Eco-trauma and displacement politics in Owuor’s Dust and Makumbi’s Kintu

This article examines Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s Dust and Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s Kintu to determine whether their portrayals of eco-trauma and displacement constitute existential upheavals rooted in cultural and spiritual worldviews. And whether the selected novels respond to, resist, or reinterpret ecological devastation from the perspective of indigenous knowledge. Methodologically, I have used contextual analysis and close reading by focusing on literariness, such as characters’ development, diction, and plot structure, to determine whether they capture generational fragmentation, memoryscapes, myths, and spiritual cosmology that inform the ecological consciousness. Drawing from Tina Amorok’s conceptualisation of eco-trauma of Being and Eco-recovery of Being and Ikechukwu Kanu’s theorisation of African eco-spirituality, the study reveals that the eco-traumatic and displacement politics embedded in psychological, memoryscapes, emotional, cultural, and spiritual ruptures are caused by disharmony between the cultural and spiritual cosmos. Furthermore, the study found that Owuor’s Dust and Makumbi’s Kintu depict eco-trauma and displacement as existential disruptions fixed within cultural and spiritual worldviews, and the healing journey must be a relational balance between humans and nonhumans. Significantly, the article not only advances decolonial eco-sustainability discussion but also broadens African-centred literary ecocriticism.