Nature in Times of Pandemic in Recent Nigerian and Cameroonian Poems
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Abstract
The advent of the coronavirus has ushered new perspectives from which several issues have been addressed. The human predicament, with its attendant humanitarian concerns, poverty, the quest for survival, and human resilience to feminist interests has inspired poetic expressions. One aspect which appears to have been neglected is the portrayal of nature in times of pandemic. This gap in pandemic studies has necessitated this essay. The aim is to explore, from an eco-semiotic angle, how pandemic poets have expressed the state of nature as the coronavirus wreaks its deadly blows on humanity. Nature, as conceived in this essay, presupposes the entire range of ecological species comprising animals, plants and aquatic worlds. This essay explores how Nigerian and Cameroonian pandemic poets fictionalise the positive and negative impacts of the pandemic on nature. This essay focuses on four Nigerian poets, namely, Ikechukwu Emmanuel Asika, Kayode Iwayemi, Balogun Kehinde and Alfred Fatuase and one Cameroonian poet, Marinus Samoh Yong. These five (5) poets are drawn from World on the Brinks: An Anthology of the Covid-19 Pandemic (henceforth abbreviated WTB). The textual analytical method is used to interrogate these poets’ eco-semiotic vision of nature in times of pandemic to interpret the relationship between nature and humanity as well as the impact of the pandemic on both the universe and the people. The following findings reveal that the pandemic redefines the way humanity should treat nature; it demonstrates the bond between the two and it establishes the fact that nature is critical in providing the cure to the Covid-19 pandemic. The essay concludes that, during the pandemic, nature regains its lost essence; exposes the interdependence between it and humanity as well as posits that herbs from nature can cure the coronavirus disease.
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References
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