The Poetics of Place and Belonging in Joe Ushie’s Poetry

Abstract

Joe Ushie’s poetry is highly expressive of a poet persona’s place consciousness. In this paper I interrogate selected poems that articulate a sense of place and belonging in his four collections of poems: Popular Stand and Other Poems (1992), Lambs at the Shrine (1995), Hill Songs (2000), and A Reign of Locust (2004). Utilising the theoretical provisions of postcolonial ecocriticism, I see his imagery as a creative strategy to express his belongingness, foreground a marginalised cultural space, and draw attention to the vagaries of a once idyllic environment in the throes of vain postcolonial politics, commercial greed, and poverty. Thus, while remaining close to the poet’s indigenous imagination, I conclude that Ushie’s aesthetics of place and belonging is anchored firmly in the environmentalist ethics of pursuit for a healthy environment.