“The earth we used to know”: ferality in John Ngong Kum Ngong’s “Tall But Bare” and Niyi Osundare’s “Hole in the Sky”

Ferality, according to Anna L. Tsing et al., investigates “the ways living beings as well as non-living beings react to the kinds of infrastructural projects humans come up with” (Field Guide 310–11). As a concept in Anthropocene criticism, it serves to explore the often uneven social and environmental imprints of the latter. Referencing characters, landscapes, or narratives that escape or subvert human control, domestication or rational order, ferality is useful and innovative in examining contemporary African poetic responses to the Anthropocene. My article investigates ferality in the Cameroonian, John Ngong Kum Ngong’s “Tall But Bare” and the Nigerian, Niyi Osundare’s “Hole in the Sky.” I underline how both poets, through an aesthetic rooted in critical realism with borrowings from traditional African oral forms and ethics, engage the Anthropocene in its vicious essence, underlining generalized suffering and poverty, pollution, desertification, and ozone layer depletion as some of the unplanned and violent outcomes of infrastructural projects on both human and nonhuman nature. These inadvertent and irrepressible consequences invite a rethinking of what “it means to exist, what Earth is, what society is” (Morton 15) in contemporary Africa and the world at large. Postcolonial ecocriticism serves as an analytical paradigm.