From ‘Palm Fields to Palm Oil’: Call for Environmental Justice in How Beautiful We Were
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Ecology and literature hold immense importance at the heart of critical scholarship within the broader corpus of Environmental Humanities because they open up new lines of critical inquiry and foster critical consciousness among both the masses and academia at large. This paper demonstrates the way How Beautiful We Were (2022) portrays the African village named Kosawa, where the indigenous African farmers and their families were jeopardized by having their indigenous natural resources exploited. This study analyzes how the palm trees serve as a cultural heritage for the farmers in the remote village, which was barred from the outer world. However, they still cherished the indigenous resources to make a harmonious relationship with nature, which is analyzed by the theoretical insight of Cultural Ecology by Q.Mark Sutton. The study also addresses that the colonial powers of the West have marginalized the ecological landscape and the familial fabric of the poor peasants, and the female farmers suffered subjugation and oppression at the hands of the glossy illusions that the West has impinged on their minds in the spurious ambiance of development. I analyze that the poor peasants pleaded and utilized their natural indigenous resources for the higher officials, but their voices were muffled and reduced to invisibility. My study is the emblem of the call for environmental justice from the periphery of the crunched remote region of Africa, where African farmers were grappling with diseases, exploitation of resources, and female oppression.
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