VILLAGE VOICES AND GHOST COASTS: CHILD-AGENCY AND ANTHROPOCENE FRAGILITY IN NIGERIAN AND JAPANESE POETRY

Abstract

This study examines representations of human-made environmental disruption in contemporary Nigerian and Japanese eco-poetry through the lens of children as transnational witnesses to ecological vulnerability. While ecocritical scholarship has explored environmental justice, ‘slow violence’, and post-disaster literature, there has been limited comparative focus on how Nigerian and Japanese poetic traditions converge through childhood perspectives within the context of unequal histories of postcolonial extraction and technological modernity. Drawing on second-wave ecocriticism, transnational ecocriticism, and postcolonial environmental humanities, the study employs a qualitative comparative approach and close textual analysis of TanureOjaide’s "Songs of Myself: Quartet" (2016) and Kozue Takeuchi’s ‘Do Not Forget’ (2012). The analysis shows that Ojaide depicts the Niger Delta child as inhabiting ecological ‘internal exile’ caused by petro-capitalist extraction and postcolonial environmental injustice, while Takeuchi portrays the Japanese child-survivor facing existential rupture following the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake, tsunami, and Fukushima nuclear disaster within a technologically mediated culture of risk. Despite contrasting historical pathways, both poetic traditions frame the child-subject as a ‘somatic archive’ through which ecological damage is experienced bodily, emotionally, and ethically. The poems further challenge state and corporate narratives of progress by emphasising memory, sensory witness, and intergenerational vulnerability. The study concludes that the polluted Niger Delta ‘Village’ and the post-3/11 Japanese ‘Ghost Coast’ serve as interconnected, yet historically uneven, sites of Anthropocene crisis shaped by extractive capitalism, technological modernity, and environmental precariousness. By highlighting child-agency as ecological testimony, the research enriches transnational ecocriticism and postcolonial environmental humanities while deepening understanding of literature as cultural ecology and ethical resistance.