INTRODUCTION

The last lines of Derek Walcott's poem The Sea is History sets the tone for a close reading of The Book of Phoenix by Nnedi Okorafor (2015a). The sea as ‘history’ asserts that the Atlantic ocean's sinister history is not past-tense, but resounds into present day. Nestled within this highly charged narrative, an ecocritical reading can tease out an interweaving of both racial and environmental histories. Okorafor's dystopian novel is layered with narratives of waste, and reverberations of the slave trade, set against a science fictional world in which African-Americans are used for a neoslavery which involves cyborgian, transhuman transformations, organ trade and other cruel genetic experiments. This text is far from pastoral narratives of nature, as it traverses racial geographies, using the Atlantic as its anchor point in a speculative oceanic imagining. The Afrofuturist aesthetics of the text collapses past, present and future, ‘interlinking historiographical and mythical rhetoric not so much in order to reconstruct a lost history, but to dismantle the established one and give scope to altogether different, highly fantastic scenarios instead, which are as much of the future as they are of the past’ (Mayer 2000, 566).

‘Green’ criticism has been the defining position of ecocriticism since its formation as a discipline. The discourse has been plagued by ‘wilderness fetishism’ which Ross (1999, 16) refers to as ‘almost wholly devoted to nature worship in “the cathedral of pines”’. Definitions of ‘Nature’ remain tied to wilderness in the Western imagination, excluding narratives from beyond this tradition, often both aesthetically and geographically. Literature which contains dirt, pollution, and defiled ecosystems has had little place within the discourse. However, beyond this, it is the cultivation of such wilderness narratives which have served to legitimate and racialize processes of conquest and imperialism through a preference for sublime aesthetics. Ecocritical scholarship has a tendency to lean towards texts which address wild spaces and landscapes where either ‘positive collaboration’, refuge or the idyllic are presented, even if they are disrupted by degradation or disaster.