STAUNCHING NIGER DELTA’S OIL CURSE: STEMMING THE TIDE OF YOUTH RESTIVENESS IN CHIMEKA GARRICKS’S TOMORROW DIED YESTERDAY (2010)
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.25159/1727-7140/1380Keywords:
Niger Delta, environment, ecocriticism, socio-ecological literature, youth marginalityAbstract
An attempt to illustrate how the environment has a far-reaching, marked impact on literature in respect of Chimeka Garricks’s Tomorrow Died Yesterday (2010) entails an eclectic, cross-disciplinary preoccupation. It is an initiative that considers why Niger Delta’s youths have to contend with not only enduring economic disenfranchisement but also environmental degradation emanating from regular oil spillages in the region. Often in a particular ecocritical literary work, a writer has to present a balanced view. For Garricks, artistic, political, economic and environmental concerns raised in the novel are inextricably interwoven with Niger Delta’s youth restiveness. The article reassesses how this novel portrays the interaction between environmental degradation and youth marginalisation in the oil-bearing Delta region in contemporary Nigeria. It further examines the way Garricks explores the theme of environmental devaluation of his Niger Delta society as it impinges on the youth restiveness in Tomorrow Died Yesterday. The paper interrogates the power of imagination in its appropriation of word, imagery and symbolism to represent the debilitating problematic of environmental concerns in the oil-bearing region ofÂ
Nigeria  Ecocriticism is utilised as the theoretical framework to argue that socio ecological  issues of the Niger Delta constitute the maJor focus of the novel as they underpin the economic  emasculation  of youths from the region,  underlined  in the lives of the characters  portrayed in the novel. The paper concludes that the radical transformation  of the Niger  Delta from  a peaceful  littoral  haven  into the ransom taking  enclave  of the present  is grounded  in Garricks's  creative  depiction  of the youths' debilitating economic marginality, derived from the perilous environmental degradation of that region in the past decades.
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Accepted 2016-08-12
Published 2017-03-07
