Indigenous eco-consciousness in recent Nigerian poetry: The example of Joe Ushie

Introduction

This study examines indigenous ecocritical consciousness in the poetry of Joe Ushie. Like other postcolonial (including African) writers, Nigerian authors have given serious thought to the current environmental crisis. As Maria Alonso and Maria Jesus Traseira aver, “literature, with its many genres and languages, continues to offer the possibility of taking small but definitive steps towards addressing this overwhelming global concern” (2019: 147). Alonso and Traseira identify a surge in ecological responsiveness informed by climate change and other irretrievable situations that have negatively affected humans and non-humans; they argue that these situations have caused writers to document the state of emergency that societies have reached (2019: 147). Nigerian novelists such as Helon Habila (Oil on Water, 2010), Kaine Agary (Yellow-Yellow, 2006), Chimeka Garricks (Tomorrow Died Yesterday, 2010), and Jowhor Ile (And After Many Days, 2016) have used fiction to foreground the Niger Delta region’s landscape and its ecological crisis. Likewise, as Sule Egya argues (2013: 60), environmentalism is a core component of Nigeria’s poetry. The vigour and radicalism one encounters in the works of Niger Delta poets is informed by the fact that Niger Delta inhabitants and writers are experiencing, more acutely than other Nigerians, the negative effects of environmental pollution.

The core Niger Delta states, Akwa Ibom, Bayelsa, Cross River, Delta, Edo, and Rivers, have come under severe oppression and deprivation by various Nigerian governments owing to oil exploration in the region. Such subjugation has resulted in diverse violent revolutions by Niger Delta people against government institutions in the region (Okpalaeke and Aboh, 2022). The killing in 1995 of the Nigerian environmental activist and writer Ken Saro Wiwa by the late military dictator General Sani Abacha did not suppress environmental activism, but rather brought about an explosion in both literary and non-literary engagements against forces of hegemony in the oil-rich Delta. Consequently, Niger Delta poetry is vested with its authors’ struggle against institutional despoliation of the biotic community of the region. The poets portray the land and its people, but, more significantly, they advocate for human and environmental justice. Also, they foreground the risks both human and non-human beings face, especially in the wake of oil production in the region since the 1950s (Egya, 2016: 2).

Joe Ushie is an established member of the third generation of Nigerian poets. According to Idom Inyabri (2020: 2), Ushie is one of the most exceptional poets of this generation. Ushie hails from Bendi in Obanlikwu local government area. Bette-Bendi describes the two related dialects of the Bette people in the Obudu local government area and the Bendi people in the Obanlikwu local government area, both in northern Cross River State. Both Bette and Bendi designate the people of each area and their languages, while Bendi also describes the geographical territory of the Bendi people. The region of the Bette-Bendi is temperate and surrounded by hills, and the people do most of their farming on the fertile land of the hills. Both people have a similar culture (Aboh, 2014; Betiang, 2019; Aboh et al., 2023).

Many Niger Delta poets have used their works as tools of mobilization against environmental injustice, making poetry a compass for social redirection as well as a potential source for the analysis of ecological consciousness. However, Ushie, unlike other Niger Delta poets such as Tanure Ojaide, Ebi Yeibo, Ogaga Ifowodo, and Nnimmo Bassey, whose eco-conscious engagement highlights oil exploration and its damaging effects on human and non-human agents in the Niger Delta, is mostly concerned with the flora and fauna of the region. Acknowledging that Ushie’s ecocritical consciousness differs from other Niger Delta poets, Inyabri (2015: 178) writes that Ushie’s poetry highlights the ecological value of that flora and fauna, as well as the inexorable link between humans and other organisms in a biotic community. In Nigerian poet Niyi Osundare’s most celebrated ecocritical collection of poems, The Eye of the Earth, the poet presents the earth as humans’ greatest gift and expresses his displeasure with the way humans abuse the earth:

“Let Earth’s Pain be Soothed” depicts images of environmental abuse such as bush burning and signposts the extent of damage that is done to the environment by human activities. This eco-degradation is also foregrounded in Ushie’s poetry, as we shall see later. Though both Osundare and Ushie are from different ethnic backgrounds, Ushie tends to emulate his teacher Osundare, in that his poetry takes up the challenge of finding a new mode of writing about the significance of the natural environment by drawing insightfully from his Bette-Bendi culture. ¹

Ushie has five collections of poems to his name. Three of his collections, namely, Popular Stand (1995), Hill Songs (2002), and Yawns and Belches (2018), have been selected for analysis in this study. His poetry can be situated within postcolonial ecocriticism because of its sensitivity to the environment, along with its resistance to and subversion of the excesses of the Nigerian capitalist system that has contributed to the desecration of the landscape. His stylistic choices detail the nexus between poetry and the environment, and demonstrate how poetry can serve as a platform for the (re)construction of environmental values. This study extends knowledge about literary environmentalism by exploring how postcolonial writers appropriate indigenous epistemologies to explain the interaction between humans and non-humans. This article next outlines Bette-Bendi eco-consciousness before exploring how this eco-consciousness works in Ushie’s poetry.

Bette-Bendi eco-consciousness

The core thesis of ecocriticism is that the environment itself has direct and inherent rights and that it qualifies for moral personhood deserving of ethical consideration; it is imbued with inherent worth (Engar and Smith, 2006: 2). Marta Frątczak-Dąbrowska (2019: 183) argues that in literary studies, ecocriticism explores what literary texts tell us about people’s involvement with nature and how they shape our understanding of the environment. Over the years, a variety of ways of interpreting literature and environmental consciousness have evolved, especially in postcolonial contexts. This article contributes to postcolonial literary ecocriticism by situating Ushie’s poetry within Bette-Bendi environmental epistemology and its embodiment of the realities of the Nigerian postcolony. Reading Ushie’s poetry from this perspective enables a deeper understanding of the people’s connectedness to their land, and of how the environment is in itself an agent of activism.

Situating this study within the Bette-Bendi perception of the environment does not imply that this perspective is completely distinct from other worldviews. Rather, such an approach represents an extension of ecocriticism as it opens up other knowledge bases in relation to the environment. Alonso and Traseira uphold the inclusion of multiple epistemologies as they point out that “differing points of view in world literatures, as well as in […] theoretical practices, enrich the debate in the complex existing interplay between culture and the environment” (2019: 182). In sustaining the drive for alternative approaches to environmental studies, Stephenie LeMenager, Teresa Shewry, and Ken Hiltner (2011: 8) maintain that the archives of Global South, non-Euro-American, and indigenous people have great potential for engaging with contemporary environmental issues. The role of nature in Bette-Bendi cosmology is significant here because it is from its belief system about the environment that Ushie draws his creative ideas.

A brief review of Bette-Bendi cosmology in relation to the ecosystem is useful here. Jacinta Maweu (2011: 35) clarifies how different groups of people in different parts of the world observe and relate to the environment in their own particular ways. For the Bette-Bendi people, the environment is not merely the physical ecology within which they live; rather, the land is fundamental to the way in which they see and interact with the universe. They believe that land (an expansive term that covers streams, rivers, mountains, forests, animals, and ancestral spirits) is the source of life, and that this source is sustained by accurate and robust communication between humans and the non-human environment (Adie, 2015). In their work on the history, language, and culture of Bendi, Joseph Ushie and David Imbua (2011: 252) explain how land is “usually owned communally by all members of the family […] Land is never sold and cannot be bought among the members of the community”. Consequently, in Bette-Bendi thinking, selling a piece of land is equal to its desecration; this is because it would involve rupturing the spiritual filament that holds the people together. In this regard, when Patrick Nmah (2011: 138) states that “Igbo people see land as an object that has spiritual and other implications”, his observation also applies to the Bette-Bendi worldview in relation to land. They believe that land serves as a connection between the living, the dead, and the unborn members of the clan. During festivals or social events, they pour libations to the ground in order to sustain the link between the living and the dead.

The belief that their ancestral spirits inhabit hills, rivers, forests, bushes, and every part of the community informs the people’s relationship with the environment. The people believe that if they treat the land in an untoward manner, they will upset the cordial relationship between the living and ancestral spirits. John Mbiti explains that whenever people’s behaviour upsets “the balance of existence” between the living and such ancestral spirits, “men [sic] make sacrifices, offerings and prayers, to try and restore it” (1969: 79). Rivers, for example, are seen as integral parts of the people’s existence. The Bette-Bendi people believe that rivers are sacred and powerful forces that can connect them to the divine. Indeed, they see rivers as gateways to the divine, and as essential components of their ancestral spirits. Consequently, it is an abomination to dump both human and non-human waste in rivers and streams.

Another feature of the landscape revered in Bette-Bendi cosmology is the hill. In their folklore and songs, the people usually make reference to Ulanga, a peak near the present-day village of Amandakureke in the Obudu hills, as their spiritual headquarters. They hold the strong belief that they migrated from Ulanga to their present settlement (Ogar, 2005; Aboh, 2014; Adie, 2015). Relics of their ancient buildings and artifacts can still be found on the hill, and an indication that it was the original home of the Bette-Bendi people underpins their mental wellness. They see Ulanga as a life-giving fortress because their ancestors lived there. The custom of asking for rain, good harvest, good health, children, and prosperity from Ulanga hill still features in the people’s prayers (Aboh, 2014). This custom chimes with the view of Sonya Sachdeva (2016: 2) that religious cosmology “affect[s] how humans see their place in the environment but environmental features shape religious perspectives as well”. The way the Bette-Bendi see the hill as a fortress is reflected in the way they define and determine the value of life. Such deification of the hill underpins their spirituality. When they have serious issues to deal with, they touch the earth with their index finger, then place this finger at the tip of their tongue and point to the hills. They have faith in the efficacy of such a spiritual act. Further, they strongly believe that a poor harvest is a signal that the land is fighting back against its defilers. Sacrifices are then made to appease it.

The people are bonded by a healthy sense of connectedness to each other through the agency of land. They connect with it as an element handed over to them by their ancestors to be preserved for the next generation (Ushie and Imbua, 2012). In the Bible (1 King 21: 3), Naboth considers it an abomination to give, or even sell, his vineyard, which he inherited from his forefathers, to King Ahab. One can, perhaps, draw a parallel between the Bette-Bendi reverence for land and that of the Hebrew scriptures. Like the Bette-Bendi, the biblical writers “belonged to a culture that recognized land care as the life-and-death matter it unquestionably is” (Davis, 2009: 2). The Bette-Bendi veneration for land, and their belief that it is an abomination to sell it, informs their deep respect for their environment. Consequently, for the Bette-Bendi, financial profiteering that emanates from the sale of land is inimical to their spirituality.

Bette-Bendi eco-consciousness in Ushie’s poetry

Ushie has been described as a poet of eco-consciousness. Inyabri (2015: 178) makes this point in a nuanced way when he claims that Ushie “is awakened by human activities that portend destruction [of] ecological bliss”. Inyabri’s view is borne out by the poem “Climate Change” which uses a web of remembrance to imaginatively recreate the injuries done to the health of the ecosystem:

Ushie laments the annihilation of the filial bond between “virgin forests and fertile minds” by “mercantile greed”, a synonym for rampant capitalism. The parallel drawn between “virgin forests” and “fertile minds” indicates the poet’s desire for a harmonious co-existence between the non-human and the human. This is central to the poet’s vision in that he emotionalizes the violation of nature and, in explicit terms, draws attention to the way pristine nature is being ravaged by intensive human contact. Thus, the reference to “fertile minds” challenges our “enlightened” minds to take decisive actions that will bring about the protection of our “virgin forests”, for there lies the essence of existence. Further, the reference to “virgin forests” encodes a gendered view in which the forest is worth protecting because of its “virginity”, an example of the poet’s broader assignment of feminine virtues to land. Zones that used to be “temperate” have, through human intervention, become “insular”, “freezing”, including even their “temperate | hearts” (Ushie, 2018: 18).

Moreover, the religious and moral angles taken by the poet-persona, signalled in the expression “We had prayed” in the first two stanzas of the poem, detail the people’s dependence on spiritual help to protect the decaying ecosystem. As noted above, when the people have a bad harvest, they read it as a consequence of humans’ abuse of the environment, so they make supplications to the gods for appeasement. However, the people’s prayer is intercepted by “mercantile greed” which “Balkanized [the people] into arrows and bows of mutual hate”. The poet-persona reminds the despoilers of nature that they will be held accountable for the “blood of the innocent”, destroyed by their exploitative engagement with the environment, the result of which is that “endless floods” have “drain[ed] our mores”. In this regard, the poet suggests that the destruction of the environment is an attack on their spiritual values. The poem imaginatively incorporates the environment by highlighting the “violence on the calm of the ozone layer”, the “encroach[ment] on the green lands”, and the “tearing of earth’s flesh” (Ushie, 2018:19): these are violations that contribute to the despoliation of nature. To make reference to “tearing earth’s flesh” is to draw attention to humans’ deep-seated disregard for the environment. The expression “In that stretch”, used repeatedly in the first two stanzas of the poem, is a familiar Bette-Bendi way of referring to the past. Kourken Michealian and John Sutton (2017) call this kind of reference to past events “retrieved memories”. According to Inyabri (2017:13), the poem takes readers on “an eco-conscious pilgrimage”, awakening the reader to the rotting ecosystem and the penalties exacted for “hewman” activities. “Hewman”, in Ushie’s play on words, can be read as humans’ indiscriminate hewing down of things; the pun reaffirms the mindless destruction of the ecosystem.

The life of the tropics is threatened, and the poet-persona bemoans his inability to prevent the increasing environmental abuse. It is the unwholesome relationship of the people to the ecosystem that has symbolically opened the floodgates to the present calamity:

The repeated use of the temporal indexical “Now” at the beginning of these lines suggests multiple meanings. First, it is a discursive technique that shows how humans’ past unhealthy interactions with the environment have led to the present challenges facing them. Second, and closely related to the above, it represents the past as embodied in the present situation of environmental degradation; the adverb of time strategically suggests how Ushie’s poetry enables understanding of how past events such as bush burning and indiscriminate deforestation have contributed to the despoliation of the environment. Third, it conforms to the Bette-Bendi way of making the people attend to the weight of a message; the people employ repetition in oral delivery to heighten effect and to reinforce a speaker’s message. As well as the repeated use of the indexical “Now”, there is also the consistent deployment of “yearns”, personifying nature’s desire for justice. Significantly, the parallel structures work to galvanize the people’s collective will against the defilers of the bioregion.

One striking aspect of Ushie’s eco-consciousness is his imaginative creation of past life-worlds: the transmission of images of history and the negotiation of competing recollections. Ushie’s personification of the environment helps to heighten the reader’s understanding of how the biosphere is being wounded and damaged. Stylistic markers such as the exclamation mark at the end of each line of “Climate Change”, for example, amplify the poet’s displeasure at the abuse of “the communal tropical savannahs” and illuminate his nostalgia and sense of loss (Ushie, 2018: 19). Similarly, the poem’s diction “faiths, race, tribe and power” (Ushie, 2018: 18) suggests that the consequences of global warming are felt by everyone, regardless of their religious orientation, nationality, ethnicity, privilege, or power. Consequently, preserving the ecosystem should not only be a collective effort, but of utmost concern to all because climate change has permeated every “crevice and crater” of human existence.

“A Trip Home”, dedicated to Niyi Osundare, recounts the poet’s disenchantment with anti-environmental activities:

Ushie’s works consistently show the pastoral ideal of his bioregion as having been undermined by industrialization. The deft metaphorization of lumber workers as “restless soldier ants” highlights the desertification of the forests due to the profit-motive overwhelming any long-term concern for the wellbeing of the environment. This eco-consciousness amplifies the divide between nature and the work of industrialization, reinforcing the Bette-Bendi ideology that the people are the land, and the land the people. The rivulets are abused, “left nude”. Evidently, the poet-persona is saddened by such public disgrace of the rivulets as he hints that the abuse of the rivulets corresponds to the abuse of the entire essence of the people. This ecocritical perspective is not a romanticization of nature. Rather, it reinforces the poet’s desire for a calculated effort targeted at protecting nature. In this regard, nature, as Alonso and Traseira (2019: 150) argue, is not something to be adored; rather, it is that very indispensable element that conditions the co-existence of humans and non-humans.

Such spiritualization of the river is a recurrent motif in the poems of many Niger Delta poets. Ushie’s river symbolism here is reminiscent of Gabriel Okara’s 1953 poem, “The Call of River Nun”. As Egya puts it (2016: 4), Okara’s river imagery “demonstrates his alignment to his local culture and environment”. Similarly, Bette-Bendi spiritual and ecological concerns operate as an active linguistic and physical presence in Ushie’s poetry. In “Back to Kugbudu”, he details how the river maintains this kind of bond between the living and the ancestral spirits:

The poet refers here to the Abed River in Obudu town (called “Kugbudu” by the local Bette-Bendi people). The poem foregrounds the spiritual tie between the living and the living-dead, and thus the symbolic connection between humans and their environment. The seamless connection between past and present is carefully accounted for in the dialogue between the poet-persona and the river. The persona is perturbed that the same river that nursed his forebears is being abused, and he fears that such mishandling of the river will lead to breaking the bond between the living and the ancestors. In this way, the landscape is foregrounded as an active participant in the people’s historical process, rather than as a passive setting (see DeLoughrey and Handley, 2011: 4).

The poem mourns the loss of the people’s spiritual essence that is occasioned by harmful human practices. As well as the erosion of the people’s cultural values, it mourns the disappearing food culture caused by the destruction of the river’s watershed. The destruction of the river’s watershed has caused the river to shrink in size and the gods to scurry into hiding. After a lamentation against the abuse of the river, the poet-persona invites his ancestors to fight for the land and rescue them from ecological devastation. He implores the Abed River, the symbol of the people’s link to the world of their ancestors, to report the ecocide committed. The adroit stylistic combination of ideas drawn from the people’s cosmography and overtly poetic conventions captures the link between their collective identity and the way they relate to the environment. The repetition of the phrasal element “like it” in each line of the first stanza enables the poet to control his readers’ understanding of the extent to which their “gods” are being chased away because of the unhealthy relationship with the environment. Thus, the strategic placement of symmetrical linguistic structures not only makes the ecocide committed powerful and visible, but it also reawakens the people’s ecocritical consciousness to make them see reasons to desist from causing harm to the environment.

Ushie’s Bette-Bendi region is surrounded by hills, on whose fertile soil the people do most of their subsistence farming. The recurrence of the hill symbol in his poetry suggests Ushie’s admiration for nature in its agrarian form. In another sense, the hills are emblematic of his Bette-Bendi religious identity. The hill metaphor has a spiritual significance, as can be seen in these lines extracted from another poem, “Hill Song”:

Highlighting the value of the hill in terms of human survival, the speaker makes it clear that it is the place where his umbilical cord was buried. The pun on cord/accord has a suggestive parallel; it describes the coexistence of humans and non-humans. In the Bette-Bendi culture, as with some other African communities, burying the umbilical cord of a newborn (usually under the roots of a fruit-bearing tree) ties the life and fate of the child to the place of their birth. It also symbolizes productivity, in that the child will bear fruit; that is, they will be prosperous and produce children of their own. Consequently, the allusion to the “hills of my birth” is fundamental: it underscores the poet-persona’s unwavering veneration of his place of birth and the spiritual bond that exists between him and the hills. The reference to the hills’ “crowns” has a spiritual undertone; it alludes to the head, or the beginning of his ancestry. Therefore, the notion of the hills as “silent sentinels” connects the poet with his roots as well as depicts the protective anchorage of the upland landscape. It also captures the indigenous people’s respect for the hill, as noted above. The people believe that the hill has its own rights and that they owe allegiance to it. In fact, the hill, in the context of the poem, is seen as super-human, for it gives life to everything around it: animals, people, and vegetation. “Hill Song” depicts the way the people’s existence is tied to the Ulanga hill, for the poem evokes the “crowns” of his “forefathers” and the abode in which they “dwelt”. It follows that a reader of Ushie’s poems comes face to face with the geography of the poet’s origin and his people’s undeniable connectedness to the land they inhabit.

Ushie’s yearning for a clean, “green” landscape defines his poetic motif in “Roadside Shit” (2018: 41). The poem begins with “It”: “It was deposited here, near an abandoned baby”. This cataphoric reference stylistically enables the poet-persona to dissociate himself from people who disregard the roadside. A reader has to read through the sixth stanza before knowing what “it” refers to. There the poet-persona laments: “another dawn and another mound of shit mounts – taller, | Nearer the pathway” (2018: 41). His disdain for the “dare-devil deed” has made him delay naming the offensive substance until later in the poem (2018: 41). Committed “by one or most of us”, making the violators both aggressors and victims, the violation “of our land of beauty” strikes a deep chord within the speaker, who is aggrieved by his own people’s disrespect for “the green land”, their communal property (Ushie, 2018: 41).

Ushie’s idea of the sacredness of the land emanates from his people’s concept of an ize. An ize is a small hut built a significant distance away from the compound, a pit where the members of the extended family defecate, for excreta and other human wastes must not be seen around people. The ize is constructed in order to protect the land’s sacredness. If a person wants to curse a particular family or one of its members, the curser defecates in the person’s compound. Such an action can bring about irremediable woes to the members whose compound is polluted. Also, if faeces are found in the open or in places such as pathways, playgrounds, and compounds, and if no one owns up to the act, red pepper would be added to the excreta and burnt. The result of the burning is often an endless sweltering sensation in the anus of the subject who polluted the community’s social space. It is the people’s willingness to desecrate the environment that Ushie recreates in his poems.

Air pollution is in fact one core area that has been largely neglected in Nigeria’s environmental discourse. Ushie focuses on this symbolically in “Roadside Shit”, when he dramatizes the way in which a simple activity such as breathing can become laborious — “more odorous, more lethal, more nauseating” as air enters “our mouths as we yawn” (Ushie, 2018: 41). The poet-persona’s compassionate concern for “the green land” obliges him to lambast the despoilers who try to claim innocence, as articulated in a line describing “the ritual of distancing, cosmetic cursing” (Ushie, 2018: 41). The speaker’s angst is heightened as he describes this symbolic ecocide as a “dare-devil deed”, for only a daredevil would defile the community’s property (Ushie, 2018: 41). The speaker’s anger is informed by his knowledge of the Bette-Bendi communal practice in which the community collectively owns and shares resources. Even a newborn child is seen as a member of the community: one who can lay claim to communal property. So, every community member is obliged by unwritten laws to preserve and safeguard the property.

The poem “The Farm Hut” further testifies to the influence on Ushie’s poetry of the Bette-Bendi bioregion and its agrarian culture. In this poem, one encounters the happy mood with which the poet-persona remembers pristine days of the past as well as a reflection on his people’s way of life. The poem reads in part:

Through nostalgic memories of a past endogenous serenity, the poet recalls the natural farming methods practised by his people. Because cultivation mostly took place in hills far away from the homestead, the people would sleep at the farm during the yam harvest. The process of bringing the harvested yams home and taking seed tubers back during planting season allowed them to spend blissful nights in farm huts. Many children looked forward to the harvest season because they could fill their “stomachs with | Stacks of all species of yam” and make themselves “fat on rodents fished for [them] by faithful traps” (Ushie, 2018: 34). These were pleasurable times in the lives of the poet-persona and his people. The reference to food signifies a certain cultural identity which details the attachment and knowledge the poet longs for. Echoing this view, Khaidzir et al. write: “food, like various other sorts of connections to place, has the potential to stimulate and elicit an individual’s thoughts and behaviour towards his or her surroundings” (2022: 193). In this way, food functions here as the link between the poet-persona and his past as well as his cultural identity.

This childhood memory draws attention to the sanctity of life and the habitability of the farm hut. Unfortunately, this happy mood of the poet-persona turns to dirge from stanza four through to the end of the poem. This memory is constructed from a sense of apprehension about the points of divergence between the old order and the new, burdened by abandoning the old, preferred order for the confusing new. This new order, brought about by excessive materialism, upturned things entirely for the people and their communal living. In this regard, the poet projects the idea that Bette-Bendi values are incompatible with extreme materialism. Ushie is angered by his people’s complicity, that is, their involvement in the destruction of the old order. The farm hut, symbol of the old order, represents the communal culture of the people. The people abandoned the farm hut for an individuated lifestyle, something entirely different from what they were born into. This individualistic lifestyle encourages insatiable cravings for newer ways of living. For example, the people abandoned their traditional culinary culture (eating different species of yams, eating together from the same plate, and spending interesting nights in one farm hut) for “a mixture of strange staples some of | Whose names taunt our tongues as we try calling them” (Ushie, 2018: 34). In spite of deserting their community-oriented lifestyle for a new life, they are frustrated, as the new order leaves them unsatisfied. The poet’s quest for a delightful reunion with his homeland further strengthens the need for cultural recovery. This, according to Inyabri (2017: 178), gives Ushie’s poems “an ecocentric stamp”.

References to the lost splendour of “springs of purity which hung like | Chandeliers down the trunk of our healing hills” capture the beauty, health, and balance of the poet’s biozone, and the purity and sacredness of the hills his people inhabited (Ushie, 2018: 34). These are now under threat from “belching landlords” and “the directors of the companies” (Ushie, 2018: 35). The hills used to stream with healing water, but no more. The poem expresses a longing to return to natural roots, a serene environment where one could drink from pure streams that possessed healing power.

The poet-persona’s reference to the “single voice” of the xylophone, which “decorated” the consciousness of the occupants of the farm hut, reconstructs the collective memory of the speaker’s roots, and recalls the thrill of darkness in an African farm hut (Ushie, 2018: 34). The farm belongs to all who make up the extended family system, and those who slept there represented the entire clan as custodians of the property. However, this prized oneness is soon to be shattered:

For the Bette-Bendi, like other ethnic groups in southeastern Nigeria, the yam is the king of crops. In “The Farm Hut”, this is suggested by the terms “reigned”, “kingdom”, and “dynasty” (Ushie, 2018: 34–35). The speaker is left with a painful memory of a farming system that no longer exists. The poet, therefore, questions the “thralldom” that results from anti-environmental culture.

The use of expressions drawn from the pool of Ushie’s Bette-Bendi language (ogakwu Omulang, uwhulkem, ashia, and shipang shifong, for example, are names of the various species of yam in his culture) conveys the poet’s fondness for his Bette-Bendi culture and his attachment to his roots. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s (1986: 4) position on this is convincing: “the choice of language and the use to which language is put is central to a people’s definition of themselves in relation to their natural and social environment, indeed in relation to the entire universe”. Often, as we read Ushie’s poems, we encounter the Bette-Bendi linguistic system, which determines what he says and the manner he represents his “natural and social environment”. The poet’s linguistic resourcefulness in interspersing his poems with Bette-Bendi expressions constructs a collective identity that stems from his roots.

Conclusion

Ushie’s poetry protests against environmental abuses such as indiscriminate desertification, exploitation of the green world, destruction of animal habitats, and water and air pollution. His poems draw attention to the urgent necessity of rescuing the environment from those who are engaged in despoiling it. In writing the environment into public awareness, Ushie relies on the Bette-Bendi culture which becomes the anvil upon which he crafts his eco-consciousness. He draws meaningfully upon Bette-Bendi cosmology and lore in constructing his poems, making them an expression of his ethnic identity. As is the case with other postcolonial ecocritical poets, Ushie’s environmentalism is inspired by oral African resources. His ecocritical engagement pivots on the intense degradation of the flora and fauna of his bioregion. By drawing on Bette-Bendi knowledge systems and environmental practices in his poetry, Ushie exemplifies how literature in the postcolony responds to ecocritical concerns. We encounter in his poetry a passionate voice which empathizes with nature and laments its despoliation by humans. In other words, poetry is a dynamic medium that allows Ushie to express his angst at humans’ unhealthy engagement with the environment.

Ushie’s stylistic construction of environmental values signposts his undeniable commitment both to his Bette-Bendi cultural aesthetics and to literary environmentalism. His exploration of language can hardly be delinked from his ecocritical inclination. Significantly, the poet’s consistent stylistic personification of the environment blurs the distinction between human and non-human agents, and foregrounds the interdependence between human and non-human agents. In this regard, non-human agents are fundamental to the survival of humans, and Ushie’s poetry can be read as an act of complex resistance to environmental pillage.