POST-COLONIAL ECOCRITICAL READINGS OF CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE’S NOTES ON GRIEF (2021): ENVIRONMENTAL DEGRADATION AS NEOCOLONIAL VIOLENCE

Abstract

This paper is a postcolonial ecocritical analysis of the memoir Notes on Grief (2021) by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, in which the author places personal grieving in the context of global ecological destruction and infrastructure devastation as new modes of colonialism. Although the text has been viewed largely as a meditation on loss in general, this study shows that Adichie has embedded grieving within the context of pandemic-related lockdowns, upheaved rituals, and existing disparities that remind of colonial legacies and global capitalist systems. By referring to postcolonial ecocriticism by Huggan and Tiffin, slow violence theorized by Nixon, Eurocene proposed by Sloterdijk and critique of technocracy voiced by Haraway, the paper identifies how its fragmented narrative, breath and space metaphors, and Igbo funeral rituals insistences can be viewed as cultural resistance. The memoir criticizes the lack of technological mediation in the mourning process and reveals the ways that global infrastructures continue to institute unequal vulnerabilities during pandemic conditions. The results indicate that Notes on Grief not only functions as a personal elegy but that it is also, in many ways, a literary genre whose distinctive feature is giving priority to the indivisibility of ecological injustice, cultural continuity, and systemic inequality in postcolonial settings. By locating grief at the intersection between planetary politics of environmental and infrastructural dictation, the memoir makes a point about what literature can do to resist neocolonial ecological violence and to expose the structural context of personal loss.