Cross-Border Lingos, Environmental Consciousness and Sustainability in Isidore Okpewho’s Tides and Aliyu Kamal’s Fire in My Backyard

Two Nigerian prose narratives, Tides and Fire in My Backyard, embody vocabularies of diverse fields, suggestive of academic border-crossing. Science and technological jargons in the novels examined through interdisciplinary lenses reveal significant contributions to the propagation of the border-crossing currents in twenty-first century global scholarships. From language and literature to the empirical fields of ecology, geography and engineering sciences, ecocriticism's postcolonial and empirical ecocritical views provide the guide for the study of interdisciplinary, cross-border and sustainability ideologies in the texts. Vocabularies of other fields embedded in segments of the novels are examined as models for strengthening academic border-crossings, from the arts and humanities to the environmental science fields. This paper begins with an examination of the supporting theories of ecocriticism and border studies in the literature. This is followed by related literature on the primary texts. It concludes with the novels' narrative contexts, highlighting the linguistic features that support the ideologies of interdisciplinarity and academic border-crossing through the literature, as a contribution to sustainability and the advancement of postcolonial ecocriticism's advocacies for ecosystem balance, and socio-economic, political and ecological justice.