A postcolonial ecocritical reading of Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing (2016) and Kwakuvi Azasu’s The Slave Raiders (2004)

Abstract

African literature has suffered a great deal of scathing criticism, especially from western critics and scholars, who believe that Black African writers and critics have repeatedly focused on trite themes and subject matters of colonial/postcolonial nature at the expense of the global environmental crises. This paper then, which is partly a response to this criticism, focuses on two novels, namely, Azasu’s The Slave Raiders (2004) and Gyasi’s Homegoing (2016), texts that yield themselves to postcolonial ecocritical reflections. Situated in the postcolonial ecocritical theory and using content analysis, the paper reveals that colonization and slavery, as the two texts show, have left some incontestable damage to the natural landscape of colonized Gold Coast, now Ghana. The wilderness has disappeared and the specimens of animal species are trafficked leading to some considerable damage to the ecosystems. However, these ecological hazards are subordinated in postcolonial thematic issues such as resistance to slavery, trauma, memory, and healing. The paper contributes to scholarship on the emerging discipline of postcolonial ecocriticism in the African context.

Keywords

• Postcolonial
• ecocriticism
• slavery
• Gold Coast/Ghana
• ecosystem
• resistance