Abstract
ABSTRACT This article examines Ken Saro-Wiwa’s (1941–1995) vision for the Ogoni people through an ecocritical interrogation of his short fiction and poetry. Academic analyses of the Ogoni struggle have been unfailingly anthropocentric in their approaches. This article challenges this dominant epistemology by centring the non-human world. I examine Saro-Wiwa’s collection of short stories ‘A Forest of Flowers’, the poetry anthology ‘Songs in a Time of War’, and his final poems written in prison in the 1990s. An ecocritical reading of these texts will reveal how Saro-Wiwa invokes pastoral tropes and romantic portrayals of a pre-oil ecological paradise to articulate a primordial eco-nationalist Ogoni identity. Throughout his fiction, the fate of the people and the natural world are intertwined, and notions of home and community expand beyond the human to incorporate the ecosystem of the bioregion.
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