Terraqueous Ecologies in Nigerian Fiction

Either as a direct site of resource extraction, as a foundational aspect of urban land reclamation projects, or through Nigeria’s expansive Atlantic-facing coastline, water forms a dominant feature of Nigeria’s spatial imagination. Specifically, I am concerned with the liminal and contested spaces where land and water meet, or what has come to be termed the “terraqueous”. As eloquently defined by Tiffany Lethabo King, the terraqueous is an “in-between, an ecotonal, unexpected, and shifting space [that] requires new footing, different chords of embodied rhythms, and new conceptual tools to navigate its terrain” (4). In acknowledgement of the ubiquity of the aquatic and terraqueous in Nigerian literature, I consider the question: how might the specific texture of the terraqueous environment—one that inherently resists spatial fixity through its volatile and fluid nature and appears epistemologically unknowable—demand a renegotiation of space in the Nigerian literary imagination?

In the three texts my dissertation took as its corpus, I foreground the consideration of why, exactly, does the terraqueous continually return as an undulating presence throughout this body of national literature? We encounter this liminal space, for example, in Chris Abani’s 2004 novel GraceLand, be it through the microcosm of casual hydrological infrastructures or the macrocosm of the Lagos lagoon. The novel follows the roguish picaro of Elvis Oke, a dancer and impersonator of his namesake as he navigates the fragmented urban archipelago and the swampy foundations of Maroko, the floating slum built on stilts around the lagoon. Indeed, Abani’s narration is dominated by water.

Writing several decades earlier in 1961, Cyprian Ekwensi’s spatial imagination is similarly preoccupied with the aquatic. The story follows the eponymous Jagua, a sex worker living a life of highlife and hedonism as she dances in the Lagos nightclub, The Tropicana, among a panoply of unscrupulous characters. The short novel charts a comparatively wide geography, following Jagua on her path to fulfilment through the capillary tributaries of the Niger Delta region after Freddie, her lover, leaves for England. It is a story of embroiled plots, an ungraspable chase, and impulsive desire that unravels within the creeks of the Niger Delta.

A little over twenty years later in 1986, environmental activist and writer Ken Saro-Wiwa from Bori, Ogoniland, would come to write his collection of short stories, A Forest of Flowers. The volume, though largely divided into two sections, is largely interwoven. The first part contains eight uncannily nostalgic stories set in the Niger Delta village of Dukana, whilst the second navigates urban settings such as Aba, Port Harcourt, Lagos, and Kano. The collection sutures together what formally resemble “news clippings” that centre around the events and failed epiphanies of its characters, both around the swampy mangrove creeks of the Delta and the Lagos Lagoon. As Saro-Wiwa negotiates the short-story form, the terraqueous setting spills over the boundaries of each story and forms a continually undulating presence in the text whilst the looming presence of extractive industries operates as a spectre of distant promise in the background.

Within the narrativised spaces of Lagos and the Niger Delta, these authors engage with the spectacle of oil through the direct site of resource extraction as with the Niger Delta and as an inherited structure of exploitation in Lagos. Since oil was first discovered in the Bayelsa state in 1958, the Niger Delta has become a place defined by spectacular resource exploitation and extreme environmental degradation, experienced most pressingly by its marginalised ethnic minorities As Lagos went through a process of rapid expansion in the 1970s and 80s as prompted by the oil boom years that followed the end of the Biafran conflict in 1970, writing the spectacle oil into the urban spatial imaginary. Though Abani and Ekwensi do not engage with oil at the level of plot, we see that an infrastructure of exploitation is visible in Abani’s graphic and arguably sensationalist descriptions of urban poverty in GraceLand, and in the fetishisable spectacle of Jagua’s sexuality as a paradigmatic sex worker in Jagua Nana. With these observations in mind, we might consider the question: how are we, as readers, being encouraged to engage, or disengage from consuming or indeed fetishising the spectacle of oil here? We might consider Saro-Wiwa’s experiment on the pastoral through the nostalgic depictions of the Delta as the connective tissue between these two texts, as an ethical imperative that draws our attention away from the spectacle of resource extraction and towards the more subtle nuances of ecological existence and attritional violence.

In turning our attention to the terraqueous, we glean a configuration of the nation that can be characterised (following Jennifer Wenzel) as a ‘biome or lifeworld to be inhabited,’ instead of a purely political and fraternal entity (112). In the terraqueous space, we can restore the environmental and nonhuman aspects of nationhood, turn our attention to subtle ecological nuances such as the formation of playful subjectivities, and reassess our engagement with the spectacle of oil. In a nation where a printed literary tradition evolved in tandem with the oil boom, I argue that considering the particular environmental conditions that undergird this literary evolution is particularly pertinent. Most pressingly perhaps, in the face of planetary climate change, with sea level rise producing, as Elizabeth DeLoughrey puts it, “a new sense of planetary scale and interconnectedness through the rising of a world ocean” (13), a consideration of terraqueous environments as becoming an increasingly pressing part of our ecological future demands a reckoning.

 

—Eliza McCarthy, DPhil Candidate at the English Faculty

 

Works Cited

DeLoughrey, Elizabeth M. Allegories of the Anthropocene. Duke University Press, 2019.

King, Tiffany Lethabo. The Black Shoals : Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies. Duke University Press, 2019.

Ojaide, Tanure. “Migration, Globalization, & Recent African Literature.” World Literature Today, vol. 82, no. 2, 2008, pp. 43–46, www.jstor.org/stable/40159669. Accessed 13 June 2024.

Wenzel, Jennifer. “How to Read for Oil.” Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, vol. 1, no. 3, 2014, https://doi.org/10.5250/resilience.1.3.014. Accessed 22 Nov. 2023.