Literature: An Emerging Value in the Hard Ground of the Niger Delta

Abstract

Literature is a social value which creeps out from human imagination. Its production is motivated by the pressures of conflict in the world of humanity and the strong instinct of man to device ways and means to conquer these challenging conflicts. Environmental literature thrives more on human and social conflict, particularly on the ecology of oppression. All over the world, traditions of literature have cropped up from the wreckage of war and difficult circumstances and situations man and society have been plunged into. These facts are well reflected in the literature of the world. But the Niger Delta experience has not been given adequate scholarly attention by literary scholars. This study demonstrates how a prolonged history and experience of violence in the Niger Delta characterised fundamentally by economic cannibalism, political brutality, environmental degradation and physical violence on the region have instituted literary nationalism. The study which deploys the historical and literary methodological modes of investigation shall undertake a conceptual foray on the implication of the concept of hard ground and its overview and as well provide a panoramic scaling of the hard ground in the history of struggle in the Niger Delta. The paper further argues that Niger Delta is a territorial figuration of hard ground and held firmly that literature is an emerging value of the rubbles of hard ground- a festering ecology of oppression and victimisation.

Key words: Hard ground, emerging values, literature, technological, renaissance