Revisiting Eco-critical Discourse in the Poetics of Zakari Sule Musa’s Elegy for the Earth

Abstract

To establish a critical intervention between language and literature in addressing a real-world problem of ecological nature, this paper studied an eco-critical discourse in the poetics of Zakari Sule Musa’s Elegy for the Earth. The objective is to analyse how human activities contribute to ecological exploitation and destruction of the earth. Here, the approach of eco-critical discourse is to create awareness of social action by identifying the hidden meanings of ideology behind the texts. Under the conceptual framework, the study sought the philosophy of eco-criticism with eco-linguistics in order to emphasize the power relations between the human oppressor and the oppressed subjects. In doing this, the paper relied on the stylistic tools of foregrounding and intertextuality so as to project Norman Fairclough’s three dimensions of discourse and guide our data analysis. Consequent upon this, main findings were made. The bottom line is that ecological crisis is one of the social disruptions as evidenced in the disruptive language of Musa’s poetry which could draw public reader’s attention more. The study therefore concludes that the public readers in the global village require knowledge of emancipation to enable them resist the discursive injustice of undue exploitation with its attendant destruction.