Earth in the Balance The Commodification of the Environment in and

Tanure Ojaide and Niyi Òsundare are among the foremost politically committed Nigerian poets at present. The overriding concern in virtually all their literary works is commenting on the politics of the season. In Òsundare's words, poetry is “man meaning to man.” For Ojaide, a creative writer is not “an airplant” that is not situated in a place. Both writers envision literature should have political message. Thus, in Òsundare's collection (1986) and Tanure Ojaide's (1998) the major aesthetic focus is eco-poetry, which interrogates the politics behind oil exploration in Nigeria as well as its consequences on our environment. Both writers refract this with what Òsundare calls “semantics of terrestiality”: i.e. poetry for the earth. Eco-poetry deals with 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, environmental/ecological dissonance, leadership malaise and endangered Nigerian environment mediated through (global) capitalism. Both writers maintain that eco-poetry is a platform for upturning environmental justice; and for decrying man's unbridled materialist pursuits. Thus, the preoccupation of this paper is to explore how both poetry collections: and interrogate the despicable state of Nigeria's environment as a consequence of global capitalism

Aesthetics · Art · Capitalism · Commodification · Economy · Environmental ethics · Environmental justice · Environmentalism · Literature · Poetry · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · History · Law · Philosophy