ABSTRACT

Lagos is perhaps the most economically, socially and culturally crucial coastal city in Nigeria. The pressures of expansion and overpopulation have resulted in many ecological crises, one of which is flooding. Nigerian poets have poetised incidents of flooding in Lagos. These poems are concerned with the biophysical space of Lagos as a city as well as the species lives, including human lives, that get flooded away in the annual ritual of rising water. In this article, I read a selection of these poems in a theoretical context drawn from insights in postcolonial ecocriticism and urban political ecology. While my analysis will concentrate on the ecopolitical force of the poems, I will also examine the aestheticization of flooding and the use of the flood as a poetic trope – a metaphor that disables humans’ sense of complacency in human-centred urban systems and enables our sense of openness to recognize the being of waters. I conclude by pointing out that in postcolonial societies, the representation of urban ecological problems in literature is one way of indicting humans for the ecological fate both humans and non-humans now face.

摘要

拉各斯可能是尼日利亚经济、社会和文化最重要的沿海城市。扩张和人口过剩的压力导致了许多生态危机，洪水就是其中之一。尼日利亚诗人对拉各斯的洪水事件进行了诗化。这些诗关注拉各斯作为城市的生物物理空间，以及在每年一度的涨水仪式中被淹没的物种生命，包括人类生命。在这篇文章中，我从后殖民生态批评和城市政治生态学的见解中汲取了理论背景，阅读了这些诗的选集。虽然我的分析将集中在诗歌的生态政治力量上，我还将研究洪水的审美化和洪水作为诗意比喻的使用——这个比喻使人类在以人为中心的城市系统中无法自满，并使我们的开放感能够识别水的存在。最后我指出，在后殖民社会中，文学中对城市生态问题的表现是对人类和非人类现在面临的生态命运的一种控诉人类的方式。