Can Writers Bring About Environmental Justice Where Slow Violence has Devastated the People and the Land?
Introduction by Jonathan Steinwand
There can be no peace as long
as there is grinding poverty,
social injustice, inequality,
oppression, environmental degradation,
and as long as the weak and small
continue to be trodden by
the mighty and powerful.
--Tenzin Gyatso, The XIV Dalai Lama
Message Sent to the Millennium World Peace Summit
August 23, 2000
Speaking truth to power, writers cry out for justice and peace. Emboldened by the protests organized by the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP) and international outrage against social injustice, corporate crime, and environmental degradation in the Niger Delta, these novelists, poets, and essayists risk their lives to bear witness to what they see. In this section, we highlight some of the key contributions we have encountered in works by Ken Saro-Wiwa, Isidore Okepwho, Kaine Agary, Ogaga Ifowodo, Tanure Ojaide, Ben Okri, and Helon Habila.
We take the concept of "slow violence" from Rob Nixon, who contrasts slow violence with the spectacular violence of bombings and disasters that we see in the daily news. Slow violence, rather is the "violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all" (2). When the rivers become so contaminated with oil and other indusrial waste that the fish die and the fisherfolk of the delta lose a key source of their sustenance and their livelihood: that is the slow violence of environmental injustice. When the only jobs that pay enough to keep up with inflation are those working for the oil companies: that is the slow violence of environmental job blackmail.
If hope is to found, it can be heard in the voices of people rallying together to cry out for justice. If hope is to be found, it can be seen in the gatherings of people staking their claims for self-determination. If there is hope to be found, it can be felt in our hearts and our veins as we read the literature of the Niger River Delta. If hope to be found, it can be tasted in student reactions to these readings.
Works Cited
Gyatso, Tenzin. "The Message of the Dalai Lama Sent to the Millennium World Peace Summit." The Global Forum for Common Good. 23 August 2000. Web <http://www.commongood.info/DalaiLama.html> 25 March 2016.
Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2011. Print.
