Inundations, boundaries and intersections: flood as narration in Nigerian literature

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this article, I explore the idea of flood as narration in selected Nigerian writings. In Niyi Osundare’s City Without People (poetry), I read how the poet recreates the Hurricane Katrina flood in overlap with diaspora, slave history and Yoruba cosmology. Wale Okediran’s After the Flood (novel) fictionalises the Ogunpa River floods and provides a text for examining how flooding intersects with the domains of family, community and nation, thereby questioning the concept of ‘natural disaster’. In Iyayi’s Violence, I explore how flooding is imagined as a form of slow violence in relation to exploitative capitalism. Both the views of narration as succession and as multilinear are employed for the purpose of delving into the ways in which flood-narrations tell multiple stories that overlap the domain of nature with those of human politics, culture and history.