Abstract
This paper uses poems from Shiila Kaaya’s The Bleeding Heart (2009) and Dominic Rugaimukamu’s Harnessed Memory: Poems from Baba (2022) to make a case for the importance of literary intervention in the process of re-establishing new insights about contemporary environmental challenges. Kaaya’s and Rugaimukamu’s eco-poems overflow with personas’ reflections about contemporary environmental concerns—all pleading to be analysed. By examining the selected eco-poems, the paper re-discourses the epistemics of reading contemporary environmental concerns in general and specifically affords us an opportunity to encounter and ‘feel’ this environmental pressure. This way, the paper shows how poetry offers us a new site of reading and encountering this crisis—an approach that may help us to understand it in new ways. Borrowing insights from eco-critical theories, the paper invokes a triangulation of environment, environmental nostalgia, and diagnostic poetics to explore various ways through which the poems imagine, re-imagine, and respond to the contemporary environmental precarity in the country. The environmental concerns captured in the poems reveal a growing imaginative attention in representing environmental issues in Tanzania in ways that illuminate and even complicate our understanding of how the socio-cultural, political and economic realities of our times influence our environment.
Presenters
John WakotaSenior Lecturer, Department of Literature, University of Dar es Salaam, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
ENVIRONMENT, ECOCRITICISM, SHILIA KAAYA, DOMINIC RUGAIMUKAMU, DIAGNOSTIC POETICS, NOSTALGIA
