'Sea-salt rides its currents to the city': Lagos and the poetics of flooding. Issue 3 (3rd July 2021) - Egya, Sule Emmanuel
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.