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Contemporary Cameroon poetry in English, nature and the politics of consciousness raising for the future

ABSTRACT This article is informed by the centrality of consciousness-raising in ecocritical ideology, which, according to Christine Gerhardt, “has come to hold the many different perspectives and techniques in ecological criticism together”. It seeks to examine a selection of contemporary Cameroon poetry in English to foreground its concerns with the environment and its futures. The paper aims at showing that through familiar, comprehensive and meaningful culture-specific metaphors, the poems increase general environmental awareness first, by foregrounding the effects of human-nonhuman nature dynamic and secondly, by suggesting some solutions to the environmental crisis. This perspective, it will be shown, is rooted in an African tradition that assigns a functional dimension to art.