“I Would Sing for You Rain Songs:” An Ecolinguistic Reading of Ofelia Zepeda’s Ocean Power

Abstract

The purpose of the paper is to explore the collection of poems Ocean Power by Ofelia Zepeda through the lens of the interdisciplinary field of ecolinguistics. The article examines issues such as the role of language in the relationship between humans and their physical environment or in the maintenance of the social and cultural unity of its speakers. It also focuses on how Zepeda’s verses portray selected aspects of environmental injustice, including dispossession, displacement, and cultural impairment. The analysis provides evidence that it is reasonable to define Zepeda’s creative writing as environmental poetry with an eco­ ­justice bent. The bilingual character (English­‑Tohono O’odham) of the poems can be interpreted as an attempt to resist the demise of linguistic and cultural diversity.