The Blessing and the Curse; an Ecocritical reading of Nnimo Bassey’s “When the Earth bleeds”.
One of the growing concerns in recent years all over the world is the care for the environment. There have been threats to environmental pollution occasioned by oil exploration particularly in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. This has birthed a growing concern among writers of the region, especially poets, to lend their voices to decry the exploitation of their environment. This paper identifies the negative effects of oil exploration on the land, the human and the non-human inhabitants of the Delta region, and suggests how poetry is used as a tool to curb this menace. The discovery of crude oil in the Niger Delta has brought untold hardship on the inhabitants of the region. This deprivation has produced an activism among some of the writers in this region like Nnimmo Bassey. In his poem “When the earth bleeds”, Bassey employs an eco-critical approach to lament how the natural blessing has turned to a curse which has resulted in pain and suffering for the physical land and its inhabitants. This paper underscores the importance of poetry in the discourse for environmental preservation with a call to appropriate this natural resource for the benefit of the land and the people of the Niger Delta region.