96

Flooding is a recurrent crisis in contemporary Nigeria. In most cases, the incidents are severe and fatal to humans and nonhumans. Flooding as a physical reality and as a cultural imaginary is generating a strand of ecopoetics that invites a critical attention, which is the concern of this article. The ecopoetics of flooding, as a central concept here, examines the ways in which Nigerian poets harness the metaphorical strengths of poetics to represent the incidents of flooding, and by so doing deploy their poetic craft to serve the ecosystem. The representation is characterized by an aesthetic proximity that brings the fate of humans and that of nonhumans together in an ecological disaster underlined by power relations. It is also marked by the poets’ ideological stance against institutional powers that are indicted for neglecting the environment. Grounded in theoretical ideas from African poetics, postcolonial ecocriticism, and urban political ecology, the article reads a selection of poems to argue for the role of poetry in contemporary debates about ecological crises in Nigeria. The study hopes to further deepen the conversation between literature and society in a postcolonial setting that harnesses art forms to pursue eco-social justice.