Poetics of Environmental Imagination and Nostalgia in Contemporary Tanzanian Poetry

Abstract

This article uses poems from Shilia Kaaya’s The Bleeding Heart (2009) and Dominic Rugaimukamu’s Harnessed Memory: Poems from Baba (2022) to make a case for the importance of literary intervention in the process of revealing new insights about contemporary environmental challenges. Kaaya’s and Rugaimukamu’s eco-poems overflow with personas’ reflections about contemporary environmental concerns—all pleading to be analysed. By examining the selected eco-poems, the article discusses the epistemics of reading contemporary environmental concerns in general and specifically affords us an opportunity to encounter and “feel” this environmental pressure. This way, the article shows how poetry offers us a new site of reading and encountering this crisis—an approach that may help us to understand it in new ways. Borrowing insights from ecocritical theories, the article triangulates environment, environmental nostalgia, and diagnostic poetics to explore various ways through which the poems imagine, re-imagine, and respond to the contemporary environmental precarity in Tanzania. The environmental concerns captured in the poems illuminate and even complicate our understanding of how the sociocultural, political, and economic realities of our times influence our environment.