Interactive Challenges to Sustainability: An Ecofeminist Reading of Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun

Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun tell the postcolonial story – a grave tale of suffering which though is uniquely fueled by unshared values takes different forms and shapes in different parts of the postcolonial world. Blaming the crises on patriarchal ideologies, the texts hint on how racialism, ethnicity, colonialism and nationalism create hierarchies in their functional applications to the subjugation of women, the natural environment, and a host of underprivileged groups. The article thus functions as an exploration of the radicalized capitalisms definitive of A Small Place and Half of a Yellow Sun. Its aim is to project racism, colonialism and nationalism as an intersecting system of exploitation that particularly feeds on the vulnerability of women under patriarchy and the helplessness of non-human nature under humans. The principal objectives of the essay consist of identifying the social and environmental harms of the racialised capitalist systems embedded in the selected texts, investigate their root causes and formulate ways out of the developmental setbacks. The article then interrogates the texts’ poised dualities of nature/culture, man/nature and man, to establish the points that misogyny has environmental penalties and that environmental degradation produces unbearable costs for postcolonial societies. The paper uses Ecofeminism as theory from the standpoint that it positions gender and nature exploitations as setbacks to development. It premises a mix of the ecofeminists’ goals of nature connectivity and ethics of care as key to healthy postcolonial places,