Earth in the Balance: The Commodification of the Environment in The Eye of The Earth and Delta Blues & Home Songs
Earth in the Balance: The Commodification of the Environment in The Eye of The Earth and Delta Blues & Home Songs

Summary/Abstract: Contemporarily, Tanure Ojaide and Niyi Osundare are among the foremost politically committed Nigerian poets. The overriding concern of all their works is to comment on the politics of the season. In Osundare’s own words, poetry is “man meaning to man”. For Ojaide, a creative writer is not “an airplant”, situated in no place. Both writers envision that literature should have political message. Thus, in Osundare’s collection, The Eye of the Earth (1986) and in Tanure Ojaide’s Delta Blues & Home Songs (1998), the major aesthetic focus is on eco-poetry, which interrogates the politics behind oil exploration in Nigeria. Both writers refract this in the terms of what Osundare daubs “semantics of terrestriality”, i.e., words for the earth. Eco-poetry addresses environmental politics and ecological implications of humankind’s activities on the planet. Armed with this poetic commitment, both writers unearth commodification of socio-economic relations, the environmental/ecological dissonance, leadership malaise, and the endangered Nigerian environment mediated through (global) capitalism. Both writers maintain that eco-poetry is a platform to upturn environmental justice, as well as to decry man’s unbridled materialist pursuits. Thus, the preoccupation of this paper is to investigate how these poetry collections, The Eye of the Earth and Delta Blues & Home Song, unveil the despicable state of Nigeria’s environment as a consequence of global capitalism.

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