When did the issue of climate change get personal for you?
Onogwu: Climate awareness has always been a part of me as a child. This is because, my paternal grandmother, though not educated in the Western educational standard was very close to nature. Climate change became personal to me when I noticed the huge difference in temperature after the dense vegetation around my grandmother’s house was cleared soon after her death. The hitherto cool abode became completely uninhabitable due to extreme heat and this scenario of my grandmother’s house can be viewed as a microcosm for what our climate has become due to deforestation.
There is a strong presence of nostalgia in your story. Could this sense of nostalgia be of loss or hope?
Onogwu: The sense of nostalgia in my story is that of loss. I mourn the times when the entire world was closer to nature and thus adored and respected her.
What inspired your story for The Green We Left Behind nonfiction anthology?
Onogwu: Like I wrote in the story itself, the regular visit to my grandmother as a young impressionable child made me appreciate the beauty and many gifts that Mother Nature has bestowed on us. I was able to see firsthand the damage any damage caused to nature can cause to the environment.
As an artist, how are you able to merge beauty in language with such a dire theme on climate change?
Onogwu: As an artist, I was able to merge beauty in language with the dire theme of climate change because my story was borne out of personal experience. I already had the raw materials so I simply told them in a manner that is different from what historians do. I used figures of speech, idiomatic expressions and the like.
As you release your story to the world, what is your wish or hope for the story?
Onogwu: I really wish and hope that my story will create awareness on the many dangers posed by the rapid deforestation going on in the world as a result of the growing demands for charcoal both locally and internationally and to curb deforestation by focusing on alternative and cleaner sources of cooking energy.
Aside from writing, how else do you intend to contribute towards curbing climate change?
Onogwu: I am already volunteering with a climate movement called Parents for future whose aim is to secure the future of the climate for the sake of our children. I intend to do and associate more with organizations that care about our environment.
Biography
Elizabeth Onogwu is a lecturer in the Department of English and Literary Studies at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, where she teaches contemporary African and oral literature. She also teaches Japanese Language in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literary Studies. She earned her doctorate degree in Gender and Literary Studies from Yokohama National University (YNU), Japan as a Mombukagakusho (Japanese government scholarship) scholar in 2015. She also won the JASSO Follow-Up Researcher position in 2018 and carried out comparative studies on the death poetries of Nigeria and Japan. Her latest work, Sexuality, Human Rights and Public Policy co-edited with Chima Korieh was published in 2020 by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. She is currently researching LGBTQ literatures from Nigeria and volunteers for the Parent for Future Climate Movement in Nigeria.
