must be reckoned with in building new energy futures.

Paper short abstract:

In this presentation, I will study how Helon Habila (Oil on Water) and Bessora (Petroleum) use magical realism and mutate the traditional conventions of the detective story to create “ecopolars” that investigate the environmental problems linked to oil extraction, respectively in Nigeria and Gabon.

Paper long abstract:

Based on a reading of two African “polars” (detective novels), Helon Habila's Oil on Water (2010, anglophone) and Bessora's Petroleum (2004, francophone), I propose to study the way in which magical realism proves particularly apt to convey a postcolonial critique of the exploitation of natural resources: oil extraction, respectively in Nigeria and Gabon, begun by European colonialists and continued to this day by international companies. In these two novels, spatial and temporal markers are constantly blurred by interventions of the "supernatural" - myths, indigenous beliefs, unforeseen and inexplicable events - which not only profoundly complicate the quest of journalists and detectives in search of missing characters (always in the context of oil extraction), but also reflect the way in which the effects of the ecological crisis often turn out to be unpredictable or for a long time imperceptible to the human experience. Habila and Bessora thus mutate the traditional conventions of the detective story, where the main objective is no longer to find the missing persons, but to discover the truth about the causes of environmental alterations. In this way, they create "ecopolars" (ecological detective novels), where the characters investigate a collective crime, whose origins are linked to a global system of exploitation, whose individual actors are difficult to identify – networks of multinationals –, and which are anchored in those African countries whose inhabitants suffer from the damage of environmental exploitation without having access to the benefits or profits.

Paper short abstract:

Cette communication entend penser et résoudre les préoccupations écologiques en Afrique de l'Ouest en puisant dans son réservoir culturel, notamment en mettant en évidence la spiritualité africaine qui considère la nature comme une altérité et une divinité.

Paper long abstract:

Les préoccupations écologiques qui battent en brèche dans notre contemporanéité engagent les écrivains à produire des œuvres littéraires questionnant l’avenir de l’Afrique sur fond de problématiques écologiques. Les artistes réinventent une littéraire qui invite les humains à renouer un lien sensible avec la nature, comme il est perceptible dans La Malédiction du Lamantin de l’auteur malien Moussa Konaté. Le texte met en évidence le désenchantement de la relation des personnages bipèdes avec la nature en les tenant responsables de sa déchéance.

De ce fait, l’auteur fictionnalise une nature qui se rebelle contre les personnages et répond violemment aux agressions dont elle fait les frais. Philippe Clermont (2015). La mise en fiction de la nature donne lieu à une nouvelle humanité qui n’est plus le personnage bipède, mais une nature qui prend possession du corps humain dans le dessein de susciter la peur aux lecteurs et aux lectrices. Ainsi, cette communication a vocable à penser l’avenir de l’Afrique en mutation à partir d’une approche culturalisante. Celui-ci repose sur des croyances et pratiques ancestrales et sur le poids de la tradition pour transmettre les valeurs écologiques et éveiller différemment la conscience écologique, afin d’habiter poétiquement la nature. Steeve R. Renombo, (2019) .