Caring about Plant Subjectivities and Life-Worlds in Niyi Osundare’s Green: Sighs of Our Ailing Planet (2021), Ben Okri’s Every Leaf a Hallelujah (2021) and Tiger Work: Stories, Essays and Poems About Climate Change (2023)
Résumé
In the three literary works under study in this paper, one aims to analyse plant subjectivities and life-worlds in order to expose what is called the ‘tormenting of the planet’ in an ecocidal ‘Necropolitic[al]’ context of Capitalist extractivism. We will see that Okri and Osundare share the same goal, that of decolonising the anthropocentric and western-centric Kantian dualism Nature vs. Culture. Finally, we will show how these (pedagogical and political) works not only develop an ethics, poetics and politics of attention but also a reflection on care so as toprovide ways and means to ‘love’ trees and plants, a first step towards ‘replenishing’ the Earth.