‘It is the Writer’s Place to Stand with the Oppressed’: Anthropocene Discourses in John Ngong Kum Ngong’s Blot on the Landscape and The Tears of the Earth

Summary

INTRODUCTION

For the past several decades, climate scientists have acknowledged the alarming impact of human actions on the earth system. Atmospheric carbon devolving from greenhouse gases, biotic impoverishment, flooding, soil erosion, extreme weather conditions, and a warming planet are some indicators of this phenomenon. The urgency of the situation has led to the conclusion that the present rate at which the decline of the earth's natural life-support systems is being accelerated by human action is ten to two hundred times higher than the average over the past ten million years (Watts). The Anthropocene, which has come to define this imprint, is ‘a twenty-first century term that some scholars use to signal that human activity has attained the scale of a geological force akin to a volcanic eruption or a meteorite changing the Earth as a system’ (Deloughrey 2). As a theoretical platform, it transcends geology to engage knowledge from interdisciplinary fields, bringing what Danila Cannamela calls ‘a rich variety of proposals that address social and environmental concerns at a planetary scale’ (5). Such interdisciplinarity is a convenient yardstick for foregrounding human accountability, thus inviting a crucial dialogue about our earthly circumstances.

This article seeks to contribute to such dialogue through a postcolonial ecocritical reading of selected poems from the Anglophone Cameroonian poet John Ngong Kum Ngong's Blot on the Landscape (2015, hereafter referred to as Blot) and The Tears of the Earth (2018, hereafter referred to as Tears). Grounded in the understanding that, in the current ecological crisis, ‘acts of cultural representation can wield significant power’ (Clark 2019, 2), I seek to show how Ngong's poetry, from a Cameroonian/African prism, intersects the Anthropocene as an emergent global force, inviting humans everywhere to engage with the ever-increasing, complex nature of the culture/nature interaction. Poetry for Ngong, as these two collections typify, can aptly translate scientific results on the phenomenon into forms that will move people to action. In an aesthetic rooted in visionary realism, protest, affect, symbolism and borrowings from oral traditions, Ngong highlights the declensionist perspective of the Anthropocene, witnessed in irreversible change, damage and loss; occasioned, for the most part, by the ineluctable intersection between capital and neocolonial politics.