Utopia of the Past: Barine Ngage’s Song of Dawn and the Ogoni Environmental Question
Abstract
The emergent Niger Delta literature is not a mere representation and description of a common experience. It is, in the main, the transmission of a geo-political awareness of a people (The Niger Delta people) into an aesthetic form. The prefatory exploration of Niger Delta literature and the ideology inherent in its representation of social equations is significant for two reasons. First, it helps us to situate Barine Saana Ngaaga’s Song of Dawn in a particular geo-political space; second, it provokes the need to examine his commitment and how this commitment is discursively presented as signs of his involvement in the Niger Delta story. Utopian Literature exposes man’s ontological discontent with his lot in life and his longing for things as they might or ought to be. It therefore serves as a suture on contemporary human life and society in that it exposes the inadequacy of human existence and the social dislocation of the human society. Thus, Utopia provides a door for escape for reconstruction and to look back into the glorious past that is now lost as well as imagining a perfect future devoid of the evils and deprivations of the present.
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