Studies in Transnational Africa and Japan UNIV ERSIT Y O F IB ADAN L IB RARY STAJ Studies in Tran sn atio n al A frica and Japan Vol. IV, 2021 ISSN: 2 7 3 5 -9662 1 if I f i l Ufn f I I is Online ISSN:2736-0741UNIV ERSIT Y O F IB ADAN L IB RARY Table of Contents Studies in Transnational Africa and Japan (STAJ) 1. A Comparison of TIV and Japanese Cultural Values, Politics and Economy in Select Literary Texts: A Critical Perspective -Abaya Henry Demenongo.................................. 1-17 2. Perspective and Characterisation in Six Selected Japanese and British Novels - Emmanuel Kenneth............................................ 18-34 3. Environment On The Margins: A Transnational Reading of Selected Tanure Ojaide’s And Tomiya Uideo’s Poems - Sunday Oiaoluwagbamila Dawodu...................35-63 4. Misogyny in Alain Mabanckou’s African Psycho and Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman - Ibeku Chicmcla Imelda...................................... 64-91 5. Stimulating The Law Through Ubuntu in Three Japanese Short Stories -Gabriel Kosiso Okonkvvo.................................... 92-109 6. Post-War Conditions in Adedoyin Aguoru’s Refugees of the Great Lakes and Tsuboi Sakae’s Twenty-Four Eyes. - Ngwaba Ijeoma Ann (Nee Ibeku)........................ 110-131 7. Double Wounds: Ecologies Of Trauma in Kiyoshi Shigematsu’s “To Next Spring- Obon” and Osahon Ize-lyamu’s “More Sea than Tar” -Ajibola Opeyemi.......................................... 132-150 UNIV ERSIT Y O F IB ADAN L IB RARY 7 Double Wounds: Ecologies of Trauma in Kivoshi Shigematsu’s “To Next Spring- Obon” and Osahon Ize- lyamu’s “More Sea than Tar” Ajibola Opeyemi University of Ibadan ajiboiaopeyemiwumi@gmail.com Abstract Literature across cultures and nationalities has often taken a significant stance with ecoadvocacy. This study examines two short stories’ representation of cultural trauma exacerbated by the despoliation of the environment. Japanese Kivoshi Shigematsu’s “To Next Spring-Obon” and Nigerian Osahon Ize-Iyamu’s “More Sea Than Tar”, are chosen for their thematic convergence and topicality. Both stories are comparatively engaged through the trauma theory and ecocriticism, to investigate the stories’ recreation of personal as well as collective suffering tangled up with the larger tragedies occasioned by industrialization, modernity and most of all, environmental crises. The texts depict the environment and man as subjects that occupy oscillating positions between perpetrator and victim. The activities of man wound the environment and the environment responds by afflicting man, thereby causing traumatic disruptions that affect not just the present but the past and the future. In both texts, nature is a tower and a threat and man, a culprit cum casualty. In the aftermath of ecological catastrophes - the 3/11 in Shigematsu’s “To Next Spring- Obon” and a fictional tsunami in Ize-Iyamu’s “More Sea Than Tar”, man suffers spiritual and social degeneration, whose scars both stories serve to bear witness to. Keywords: Eco-trauma, trauma theory, Kiyoshi Shigematsu, Osahon Ize-lyamu Studies in Transnational Africa and Japan (STAJ) 132 | P a g e 1 IVUNIV ERSIT Y O F IB ADAN L IB RARY mailto:ajiboiaopeyemiwumi@gmail.com Introduction Literature is as old as humanity, and trauma, too. Literature principally recreates happenings in the society. Several literary texts - poems, plays and narratives have emerged out of disasters, pandemics and other tragic events. Literature engages and seeks to respond to happenings in the society, including traumatic events. In Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction(2002)Laurie Vickroy asserts that fictional representations of trauma, even though imagined, serve to “internalize the rhythms, processes, and uncertainties of traumatic experience within their underlying sensibilities and structures” (p. 3) and hence, “provide a necessary supplement” to historical and psychological accounts of trauma, bybringing“a kind of sociocultural critical analysis that helps readers formulate how public policy and ideology are lived in private lives”(p. 222).Dominick LaCapra, a foremost trauma theorist in Writing History, Writing Traumapresents literature as a “safe heaven” that affords an opportunity to explore “modalities of responding to trauma, including the role of affect and the tendency to repeattraumatic events” (2001, p. 185).Essentially, literature takes a significant place in the exploration of trauma, both as that which wounds and the wound itself. Fictional accounts of traumatic contexts and events serve to bear witness to the presence of people, institutions and systems that engender trauma, in order to create imaginative resistance against the circumstances, institutions and systems that allow for the perpetration of trauma. Fictional accounts of trauma “warn us that trauma that trauma reproduces itself if left unattended” (Laurie Vickroy, 2002, p. 3). Trauma studies, a field committed to the exploration of trauma in all its complex manifestations and configurations, emerged in the later decades of the twentieth century. Prominent theorists and scholars in trauma studies include Cathy Caruth, Geoffrey Hartman and Shoshana Felman of the Yale School at a time, Judith Herman, Bessel van der Kolk. Dori Laub, and Dominick LaCapra.The explosion of the knowledge domain and critical Studies in Transnational Africa and Japan (STAJ) 133 | P a g e J IV UNIV ERSIT Y O F IB ADAN L IB RARY investigations that shape contemporary trauma studies is traceable to studies on the holocaust and holocaust’s veterans’ experiences of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and the entry of other such fields as literary studies, cultural studies, religious studies, sociology, history and so on, into the trauma discourse. In the nineteenth century, trauma studies was dominated by clinical and psychological research, with the term “trauma” used in reference to patients suffering from “traumatic neurosis” caused by railroad accidents (John Erichsen, 1867). The term metamorphosed into “shell shock” and then “combat fatigue” used in reference to veterans of World War I, World War II and the Vietnam War, and then more recently PTSD. In 1980, theAmericanPsychiatric Association, in Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders third edition (DSM-III), acknowledged trauma as “a psychologically distressing event outside the range of usual human experience” and that such event or experience is accompanied by “intense fear, terror, and helplessness” and that it causes “significant distress in most people” (p. 248).Presently, "trauma” captures a shocking event that is distressing, disruptive and largely destructive; trauma designates events and experiences outside and within the range of the usual human experience. This is especially so because for some, trauma is an everyday experience, and “trauma” defies easy definitions and neat genealogies. Trauma then becomes identified and identifiable by its nature and impacts. Ecotraumas as depicted in this study represent the activities of man that negatively impact upon the environment, to the extent of wounding the environment. A number of creative writers and texts have shifted attention to and projected the urgent need to bear witness to injurious activities of man upon the environment. The two short stories chosen for critical analysis in this study, Kiyoshi Shigematsu’s “To Next Spring- Obon” and Osahon Ize-Iyamu’s “More Sea Than Tar”, depict wounds inflicted on man by the environment and how the environment, in turn, inflicts pain on man. Both texts represent characters’ experiencesof cultural trauma exacerbated by the despoliation Studies in Transnational Africa and Japan (STAJ) 134 | P a g e | IV UNIV ERSIT Y O F IB ADAN L IB RARY of the environment. The choice of the two texts-Japanese Kiyoshi Shigematsu’s “To Next Spring-Obon” and Nigerian Osahon Ize-Iyamu’s “More Sea Than Tar”, is informed by the relevant thematic preoccupations in the texts and their topicality. Both stories are closely read and comparatively engaged through the trauma theory and ecocriticism, to investigate the stories’ recreation of personal as well as collective suffering tangled up with the larger tragedies occasioned by industrialization, modernity and most of all. environmental crises. By comparatively exploring two short stories from Nigeria and Japan on the environment and the traumatic consequences of the despoliation of the environmentand its effects on characters, the study underscores the preponderance of eco-traumas and cultural traumas, represented and representable in short stories across regions. This is significant because the examination of the representation of despoilation of the environment is often explored in novels and poetry, but hardly in the short story, and more often than not, through Ecocriticism but hardly through the trauma theory. A Different Kind of Trouble: Ecologies of Trauma in Kiyoshi Shigematsu’s “To Next Spring- Obon” and Osahon Ize-Iyamu’s “More Sea Than Tar” The present century has been rightly adjudged a century of trauma. Monica Casper (2016, p. 3) presents a picture of a trauma-century: Earthquakes strike, buildings fall, and people die; bodies are devastated by bullets and bombs; famine, drought, and genocide decimate entire populations; planes crash (and disappear), trains derail, and cars smash into each other, twisting metal and limbs; loved Studies in Transnational Africa and Japan (STAJ) 135 | P a g e | IV UNIV ERSIT Y O F IB ADAN L IB RARY ones become sick and die, or they are brutally murdered; sexual assault is pandemic; tornados and hurricanes rip houses off their foundations and children from their parent’s arm; wars shred lives, communities, and landscapes and send soldiers home in body bags. While some of what engenders trauma in the present age is not man-made, most are. Kai Erikson, a professor of Sociology and American Studies, at Yale, has dedicated most of his scholarship to studying disasters and people’s response to disaster, and in recent times, what he describes as the new species of trouble in A New Species o f Trouble: The Human Experience o f Modern Disaster (1995), with examples such as the Ojibwa Indian band in northwestern Ontario, that was damaged by a mercury spill, and who had to face relocation by the Canadian government; the plight of the inhabitants of Ft. Collins, a suburban community in Colorado, whose land was made toxic by an underground gasoline leak, caused by a Royal Petroleum service station; the disaster at neighbourhoods adjacent to the Three Mile Island nuclear plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and a migrant worker camp in south Florida, where Haitian farmhands lost their life savings in the twinkle of an eye, are largely man-made. These disasters are technological and human-induced, and they are as destructive in their impacts as floods, tornadoes and earthquakes. These new species of trouble, find abundant representation in Shigematsu’s “To Next Spring- Obon” and Ize-Iyamu’s “More Sea than Tar”. Shigematsu’s “To Next Spring-Obon” depicts the communal suffering experienced by a group of villagers who have been recently forced to evacuate their ancestral homeland because the radiation that resulted from an accident at an industrial plant has Studies in Transnational Africa and Japan (STAJ) 136 | P a g e | IVUNIV ERSIT Y O F IB ADAN L IB RARY contaminated their homelands. “To Next Spring-Obon” is part of the WasedaBungaku’s Charity Project, a project aimed at creatively recreating the disaster tagged 3/11. 3/11 captures the triple tragedy of anearthquake, a tsunami and a nuclear meltdown, that befell Japan on 11 March 2011, which is by all definitions a colossal tragedy. On Friday,11th March 2011, at noon, a massive earthquake (the largest in Japanese history) generated a tsunami that broke the walls that protected the Fukushima Daiichi and Dainii nuclear power plants, one of the country’s oldest plants, located in North-East Japan. In the twinkle of an eye, life for thousands for people was disrupted, and for about sixteen thousand people, life gave way to death. The official report into the nuclear accident at the plants testified that the disaster was “a profoundly manmade disaster — that could and should have been foreseen and prevented” (The National Diet of Japan. 2012, p. 9). According to this Report, the government of Japan, the operator, that is Tokyo Electric Power Company, and Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency and National Security Agency, the regulatory bodies, were principally responsible for the nuclear accident, as they failed to uphold the “the nation’s right to be safe from nuclear accidents”(p. 16). A decade after 3/11, Giorgio Shani reports that not only are the effects of the nuclear accident still palpable but also that the causes of the accident are yet to be remedied, as Japan under Shinzo Abe, had not just resumed its nuclear program but hadsought to export its nuclear technology overseas. And this is where literature takes up its cudgel to prevent societal amnesia, and draw attention to what trauma 3/11 was and continues to be. The WasedaBungaku Charity Project is one of such literary interventions. In the short story, residents of the fictional village have been evacuated and then forced to flee to farther places, because of fears of radiation. Jhe story depicts the aftermaths of the triple disaster which according to Rachael DiNitto (2017) had successfully and traumatically “transformed the spaces of Tohoku, remapping them to the concentric circles of disaster Studies in Transnational Africa and Japan (STAJ) 137 | P a g e | IV UNIV ERSIT Y O F IB ADAN L IB RARY zones, evacuation zones, and exclusion zones, and redefining them along new vectorsof tidal waves, aftershocks, radiation exposure, and debris fields”(p. 21). The natives of this village have been evacuated and now they face the realities as displaced subjects. The fictional village in the story is reminiscent of such areas as Futaba, litate, Kashi wa, Asahi, Kesennuma, Hachinohe, Rikuzentakada, Ishinomaki, Kamaishi, and others, whose citizens were massively displaced because the radiation from plants had damaged their land, houses, means of livelihood and their collective identity. Because of their displacement, many the villagers are unable to return to the village for the Obon festival, where the villagers perform the Buddhist custom of honouring the dead, and socializing. Nobu, the chairman of the Residents’ Association recalls that the previous year’s festival had six times as many people compared to the present one. In the past, children would run around shouting and the youths would appear in their bright-patternedyukaia. Nobu reminisces on how for thirty years, “the villages cooked meat on a hot-plate barbecue, sung karaoke, and sat in circles drinking” (p. 7). There would be children at their plastic pool and fireworks at sunset. “After dark, they always danced to a tape of traditional bon music” (p. 7). He sadly concludes that the year’s event would be a quiet affair. However, the Obon soon degenerated into a festival of dishonour. Instead of the usual happy festivities, there is bickering, name-calling and aggression, as “a needling irritation seemed to lurk in the conversation” (p. 11). What Nobu had envisaged would a quiet affair soon became a tragic one. The impact of 3/11 is most obviously seen in the fracturing of the people’s social relationships. The people’s response to the trauma created by the disasters they had witnessed and which has now made their homes inaccessible, manifests in their inability to relate amicably even during a festival, which should ideally have served to enliven the people’s mood.Since traumatic experience is not “assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only belated, in its repeated possession of the one Studies in Transnational Africa and Japan (STAJ) 138 | P a g e | IV UNIV ERSIT Y O F IB ADAN L IB RARY who experiences it”(Cathy Caruth,1996, p. 5), the full import of the people’s multiple losses only manifests sometime after the events of the 3/11, and after the people had been made to leave the“difficult to return to” zones.Nobu sorrowfully relates that his people who had lived on the same lands for ages, now have nowhere to call home: The old folk of every family had lived here for decades. They’d never had the feeling of ‘coming home’. ‘Home’ wasn’t something far away. It was here. They were here. Home was at the soles of their feet... those flat feet were always firmly planted on home ground... they’d believed it was only the call of heaven that would lift their feet away from home. They’d never dreamed of leaving in the way they had (P- 2). As the people gather again on the old soil, they feel rootless and they become ruthless. For the villagers in the narrative, there is a breakdown of the group’s meaning-system. The younger Non fights with Moro. one whom the narrator says is old enough to be Nori’s father. The group’s values, norms and beliefs suffer gradual erosion. In fact, personal convictions suffer setbacks. When a surprised Koji sees Nobu smoking and asks why he has begun to smoke again, he resignedly asks why he should give up smoking when “a far stronger poison was just hanging in the air” (p.5). Traumatic experiences’ effects are almost always immeasurable. The people suffer physical, spatial, temporal, cultural, and most importantly spiritual ruptures. Nobu relates that future of the village is not just polluted; it is wounded. He says that there is a “broken future” (p. 22).Onega and Ganteau (2011. p. 19) relate that trauma strikes at the roots of identity Studies in Transnational Africa and Japan (STAJ) 139 | P a g e | IV UNIV ERSIT Y O F IB ADAN L IB RARY and durably displace certainties. Ulrike Tancke (2011, p. 2) also asserts that trauma constitutes a fundamental threat to identity; she quotes Susan Brison (1999, p. 41) as saying that trauma “undoes the self by breaking the on-going narrative, severing the connections among the remembered past, lived present, and anticipated future”. “To Next Spring-Obon” depicts the villagers’ struggles at getting a grasp on their present realities, since the cord uniting and defining the group’s identity has been punctured by the traumatic reality of land contamination and evacuation.These events undermine and overwhelm the several essential ingredients of the people’s culture- their values, norms, beliefs, ideologies, knowledge (Neil Smelser, 2004, p. 38).For a group of people who according to Nobu, had had strong ties because their families had originally been a group of settlers who had set up farms in the area, lived like cousins and helped one another out, adjusting to life as a scattered people is hard, and full of uncertainties. Their trauma is further heightened by the fact that there was no end to their dispersion, disenchantment, homelessness and hopelessness, in view. The people are on an exile, the length of which is uncertain. Nobu and Koji comment on the government’s false promises of getting things back into shape in just two years, and yet making no specific plans. Nobu wonders if the government thinks that the entire village is a school playground or a private garden whose topsoil could be replaced within days. Moreover, there is stigmatization borne by the erstwhile residents of the “difficult to return to” zones, wherever they go. Eno reports how a storeowner refused to sell to him, simply because he was afraid of contamination. It is then most pathetic that the government is passive, and offers hope as a scarce commodity. Nobu, the chairman of the Residents’ Association is further distressed as he receives a letter from the priest at the village temple. The letter is addressed to those with family graves in the temple. The priest writes to ask for people’s opinion with respect to their family graves. Notably, the narrator laments the state of Ema-do, with the reality of the government’s order to Studies in Transnational Africa and Japan (STAJ) 140 | P a g e 1 IV UNIV ERSIT Y O F IB ADAN L IB RARY evacuate the ancient grave house. With this sudden order, the people suffer the loss of all that they hold dear; their past is severed from their future. The people suffer such ruptures that nothing could atone for; the people have become disconnected from their ancestral land and the stability it affords. Rachael Dinitto (2019, p. 52) commenting on the short story, relates that the villagers have become temporal and spatial refugees, who “exist in a timeless, inescapable present, without access to a past or a future”. According to Nobu, theirs is a polluted past, a wounded present and a broken future. Through this narrative, Shigematsu points out the nature of the man-m ade disasters and how' such disasters engender cultural trauma. He underlines the fact that while the first two of the three tragedies of 3/11 are natural, the nuclear plant accident was man-made, and therefore, the impact are evolving and may notbe fully visibleat the moment. In fact, the long-term impacts are just unfolding, in presenting the effect of the disaster at the nuclear plants on not just an individual but a community, Shigematsu underscores the far-reaching effects of eco-traumas on a social group, and the ruptures that significantly disrupt communal and spiritual ties, by doubly wounding the individual as well as the community, and the past as well as the future. Similarly, there is depiction of cultural trauma resulting from ecological trauma in Osahon Ize-Iyamu’s “More Sea Than Tar”. The narrative presents a family of four, as they strive to survive the aftermath of a tsunami. The family is edged in by the flood and they must seek means of adapting and surviving, against all odds. The protagonist in the narrative relates how the family and community are falling apart and continues to fall “because we can only stand so tall before we’re sinking: to our legs, to our knees, to our torsos, to our head” (p. 1). He tells of the huge disorder that their world has become and how the characters “breathe in particle dust and water that draws too much like ogbono soup. Water that’s mixed with the leaves and the soil and the garbage 1 didn’t throw away properly'. Water that isn’t water” (p. l).The characters are on exile within their own space. Studies in Transnational Africa and Japan (STAJ) 141 | P a g e | IV UNIV ERSIT Y O F IB ADAN L IB RARY Just like in “To Next Spring-Obon”, there is again the breakdown of meaning within the family, and the larger society. Within the family, there are domestic disputes, and the falcon cannot hear the falconer (WB Yeats’ “The Second Coming”). Within the larger community, nothing is the same again. The social bonds are torn and destroyed and no one cares for the community. A survival instinct pervades the activities of the characters from the beginning of the narrative to the end of it, underscoring man’s descent into savagery in the wake of ecological crises. Osahon Ize-lyamu, the author of “More Sea Than Tar”hails from the Niger-Delta area of Nigeria The Niger-Delta is not only notable for being the hotbed for oil exploration and drilling but also a massive despoilation of the environment and the resultant crises. The Niger-Delta area in Nigeria exemplifies the paradox, which Michael Lewin Ross (2013) captures as the oil curse— of how countries that are rich in petroleum and other mineral resources have less democracy, less economic stability and frequent wars, and are therefore worse than countries without oil. In the case of the Niger Delta in Nigeria, how the part of the nation that supplies the crude oil dwells in abject poverty and suffers neglect by all, is beyond a curse. It is a needling paradox, a puzzlethat defies answers and a rhizome without roots. In a manner similar to Michael Ross’, Tarry Diamond and Jack Mosbacher (2013) employ the troping of petroleum as a curse in what they entitled “Petroleum to the People: Africa’s Coming Resource Curse— and How to Avoid It”, to account for an oil boom that becomes the people’s doom: Oil booms poison the prospects for development in poor countries. The surge of easy money fuels inflation, fans waste and massive prospects for development in poor countries. The surge of easy money fuels inflation, fans waste and massive corruption, distorts Studies in Transnational Africa and Japan (STAJ) 142 | P a g e | IVUNIV ERSIT Y O F IB ADAN L IB RARY exchange rates, undermines the competitiveness of traditional export sectors such as agriculture, and pre­ empts the growth of manufacturing. Moreover, as oil prices fluctuate on world markets, oil-rich countries can suddenly become cash poor when booms go bust (since poor countries rarely save any of these revenue windfalls). Oil booms are also bad news for democracy and the rule of law. In fact, not a single developing country that derives the bulk of its export earnings from oil and gas is a democracy. Rather than fostering an entrepreneurial middle class, oil wealth, when controlled by the government, stifles the emergence of an independent business class and swells the power of the state vis-a-vis civil society (p. 88). The Niger-Delta and its complex histories of deprivation, destitution and ecological crises serve as the narrative backdrop for Ize-Iyamu’s “More Sea Than Tar”; the -writer and righter (NiyiOsundare, 2007), is able to craftily recreate the environmental crises in the Niger-Delta through science fiction. In the narrative, the world around the family is contaminated, forcing Uti’s father, Joseph and Uti to move around on garbage. The narrator relates that their food is filled with dirt and debris, and that the water is polluted. Uti remarks that their water is mixed with leaves, the soil and garbage, and “Water that isn’t water.”(p. 1). Uti’s lamentation of the dirt and pollution that has made it impossible for the characters to live as they should, echoes Ken Saro Wiwa’s age long cry on the sacking of the Niger-Delta region and the ensuing pollution that come from the oil fields and wells, the petrochemical complex, the fertilizing Studies in Transnational Africa and Japan (STAJ) 143 1 P a g e 1 IV UNIV ERSIT Y O F IB ADAN L IB RARY plant, the refineries and a network of pipelines (Holger G. Ehling & Claus-Peter Holste-von Mutius, 2001, p. 2). In “More Sea Than Tar”,Mr Abalaka and Mrs Eneyoare representatives of the sponsors of air pollution, gas flaring and those who sack the communities where oil is drilled. In the narrative, Mr Abalaka and Mrs Eneyo are partners in crime, who trade in garbage and profit from filth. They carry guns around and they will eventually kill Uti’s father and Joseph. Both characters exemplify greedy capitalists who ignore every limit of morality and justice. Mr Abalaka and Mrs Eneyo are like the ethically vacuous villains who conspire in luxurious boardrooms against nature and against the marginalized poor. They are the key players in tested narrative of corporate greed versus community welfare (Anil Narine, 2015, p. 5). In the narrative, when Uti’s father and his sons attempt to outsmart Mr Abalaka and Mrs Eneyo, in their crimes against nature and humanity, they are killed without mercy. The warped relationships depicted in “More Sea Than Tar” exemplify Kai Erikson’s assertion on how community destruction is engendered by technological or human-induced disasters. He argues that while the “I” and “You” continue to exist, the “We” no longer exists as “a connected pair or as linked cells in a larger communal body” (1976, p. 154). It is easy to see how this assertion plays out in this story, as it presents the disintegration of the entire community. Everyone is a casualty and theirs thus become a collective trauma. Erikson (1976) further elucidates that collective trauma deals a blow to the basic tissues of social life, and this blow damages the bonds attaching people together, thereby impairing the prevailing sense of community. The community described in the narrative no longer has things in common, since everyone is out to outsmart the other. It then becomes a place for the survival of the fittest, where the strong feed on the weak, and the rich on the vulnerable ones. Rather than find a solution to the problem of pollution, the people find means escape and means of coping with the situation or even making gains off other people. Uti Studies in Transnational Africa and Japan (STAJ) 144 | P a g e 1 IV UNIV ERSIT Y O F IB ADAN L IB RARY narrates how a vendor tries to sell “sliced catfish that’s an unhealthy brown colour...covered in a sticky slime... Greenish- black dots grow inside its mouth” (p. 8) to Uti and his father. All over the place, people feed on filth and face the consequences of ignoring and maltreating nature, for too long. In the introduction to Eco-Tmuma Cinema (2014), Anil Narine underscores how the source of food in contemporary times, is a political issue in this age of accelerated globalization. She asserts that amidst the metastasizing economic system, driven by the cultivation of new markets, networks of supply, the production and consumption of food items link even the most distant regions, “by global networks of dissipated accountability” (p. 13), a problem which “figures unsettlingly in nearly every contemporary account of ecological trauma” (p. 13). More alarming than the breakdown of meaning within the community, and of graver consequences is the people’s indifference to the change in their lived reality: This new community is smelly yet vibrant, loud and exciting. It’s what I’ve never seen before: vendors carrying goods on their heads with water up to their chests, chasing boats. Garbage floating around in neat little piles— some people managing to rest on top of them, the world’s pollution the newest source of transportation. People breezing by on larger vehicles than ours while afrobeats, loud and violently Nigerian, play in the background. People jumping into the water with ropes tied around their waists, latched to their boats as they repeatedly bring up trash. People splash in the water as they swim through the filth and garbage, Studies in Transnational Africa and Japan (STAJ) 145 | P a g e | IV UNIV ERSIT Y O F IB ADAN L IB RARY covered in boils and scars, disease and infection (p. 5) The people’s level of indifference, selfishness and apathy is simply amazing. The sight of bloated dead bodies floating in the stagnancy hardly ruffles the people. The graphic picture painted in the narrative of the people’s disavowal presents a metaphor for the present era’s apathy and indifference towards nature’s agonies. Nature’s cries have overtime been are muffled by political jargons on the safety of the planet and technological advancements that give false hope of safety. In like manner, in the narrative, the people rather than find a solution to the ecological crises on ground, the people find means escape and the means of coping with the situation... “Other humans pass by, all of us vulnerable without solid ground” (p. 4) ... the people got themselves “jet skis and mechanized boats” (p. 6); in fact, there were plans by Joseph and his friends to get more sophisticated “Underwater living facilities... Oxygen suits... Decontamination pods” (p. 7). The result of this indifference leads to tensions between individualism and dependency, self- assertion and resignation, self-centeredness and group orientation; the gradual the loss of connection; disorientation, disillusionment, declining morality and a rise in criminal activities (Erikson, 1976, p. 292). As Joseph, Uti’s brother, sees the shadows of animals merged with glass and plastic, mosquitos breeding, insects mutated by industrial waste and chemical reactions, he concludes that their days are numbered, as it was only matter of time before all walls collapsed. Conclusion Kiyoshi Shigematsu’s “To Next Spring-Obon” and Osahon Ize- Iyamu’s “More Sea Than Tar” both recreate personal as well as collective suffering tangled up with the larger tragedies occasioned by industrialization, modernity and most of all, environmental crises. The texts depict the environment and man as subjects that occupy oscillating positions between perpetrator and victim. Man and nature trade subject positions, vacillating Studies in Transnational Africa and Japan (STAJ) 146 | P a g e | IV UNIV ERSIT Y O F IB ADAN L IB RARY between seasons of agency and victimhood and between control and helplessness. The activities of man wound the environment and the environment in turn responds by afflicting man, thereby causing traumatic disruptions that affect not just the present but the past and the future. In both texts, nature is a tower and a threat and man, a culprit cum casualty. It is then clear as Narine(2014) argues that a traumatised earth begets traumatised people, in as much as nature, does not simply enact its revenge upon man but rather, sustains and endures trauma as a human victim would, and confronts man with its scarred body, forcing us “to confront our own propensity to inflict the traumas to which ecological degradation, like scar tissue, bears witness”(p. l3).Both texts affirm the dominant trope or belief in Ecocriticism that man is not superior to nature, and dramatize how nature and man are capable of wounding each other. The responses from the characters in “To Next Spring-Obon” and “More Sea Than Tar” is where the differences lie; for while there is a passive resignation as the people mourn their lot in “To Next Spring-Obon”, in “More Sea than far”, the people embrace adaptation and survival. In spite of the characters’ responses, they bear the full brunt of the traumatic disruptions depicted in the narratives, as trauma inflicts a double wound- the traumatic impact, and then doubling the effect, in a communal trauma, in consonance with Erikson’s agelong argument that the impact of human-induced catastrophes is often not just in immediate consequences of the event, but also how the traumatic event creates a rupture in the collective identity and social fabric of a community. Both narratives end on a tragic and bleak note, depicting that a working-through (the state of healing or the journey towards health and wholeness) is almost impossible. In the aftermath of ecological catastrophes- the 3/11 in Shigematsu’s “To Next Spring- Obon” and a fictional tsunami in Ize-Iyamu’s “More Sea Than Tar”, man suffers spiritual and social degeneration, whose scars both stories serve to bear witness to. Additionally, Studies in Transnational Africa and Japan (STAJ) 147 | P a g e | IV UNIV ERSIT Y O F IB ADAN L IB RARY the two stories underscored man’s nature’s implicit role in traumatic disruptions that result from human-induced ecological catastrophes, forcing the reader to reflect on eco-traumas, the impact on man and the possibility of eco-atonement, because embedded in the cultural trauma model developed by Jeffrey Alexander and Neil Smelser is the importance of research serving to illuminate the domain of social responsibility and political action. It is clear then that any tragedy that results from the degradation of the environment is a collective tragedy- everyone is affected, everyone is a casualty and therefore, all must seek means to effect a working-through.“To Next Spring- Obon” and “More Sea Than Tar” clearly resound the agelong wisdom that man and nature are never independent of each other, and will never be, no matter how much the capitalist drivers of the new world (dis)order would make one believe nature exists only to service man’s interests. This is because what we call the “environment” is our endangered habitat, home and nurturer, and humans are its problem-species (Gary Snyder, 2004). Humans must regard the environment as the sustainer of life and treat it as such, for failure to do so would see the environment revolt, leading to more traumatic disruptions. References American Psychiatric Association. (1980). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (3rd ed). Brison, S. J. (1999). 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