MATTERING THE ‘STORIED MATTER’: ECO MATERIALITY IN IFOWODO’S A GOOD MOURNING

 

¹Oluseye Abiodun Babatunde, ²Charles Ogbulogo

¹Mr. Covenant University, Ota, Ogun State, NIGERIA, festalbee@gmail.com

²Prof. Covenant University, Ota, Ogun State, NIGERIA, Charles.ogbulogo@covenantuniversity.edu.ng

 

Abstract

Eco materiality is a new materialist paradigm arising from the concurrence of cultural discourses and natural processes. It stems from a quaint dominion theory of man and the failure of the human centred story telling buoyed and accelerated on some anthropocentric revellings and ideologies that have grossly failed to address sundry human challenges. Eco materialism provides an (other) window of viewing reality that morphs duality of human/nature, masculine/feminine and such other binary opposites into intertwine agencies of meanings. It interrogates the stories of matter (storied matter) and affirms its constituitiveness of reality and its co emergence as a worthy material - discursive nodes. In eco materialism, matter, becomes a site of meaning, a dais of creativity and a platform of expression. Eco materialism affords a disanthropocentric reading of texts since all matters - organic, inorganic, nature, gender and humans are mere agentic references interrelating in an ever unfolding meaning. As a new signifying dimension of material agencies, it abridges varied and intersecting theories in developing storied matter. It is a new addition in the growing study of Eco criticism that enjoins us to listen to the narratives of matter. Yet humans must learn to listen to other agentic bodies with which he cohabits the world. Man should learn that in these storied matters are deep ecological messages of environmental, cultural, political and social dimensions, indeed messages that could save the world.  Ogaga Ifowodo is a major poetic voice whose works have won laurels in Nigeria and oversees. A Good Mourning (2016) is the poet’s latest work in an established tradition of Eco imagination hence the choice of the work. Eco materialism shall be the lens from which Ogaga Ifowodo’s A Good Mourning (2016) shall be distilled to exact the conjoining of matter, narrativity, and meaning. The study among other things, shall illustrate how storied matter is symptomatic of some messages that the poet tries to convey in some of the poems in the Collections. This in turn is to raise human consciousness in the materiality of matter.

Keywords : Eco materiality, cultural discourse, natural processes, anthropocentric, eco criticism, gender, agentic references, storied matter, humans, nature, material agencies, narratives and environmental dimensions.