DISPOSSESSION AND DISPLACEMENT AS FORMS OF SLOW VIOLENCE IN KAINE AGARY’S YELLOW-YELLOW

Abstract

This paper examines dispossession and displacement as
manifestations of Slow Violence in Agary’s Yellow-Yellow. With focus
on Rob Nixon’s concept of slow violence within the framework of
Postcolonial Ecocriticism, the paper argues that dispossession,
especially with respect to land as economic capital, and environmental
displacement resulting from the activities of petroleum extraction
operate as gradual yet attritional forms of violence dispersed across
time and space rather than through spectacular events. Through close
reading and interpretation of textual data, the paper underscores how
petroleum extraction disrupts indigenous livelihoods, undermines
communal bonds and forces both physical and psychological
displacement amongst the people of the Niger Delta. Narrated within
the context of the prevailing discourses on the Niger Delta
environmental problems, Agary deploys adolescent feminist voice to
tell the story of women’s fate in a male dominant environment of the
Niger Delta where the culture of patriarchy engenders slow violence
to intersect with gender, thereby, revealing how women bear
disproportionate burdens of dispossession and displacement, thus,
becoming economically and socially susceptible in the society. By
critically framing dispossession and displacement as forms of slow
violence, this paper contributes to the Niger Delta literary scholarship
as it interprets Yellow-Yellow as a major critique of environmental
exploitation and its long-term consequences upon the well-being of
indigenes and women.